Decided to add my blog to 2+2 I put the dates for when I originally made the posts. Thanks everyone.

December 25th, 2021

Hey everyone,

I am posting this blog as I am hoping that is it the beginning of the new chapter for me. I am a life nit. I am anxious, and scared to take risks. I currently work as a AI Engineer/ Scientist at Microsoft, and I am very passionate about machine learning. Previously I worked as a software engineer at Amazon. I went to the big companies to learn, and because it felt safe, and the money.

I am soon learning that the hedonic treadmill is very real. "If I just make six figures I will be happier, if I just get promoted I will be happy, if I just get a pretty gf then I will have it all." Unfortunately that is all ****. The truth is true happiness is much harder than this. Debt can make you miserable, but I don't think money will make you much happier.

This blog isn't really a poker blog. I will focus on poker, but I really want this to be the blog that will document how I stopped being a scared little life nit. Let me explain: I have lived my life in anxiety, or should I say I think anxiety has lived my life for me. I always did the things that were the right thing to do, or would avoid things that scared me. I don't know if the reader knows what I mean by the "scared child" feeling. It's something that is still in my brain stem. The feeling where you have no control of your destiny, at a young age, and that no one is there to help you.

I hate this feeling. I have realized that I had missed out on a lot of my 20s because of it. My dad passed away suddenly from cancer in 2019. It was a complete **** show. I spent most of my 20s in a library and had very little responsibility other than getting good grades, and trying to get a good job. Before he passed his girlfriend drove him to a notary (where I am from they are allowed to estate plan without being a lawyer) and tried to get his will, without his estate lawyer, or my family knowing what happened. The whole situation was awful, and this anxiety i felt my whole life shot threw the roof, and for the first time in my life I was on my own. My grandparents where too old to handle this, and my uncle was burnt out. I gave him the best goodbye I possibly could, and settled the estate over two years, and handled the drama to what was reasonable. It was here I realized I was a man. When I was young he would always tell me when I was born it seemed like magic, as if a light switch was hit and there was another person in the hospital room, and I never really understood what he meant until he passed. After his final moments I knew he was gone. It was just myself and my uncle in the room.

He always told me he regretted being too safe in life. He had the same demon of fear that I do. He had a safe job his whole life, and didn't travel much, and really missed out on adventure, and I had an epiphany that I want a life of adventure. Despite my nervous system suggesting otherwise.

I really love AI. But I don't like using it to make people click ads. You know how annoying facebook notifications are getting? How creepy Google ads are getting? Imagine if all that power went into something more helpful that trying to milk a fraction of a percent out of a conversion rate.

I want to apply AI to solve real problems, and I also love poker. I am pretty sure I can use it to help build tools in poker, or solve real problems in science. Eventually I want to start my own AI company and solve problems that I find to be interesting. You have companies like Deep mind solving protein folding, but most of the money is going into trying to get you to click ads for a some MLM's detox cleanse juice 0.001% more of the time, so Google can make another few billion dollars. I am not against making money, and I am not really against advertisements, but holy crap that is boring.

I will do the things that give me fulfillment in life..

I am going to be a winner at high stakes poker.
I am going to get a black belt in Brazilian Jiu jitsu.
I am going to make my own AI company.
I am going to crack sports betting / daily fantasy sports with AI.
I will combine any of the above as I see fit.


I have learned I really value freedom, and doing the above things are going to be proof that I am truly free.

I am still early in my career, so I don't want to up and quit MS yet. I am actually learning a lot there and it will be beneficial when I start crossing off this list. I am currently going to publish a paper with them in the next few months, and I plan to work there for two years, so in the fall of 2023 I will quit the job and start my future endeavours.

My plan after leaving MS is to go spend time in Asia and work on some proof of concepts. I think I can build an exploitative solver, and I can beat DFS and sports betting with my own invented architecture. This way I will be able to travel, live cheaply and work on these projects all at the same time.

If I am going to build poker tools, I need to be good at poker to understand what is needed. I want to get to high-stakes so this and doing a lot of jiu jitsu is priority 1. I took a lot of inspiration from this blog:
https://www.runitonce.com/chatter/on...see-the-light/

Deliberate practice is something I use all the time.

