nice job on the wedding.

i assume the 10max results are bodog? you still play on stars much?

Awesome mate and congrats on the marriage. Welcome to the club!
Excellent results too
Your graph looks so similar to mine, 2k hates us haha

Glgl

hot! and she's not too bad either.

1,2,4,3

u dig the father huh

dad gives colin couch a run for his money tbf

casting autocorrects to colin?

cheers man, was a great day

yeah been playing some bodog - especially evening time Mexico time, the games are pretty good tbh. still play some stars, give myself lots of options tho these days.

Cheers man, pretty sure 2k was very kind to me last night, but we'll see on Sunday.

haha, cheers lad

lmao, no arguments here. you should've seen Miguel on the dancefloor as night turned into morning - absolute 1 man inferno, never seen anything like it

lmao. not bad for 48!

===========================

Quick update while I play this homegame with my pals from home - no idea how they found this poker client, but it is definitely the most brutal I've ever seen



IDK who decided that call/raise/fold was the appropriate layout for preflop buttons.



Also you click bet and see a sub-window, pretty unreal ha. Have decided the money will be going to charity if I win, these boys just can't help themselves

Running good

What's up guys!

It's time for the 2020 year writeup

It was around this time last year I basically realised what a **** job i'd been doing at being a pro poker player. Playing unfocused basically always, abdicating responsibility for my decisions to arbitrary RNG spamming, being lazy with game selection, study, everything. I realised that, after playing for so many years, it was basically time to rededicate myself to doing this thing right, or to stop completely. Luckily I managed to find the motivation to get back towards the top of the heap and to actually try to give my best on a consistent basis. I was playing mostly 200nl iirc, I decided my goal was to make $100k at the tables, something I'd failed to do probably the previous 2-3 years. On a long flight, I had a long think about what I do, what moves the needle and what doesn't, and how I should approach things moving forward. I shared these reflections in my private blog on our CFP server (and eventually structured them into the 'bricks in the wall' course on the site which is now the first thing we share with new students).

I'm happy to say that, reflecting on this a year later, I was able to really embody the changes I decided I needed to make. An honest guess would be that I played maybe 5-8 sessions this year without taking some time to calm myself down, focus my attention and prepare for battle. I also probably journalled something like 70% of playing days (mostly 3 lines or less, recently much more).

After certainly the highest hourly year of my career by a decent distance, I'm feeling extremely grateful to have surrounded myself with a group like we have at BitB Cash - a fun, driven, hard working group of real risk takers who DO, and who help each other along. If you'd told the 16yo me that at 31, I'd have a career where you get to play an awesome, fun strategy game, that's competitive, where you genuinely get out what you put in, have complete freedom to work when, where and how you like... and can REASONABLY expect to earn 6 figures a year, tax free...
I mean I'm honestly not sure you'd have been able to convince me such a dream could be possible.

So anyway, here it is..





I also won some money on GG, lost some on party. Probably broke evenish in timbeys

Total = roughly +$220k

================================

It's obviously comparatively poor volume for a full time grinder, but I'm not stressing that at all really. I'm going to think on this a little more over the next day or so, but my goal for next year is to continue to work on my game and (mainly) my mindset until I get to the point where I'm comfortable taking all my own action at 5k. I hope to play almost no hands at stakes lower than 1k. I'm going to try and go decently hard on the grind until the world starts to get out of this pandemic, then if it's possible I'd like to do some travelling around Europe in the summer with my mrs.

Oh and on that note..



We got this through just before xmas Big weight off our collective mind, was a loooooooot of drama/stress this year making sure this would happen.
Much love to you all, hope you're had a good time chilling with your loved ones and bringing in the new year.

GL out there troops!

wowzers, great year man congrats!

is the 691 hours of play correct though? that would be even more impressive +220k with less than 2 hours of playing poker a day

Nice yr, insanely impressive that you kept # of unfocused sessions in the single digits, no doubt your winrate reflected it. Really reminds me how much I need to not slack and be properly focused for EVERY session, not just most of them.