As I am writing this it is Christmas day and I can't sit still. I want to crush this. The next while of posts is going to be focused on Jiu jitsu training and poker training.

Poker wise I am going to start at NL10 on Bodog, and use MDA, and solvers to really try and build my own play book from scratch. Everyone who seems to get to highstakes in 6 months follows this pattern. Being trained in AI and data science this feels the most natural to me.

I can fund myself all the way up to NL50 if I need to, but then the grind to build the bankroll naturally really begins. But for now I see no reason to avoid making sure I am not just a winner at NL10 before moving up. I want to get better at poker, and the stakes will come naturally.

For Jiu jitsu, I was a blue belt, and with COVID I really fell off. I am going to study Danaher's Dvds and a base and follow the same principles for poker as this. He is dryer than the damn dessert, but his DVDs are gold.

For poker I am going to follow the information from the blog I posted above and prioritize deliberate practice and studying over volume for now. The only downside from this is the pressure the swings will put on my mindset. I am not sure how to balance that with my schedule. I am going to study poker every day. Even if it's a little bit. I have always started getting some pre-flop ranges down, and somewhat intuitive over the past few weeks.

This is it for this ramble fest for now. I am away from my main computer until Jan, but will study videos for nothing else other than to keep the habit. I am going to blog Weds and Saturdays.

December 30th, 2021

The past 4 days I have mostly been studying from videos. I am away from Vancouver, have no access to a solver/poker until Sunday. I am excited to get home and get some real work in, but for now this is all I can do.

The course material I have been studying has been really good for understanding how to build a strategy. There are a few small things that I have learned that might come into as a big factor later. It triggered some thoughts on my end, so since I don’t have much poker to talk about I thought I would post them here.

GTO..as least on the river has an unstable equilibrium. Meaning a small change to opponents range can mean a big deviation in your strategy. For example if Villian is slightly over calling we just stop bluffing all together, and if they are slightly over folding then we fire all of our bluffs. I think this actually makes things simpler in game. Very simple set of reads, or population data can really make rivers easier. At least in a vacuum.

Since the equilibrium is unstable I think it would be very very hard to construct anything balanced at the tables. It doesn’t surprise me that some of these twitch streamers estimate a frequency and roll a rng for their action. My understanding on balance is: since they don’t know what villain is doing then they will be winning sometimes against certain villains and losing against others. I hear the argument that we don’t know what this player will do so we play GTO, but I don’t know if I agree that the line of thinking, while valid, is the best approach. I think I hear Doug Polk even making this argument. “Could be better, could be worse? Who knows”

Consider the analogy of ranges, lots of new players, myself included, try and put someone on an individual hand, when they are new. We do this because we, as humans, think deterministically rather than probabilistically, and it’s what makes poker really hard. However putting someone on a single hand is not good because we need to consider the range at a given point. If they are bluffing 30% of the time with a half pot bet, we need to call since we only need to win 25% to be better than folding. With a single hand we are going to calling or folding almost at random since we are only picking a hand that beats us or we beat, and will be biased. Every time we fold there we are losing money.

So why, if we know hand ranges are good, are we not considering a range of villains? How often does a villain with the stats we have seen so far call too much on the river? If we know 75/100 villains with these stats overfold this river we really want to start bluffing a lot, we might be wrong for this villain, but overall (which is what we care about) we are right. What percent of them will have the tendency to be on one side of the equilibrium or the other. I think this is a better way to try and make some of these decisions, rather than to assume they are balanced. Being balanced on the river is really hard, so why are we assuming unknowns are doing it?

GTO does have a nice property where, (in heads up only..this isn’t guaranteed for multiway), if we play closer to GTO than our opponent we will beat them for some win rate. But there is no guarantee there is a lot of win rate. If you play with a solver, and solve for equilibrium, note down the EV, then node lock villain to have some crazy actions. You can see against the static GTO range you get an EV increase, but it usually isn’t a lot compared to if you re-solve for the exploitative strategy against that crazy villain range you just created. Is the default assumption of balanced the best way to make long run EV?