This is how I feel pretty much, like anything it has it's negatives but it's just such a nutted job.

GL going fwd

Is there any chance you could give us a snippet of what this looked like?

Sick results also, glgl in 2021

Sick year and results, big fan of bitb and the content you guys put out - keep it up.

Second the question about some insight on the journalling! I've recently started writing a few words about how I'm feeling before/during sessions, but yours sounds a bit more in depth than that.

Very nice job sick hourly

The tax free uk thing is so insane run good, you guys r so lucky

We have to pledge fealty to a bunch of creeps and nonces though so it evens out.

lmao

gratz bud well done glad to see the mrs gets to enter the rainiest country in europe (the continent)

oh, also okish job in ze pokers

lmfao this vid deserves so many more views

lmao

Omg amazing, need more

lmfao, enjoyed this very much.

may have shed a tear or two while laughing over this lmfao

What's up guys, gonna chime in here one last time to cap things off both for this blog and for my poker playing journey as a whole.

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Feels weird to be responding to 2020 year review posts, but **** it lol.

Yeah towards the end of my career I was just focussing way more on quality over quantity. I started to view the value of each session as having two parts - that which you realise during the session (your $/hour) and that which you realise over every subsequent session (the increase/decrease in your $/hour brought about by thinking deeply about the spots). Especially given the situation with bitb, it just made so much more sense for me to play short, high-quality sessions rather than trying to play volume for the sake of it.

I would also say that having a pre session routine also really helped my mental game. In that - if I ticked everything off and then lost a bunch of money, I'd feel much more secure in the fact I'd made sure I'd maximised the probability of performing towards the higher end of my abilities. So it's a kind of double benefit, extremely high ROI for the 5-10m it takes.

I've kept up a very strong journalling habit over the last few years - most days I journal both in the morning (this is really more like a to-do list, 'what moves the needle today?' is the most common question I ask myself), and at night - this is mainly just gratitude practise, I list 5 things I'm grateful for. Plus obviously anything else that's on my mind, always helps me to tease out what's at the root of it. Another thing that over time I've come to see as more and more vital for any profession where your returns to effort aren't linear.

TY

Cheers guys

Haha, glad the boys enjoyed this. I just about pissed myself when I uncovered these tbh, it's a real shame that a bunch of them went missing as I was moving around so much in my twenties and people slowly got sick of storing my ****

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Well, where to start.

I guess I could summarise the first 4 months of 2021, which turned out to be the last 4 months of my playing career.

I had an absolutely sick run, mainly off the back of a HU grudge match at 1k on party where I absolutely destroyed a guy, can't remember the exact details but I'm pretty sure it was around 60BI in something like 10k hands. Though obviously not the highest stakes, it was definitely the sickest battle of my career in the sense that, at the start of the match this guy (who was a talker) was REALLY getting under my skin. Maybe 2-3 times I cut sessions short because I could feel that my lizard brain had just taken over with this guy **** talking me. Had to be super careful to be taking care of the mental game side, preparing like a monk before sessions and extensive review/journalling after. But then all of a sudden I just went turbo and legit couldn't lose a hand. Poor guy ended up busting his account at least once, just every session I'd win 10+ buyins. Can't really remember if he quit me, I think he maybe wanted to play 500 or something, but yea at some point it was clear it was over.

So yea - though it wasn't at all planned, I ended up playing my last hands as a dedicated professional in the early days of April. It was completely unplanned - basically I'd been paying more and more attention to defi/crypto type stuff, a few days off became a few weeks, and all of a sudden there were just a bunch of things I'd rather do than play hands.

Part of this was coaching related - during this time I put together what I personally think is my best ever course for bitb. 'Playing vs Humans' started with some epistemology type stuff - why we might think we know something about how a spot should play, how to systematically improve that knowledge, Bayes theory etc. Then moved on to some specifics- basically I always viewed players according to a 2x2 matrix - whether they were fundamentally weaktight or spewy and technically good/bad. So most regs I'd either label as weak (fundamentally they believe you win at poker by having the best hand) or spewy (believe you win by bluffing/winning more pots). And fish the same (with some winrate type variables too). Then with that distinction in mind, you can look at pio sims, get an idea for how equilibrium works in whatever spot, and have a clue and about direction you should be defaulting to in that spot depending on who you're playing against. Very, very few regs ever got the 'good' tag (where I'd not even be trying to soft-exploit them).

I got a lot of value from this framework over my career, and after sharing it with our students I kinda felt like I didn't have much else to offer. I'd known for some time that the younger/hungrier guys had much better ideas about how equilibrium looked in a growing range of spots, so I didn't really see myself adding much value on that side of things. I viewed myself more like the experienced guy who might have decent ideas about how combine that knowledge with what you know about your opponent to make good decisions in practise. As well as other practical things about how to manage the stresses of playing poker every day to have a more fulfilling/sustainable career. So yeah, between getting that out in the world and also having not played in a couple months, I decided also to step back also from coaching.

-----------------------

I guess ultimately the decision to wind up my poker career had two main motivations:

1. Financial. Though I still believe poker is probably the single best/most reliable way for someone to get from 4 to 7 figure net worth, I began to realise that it's maybe quite a poor way to get from 7 to 8+. It's basically not that hard to get to the point of making $100k-$250k/year, but then really quite hard to get substantially higher than that. At some point with poker, you get to the stage of playing the biggest games that consistently run, and then that's basically then end. To play bigger games still, I think you maybe have to move beyond poker.
2. Moral. I thought about this more and more with time. I DON'T think that playing online poker is immoral. If there's a problem gambler who's decided to play, they are eventually going to lose their money, and you NOT playing with them doesn't change that at all. That said, it's hard to argue that playing poker is a moral +. You just aren't really helping a guy by stacking him. There's an argument to be made, especially at nosebleed stakes, that those who are willing to play huge, basically 24h/day, are providing a service that you can't really get elsewhere and that therefore it's fair they're very well paid. But yea - I think playing poker is a moral 0 at best.
   
   Contrast this with most businesses - where whatever entity provides X service/product for $Y. The customer pays $Y, which implies they value the thing at >$Y, i.e. that they've had some 'consumer surplus' . I.e. they've 'won'. While the business makes $Y - their costs, i.e. they've also won. Most business transactions are therefore win-win, in a way which doesn't really exist in zero-sum games like poker.
   
   Again there are wrinkles here - there's a decent argument to be made that in the case of tourneys/streamers etc, the people watching events also get some enjoyment, perhaps making the whole thing positive sum. But these are possible exceptions to the rule IMO.

-----------------------

So, in June/July '21, having at least decided to take a break from poker, I decided to do a coding bootcamp. This is something I'd been wanting to do for literally years, my second episode actually took place right as a started a software engineering uni course. Probably for that reason I wasn't 100% sure I could do it, it being basically 9-5 Mon-Fri. But once I got started with it I absolutely loved it.

I guess the truth is that I've always been a bit of an 'ideas' guy. I'm the typical domain name buyer, 'omg but what if this', bigger picture guy. As more and more of business/life itself has moved online, inevitably that's meant my ideas are mainly for websites/automation of whatever computer-based tasks. So taking a 4-month programming course seemed like exactly the right thing to do. I did it in-person here in Edinburgh, at a place called CodeClan.

It went really good, I graduated in November and I've been doing coding, (loosely) crypto-related stuff since.

I started out in the new year basically just throwing **** at the wall, doing projects off my own bat - just thinking about whatever X project might need and trying to build it, for free. At first I got beaten to a few things (looots of very strong coders in the crypto world), but after a while I started to have some success and got my first few (small) paycheques for stuff I built. Felt pretty hype at the time

I've just been working for 1 client, obviously my plan isn't to just be a freelance coder guy, but to eventually get to the point where I'm building projects/products with a team and offering services on a bigger scale.