This ended up being quite long, so there is more about mixing I noticed while playing around with solvers but I will leave that to another day.

I am not pretending to have the answers here, there may be huge gaps in what I am missing here. Everything I am saying here is really on paper, and there may be practical considerations I am missing. I expect my mind to change a lot.

Any comments on this above rant is appreciated wether you think I am asking good questions or a huge fish. I like to hear other points.

Thanks everyone.

January 8th 2022

New blog post

I decided to just post one blog a week now, otherwise it’s going to be me rambling about results. This week I had to re-calibrate my study. I joined the EQ-Poker Patreon. I almost don’t want to mention it because the value for $40 CAD a month is insane, but he is a really nice guy so I thought I would give the few, but amazing, people that read this blog a shout out.
His first few videos explained a lot about GTO, why we simplify and how the structure of poker it self makes it very hard for humans to be balanced. I really didn’t think about it like this. I am a really big fan of this approach and it makes the path to improving much clearer.

The basic outline for how to improve is like what I was doing, but slightly different. Simple flops and then focus on learning turns and rivers. This is well known for now. A lot of the MDA is done for me and I can study for effectively with working full time. He made some very insightful points about river ranges that I never would have figured out on my own.
I switched to his pre-flop ranges to study for now, and I have some fish protocol lines that I am making sure I understand. There is 3+ fish at my table all the time, and I am in a pot with them so often that I thought it would be most beneficial to start there. Most of my money is going to come from them so I am studying these for now. I will do deeper work in cycles. There are just so many bad players that I almost can’t work out a reg strategy at the tables yet.

I am also running a bunch of sims in the background for study later. For now I think I have a good enough idea for simplified flops that studying weirder spots won’t give me that much EV. I feel really good about knowing how to improve and then just putting the work in.

I am still going to priorities study over play. I have been studying 1hour every day, but play 30-60 minutes. This will change, but for now I more so want to make it a habit.

My mindset has been ok / poor. Vancouver is in lockdown and everyone is out with covid or not coming out. I have been feeling anxious again lately. I was going to go snowboarding this AM, and I just didn’t. I am forcing myself to go tomorrow and will post about it here for accountability. Right now it’s the only form of exercise I can get. Gyms and BJJ is locked down.
I found myself worrying about work a lot. It’s not a bad place to work, and I was told I am doing really well. I don’t know if this will ever go away, but when it’s bad I want to lay on the couch and be alone a lot and it isn’t healthy. I tend to want to eat a lot of junk food. I did not do good on eating healthy this week either.

Dating has been pretty meh. Lots of matches on the apps, but it’s hard to find someone you connect with. Just patience there.

The poker part has been fun / easy. I am running well, but still not super happy with my play. I will stick to NL10 for a few months and see what happens. Not being able to work out feels like it’s feeding my other bad habits.
Next week I will cook at home the whole day. I will just worry about it one meal at a time. No junk food until Saturday.
That’s it for me.

Jan 15th 2022

Start of Blog post.
This week was a lot more consistent with poker. Darius’s group, and his approach to improving is great. There is a lot of gold in his group, and it’s conceptual, meaning you can use them to build your own strategy, which is what I want. As a tangent here, my goal is to just get good at poker, and the money will come. I think working on things, doing them yourself, realizing it wrong, fixing it and repeating is slower to get results in the short term, but your roof will be higher in the long run because you understand it more.

The general approach for getting better in a spot is: data (solves, MDA, whatever) -> simplify -> adjust -> practice.

For pre-flop that is taking some pre-flop solutions, building a strategy that is pure, or simple mixing, then adjusting it for population tendencies. In microstakes people don’t 4bet as a bluff for example, so we can add more three bets. Solvers three bet kind of polarized, so aside from the bb we use linear, but we can use a % of our range similar to solver. Then we learn them and use them at the tables.

Flop, turn and river strategy can follow a similar pattern. You get a bunch of solves, and simplify it by reducing the number of bet sizings etc. I don’t want to give away the actual strategy that Darius recommends we start with, but I think if someone wants to experiment with finding simple strategies with GTO+ they can get quite close. Post flop for example if we used 3 bet sizing on 3 streets IP we would have 3^3 decision points = 27, OOP we add in a check so that’s 4^3 = 64, so if you simplify the flop then you really simplify the turn and river.

Once you have a simple strategy down you can go through your complex strategies / solves and add in a small piece each time where you’re simple strategy is costing you a lot of EV. If you start low enough your simple strategy is probably enough to beat those stakes.
I think a lot of people want the “just tell me the lines so I can go crush”, but I think this is really flawed thinking. Eventually the game will change and you will rely on others again, and for some people that’s ok. Personally, I want to be able to make my own strategies and get better at the game myself. Limitless doesn’t get the lines from someone. Sure he gets ideas and stuff from his friends, but the absolute sickos figure it out. I want to be a sicko.

I have been really motivated for poker. Study has been easy and play has been easier. I have been “wanting to book a win” a lot, and I have been forcing myself to decide on the time I am done playing and then just staying at the computer for that time. Practicing my Reg strategy at the tables has been tougher because there are like 3-5 fish at any given time, but that is minor. I have been running insanely good. Volume is really hard with regular 4 tabling, I am use to being able to get 2k hands pretty quick with zoom, but now it’s hard to get 500. I have been ramping up and playing more now, so volume will work itself out.

I have been getting some hands reviewed in Darius’s group, and then reading and trying to work out what I would do in all the posted hands. There are a lot of people who play a lot higher than me in there, so I am learning a whole lot from them.

I have been running so good that I need to start shooting NL25, with the deposit bonuses getting unlocked as well I am at $900 bankroll. (I started pretty high I think I up like $100 or $120 with the bonus). I played a little bit on NL25 last night, and there is a lot of fish at the tables still, so we will see how this goes. Shot taking hasn’t really been good for me in the past, but I think getting use to it now is really important.

I decided to post my graph as well. This is no sample, but I want to be open with results. Hands just take longer.

My results are here

Obviously a very sustainable winrate ��.
I still see a lot of people talk about GTO vs Exploitative, and I think it’s very clear now that they are two sides of the same coin, but I think there could be an interesting discussion. I think you have a continuum of pure GTO vs Max Exploit, and there are dangers to both. If try and play GTO against all players all the time you’re protecting against things that aren’t really going to happen. You’re going to be worrying about picking the correct bluffing hand with blockers when it might not matter. Pure max exploit and you risk opponents adjusting very quickly, and the data you have to exploit might just be coincidence and not a real leak. Where on the line should you sit? There is also min exploit where you exploit at one decision node, then play equilibrium post that node.

I think you need to consider the factors: will they notice, if they notice can/will they adjust correctly, and if they adjust how hard is it for you to re-adjust. If they can’t or won’t adjust correctly then it’s all good. Fish for example, just aren’t going to counter you properly because they aren’t fish. If regs see you getting out of line with fish there isn’t much they can do about it, since they aren’t in the hand with you.
In the case where you have some secret against regs, what do you do? Can you slightly exploit them to where they don’t notice? Can you exploit them with some strategy then move back when they adjust? How do you know they have adjusted? I don’t want to be in a situation where if I get found out I need to leave the table. Especially if it is on a named site then I am done for good. It is an interesting problem and I have some ideas, but I am not sure I have the complete answer. What do you think?

That is it for me today. Next blog I will post more life stuff and less poker stuff, but for now I am motivated to keep improving. There are going to be dark times as they are in every blog I have read it’s the nature of poker. I am hoping to get through it.

Jan 22 2022

This week was interesting for poker. I studied my face off but played very little.

Two reasons:

• 1. Bodog ran into issues with reg tables.
  2. I am having mindset issues with wanting to book a win, and it's tough than I expected.