But, I've learned that it's generally a bad idea to pay people to do things you don't know how to do (as you never know if they're doing a good job or taking you for a ride), so I'm staying patient and trying to just move the needle each day, improving my skills, my network and etc.

---------------------

Sometimes I do wonder if I've made a mistake - it's definitely difficult sometimes to see the bitb coaches/students making huge cash, while I've basically decided on a whim to move from the top of one profession to the bottom of another. I try to keep it in perspective though - in the very best case my earning potential will be exponential (which involves it being very low for a frustratingly long time). In the worst case if I can't find a niche/get anything going, I can almost certainly get myself a very cushty dev job working for some big company with decent upside potential. Or I can always go back to playing poker - hopefully my ego isn't such that I won't be able to recognise I've made a mistake if that's truly how things are.

I definitely miss hanging out with the boys on random study calls a few times a week and talking shop. I've been posting on Twitter under a pseudonym (don't want to post publicly, DM if you want to connect), but haven't yet really found my tribe like I have in poker.

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Not really sure how to wrap this up honestly - thinking back on the journey which basically dominated 10 years of my working life, it's kinda hard to parse it down to a neat summary.

There are some specific people I need to thank, I'll definitely miss a few but here goes:

• Everyone who ever helped me with my game. Gonna go roughly chronological here.. pokerarb (taught me to be professional), Ted (taught me what a gameplan was), Doug (taught me HU, helped me believe I could hang at HS)... Stevie/Frank (taught me how to play with fish/badregs).. which brings me to..
• All the bitb cash guys. Coaches/Students past and present, most particularly G, without whom the whole thing would probably have imploded. But also Rool, Patrick, Marcus.. I mean the boys know who they are, but they probably don't know how grateful I am that they stuck with me through it all.
• Everyone I met along the way. Stevie and Frank again, the first poker guys I ever met IRL. Ricky, Hughes, Marcel, Ben, Cam, Julian, Stefan, Linus, the whole London/ Gay UK/ PDC crews. Good ****ing times.
• 2p2 and everyone who followed along. It's a strange thing to have identified so strongly with an online community built around a gambling game. But I have always felt a great respect for and camaraderie with everyone who's stumbled across a poker client, a pure fish, and mastered themselves and the game enough to support themselves from it. It's a strange kind of hero's journey which I think we've all been on and which unites us in a way.

My advice to anyone just starting out:

Take care of yourself.

I think poker attracts young guys who are intelligent, ambitious, a touch introverted and maybe a little more intense than average. If you truly dedicated yourself to the path, it takes you on a hero's journey where you experience highs you didn't think possible, but also intense lows where you begin to question everything you think you know. Everyone thinks they are prepared for it till it truly happens to them. You don't have to look that far to find circumstances where this turns tragic. Sometimes financially, sometimes worse.

I knew this objectively, but in my heart-of-hearts didn't believe it could happen to me when I suddenly started having my own mental health problems. I feel like this is maybe bound to fall on deaf ears, but the lesson to take here is - DON'T be complacent about your own mental health. No one can do this for you, you have to save yourself and you have to be deliberate and proactive about it. When the crisis comes, it's too late.

Everyone knows what this means - meditating, journalling, looking after your physical health etc etc. The hard part is having the discipline to tick it off when it doesn't feel urgent.

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Not sure if this is really likely to get any traction, but I thought it would also be cool to do an AMA. Can't find the original copy/pasta annoyingly (and don't have the patience to keep trying after typing out this monster), but I got a lot of value from reading the old 'The Well' posts from OGs in my early days on P5s/2p2, so seems like it's only fair to take my turn down the well.

Much 2p2, GL out there.

Great post man, and in general very inspirational journey. Wish you good luck in whatever comes next!