My NL25 shot went really well, and I felt like I was waiting for the moment where it all came crashing down. I would win 1-2 BIs then want to stop the session. Initially I thought I could just blast through it, but it a very powerful sensation. My strategy to deal with this was to play for 60 minutes, and it was about 90% of what I could take. Then take an hour off and come back for another 30 minute session. Coming back for this session helped a lot. After doing this for a few days it was easier. I have a lot more cushion at NL25 now, so I think this is helping as well, but there is something telling about my mindset here: I have a emotional connection to short term results. There will be a battle with this all the way up. I don't want to play more than 90 minutes on weekdays for now, so this strategy will be ok for now.

I feel confident in my play in these pools they are just so soft, so I am not sure why I want to book a win so bad. Darius gave some advice about not trying to numb yourself to the sensation, and be aware of it, and I think it's really good advice. I am just not certain how to implement this. I hear good things about meditation. I will need to look more into this.

I came through some theoretical break throughs as well. I posted this in my Darius's discord, and I don't want to give away too much but consider this example:

Lets say, for the sake of example, a player is at a river node and they have 10 value combos and 100 trash combos. The play decides to bluff trash at 10%. What is their bluffing percentage? Most people think 10, and that could be correct if their choice is value betting, bluffing or checking. But after deciding to bet they have 10 value combos, and 100*0.1 (100 trash combos bluffed 10% of the time) = 10 bluffing combos, so the rate they are bluffing given they have bet is actually (10/20)100=50%. We are printing here.

This example demonstrates balance is really dependent on not just your frequency, but your actual combos you hold. If we don't get to the river with a different range than a solver and the solver says bluff 25%, the RNG won't protect us. We could be over or under bluffing here. Something to keep in mind. In practice probably only 1-2% I would think. But I Believe this gives a lot of power to min exploit strategies. I need to play around with some solves, to see how extreme this can get, but I think you could put yourself in a position where you can be exploited on the river and there is nothing you can do about it with your river strategy.

I am learning a lot about how to get better. I actually had a lot of issues with adjusting before starting up poker again. I think it was an artifact of Zoom, where you just had to do it so infrequently, but now I play very differently against "regs" than "fish".

I had some really great advice for bluff catching as well, and seeing other people better than me execute these, and post the hands have been really helpful to calibrate my own thresholds.

I have been using the trainer in GTO+ for some of the simple strategies too to help calibrate how a solver plays here. It really helps with lines that are less familiar. I mostly drilled BTN vs BB in SRPs, and it actually helps a lot with very little hands. It's actually interesting to see how the solver tries to exploit you. When you realize pop will never do this, you can almost see where the EV is coming from.

Continuted results

I don't think I have ever been on a heater like this before. I wanted to share this sample since it's so pretty haha. Again no sample and not sustainable, but sure looks nice.

The next week I want to be more focused in my learning. I have been all over the place. I am going to spend the next 3-4 days on OOP SRP strategies (BB vs SB and CO vs BTN), and then after that I will go to bluff catching or three bet pots.

I would like to get more volume in next week as well, but we will see. It's still early days, so one day at a time.

That's it for me today.

Jan 30th 2022

his week was busy. I was on a Machine Learning Engineer panel aimed at helping new grads with their career. It was an interesting experience, normally I am on the other side of the fence trying to gain a lot of knowledge about how to get my job. It was a cool experience, and my LinkedIn blew up. I also had a new project at work, and it’s been a few long days so I can figure this out.

I think poker is getting harder to be honest. I am heading down the dunning kruger effect. The past few sessions I just felt completely lost and started making weird plays. I think it’s a form of tilt to be honest. I also had my booster the day before, so I really don’t think my brain was working at full speed. Adapting to a more aggressive, and looser strategy, is going to have some growing pains, and I just everything felt like a mess suddenly. I didn’t really know what to do in a lot of spots. I think I was treating bluff catching in 3bet pots like bluff catching in SRPs and it’s tighter, so I fixed that up a but yesterday and tried to re-calibrate my thresholds vs regs. Wasn’t sure if it was run bad or if I am just getting smashed there, but the data I have suggests they are a lot tighter than I thought.
All in all the results aren’t bad, for feeling like my level of play I have just been breaking even, which is funny to me.

I decided to just invest in coaching. My time is limited and the $$ I would spend on it would give be a better ROI than what would happen if I invested it in the market, so I am going to pull a little from my monthly savings. I think it’s the correct play. If I can get to NL100/NL200 quicker with this then it will pay for itself + Expected market returns quicker. Pretty sure this will pay off well. I don’t have enough time for a CFP, but I think hourly will work out great.
Poker mindset has gotten a lot better. Playing for longer periods is not nearly as hard for me anymore. Life mind set has been rough to be honest. In generally I have been noticing my patience is lower and I have been getting pent up in general. I am just starting to get back to the gym now that they are open again, but I can feel myself being tense all the time. This pandemic has really messed with my mindset the past few years. Amazon stressed me out so much, even now that I am out, I think I am still feeling residual effects. Small things really give a big emotional response from me.

This is it for me, there isn’t too much exciting aside from keeping on trucking a lot and starting coaching with Darius on Monday. Hoping to keep the improvement on the up and up.

Feb 5th 2022

The past week I finally started to downswing. I am not surprised about this, but the mental toll it took on me caught me off guard. The strategy I play is pretty high variance, and it felt like there was just something wrong. Since I am still new to this again I was actually convinced there was something wrong. It helped me study more, but it actually made me play worse. I lost confidence in every thing I was doing, and started to change the strategy.

It was wild. In my past playing this I remember the downswings feeling like they are playing tricks on you, but not like this. I mentioned this in our discord before, but running bad is kind of like being on acid. You know you’re running bad, just like you know you’re on acid, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

I tried to be very conscious about how I was feeling. It just felt like I was doing something wrong. My mind would wander looking for something to show that I “made a mistake” and sometimes they were found. I def punted more easily through this, and it might not be over yet, who knows.

My inner conscious stream would feel like losing chips is a loss of progress, and obviously this isn’t true. Especially since I am in 0 rush to get to NL50 now. It’s interesting to try and openly analyze my own thoughts. Getting sucked out on really doesn’t bother me, but when I lack confidence + a bad result then I get this mix of thoughts: “something is wrong”, “you’re doing it all wrong” and “you’re losing progress”. You’re getting worse, and going down the the Dunning Kruger effect.

Obviously this is silly, I am improving, studying every day and getting better, that is the progress, not the stochastic nature of my bankroll, but here I am writing about it.

Going to do some more jiu jitsu next week. I think I am going to go to the BJJ gym once or twice instead of just trading with my partner, and on the weekend I am going to go to Whistler to go snowboarding. Tomorrow I am actually going to the hill in Vancouver to go snowboarding as well.

Work has been okay. I effectively decided to try and move into research and without a PhD this might be very hard, but we will see. I am still new to Microsoft, and I still feel I need to prove myself before I start making any asks.

The main goals for poker are to keep playing, and keep trying to make sure I am keeping up with executing the basic strategy. I am reviewing hands constantly, and making a good effort to mark any hand I am unsure of for review later. I am studying spots as the defender since that is where I feel way less confident.

I had a session with Darius and it was really helpful. I just need to keep staying the course for now.

That’s it for me.

Feb 13th 2022

I don't really want to write a full blog entry today. Maybe tomorrow but in general I am experiencing really bad anxiety, and it's getting to the point where I want to do all these things, but doing them scares me.

Poker wise my biggest leak is not playing enough. Otherwise it's fine. I am actively marking hands and spots that show a constant pattern I work for a week, so it is a little like wack a mole, but confidence while playing is up.

Life wise I am a bit of a mess. I want to do all these things, but then find some reason to talk myself out of it, then get mad at myself for not doing it, and I am wearing myself down. The main point of the blog was to shed this, but it's really a struggle right now.

My BJJ Partner has covid so that is on hold for a while.

overall I think I could be doing better with things, so going to just try and build better habits back in slowly.

I am waisting a lot of my life being anxious.

Feb 20th 2022

My goal for next month is to put it more volume and less worrying about trying to understand every single spot and stuff. I think I just like studying more than playing or something. I find I am making a lot of adjustments to my game and it's making me a little inconsistent. My goal for NL25 was to get the pattern matching down better and I think I have done that.

I am getting into these wormholes with trying to understand when we want to overbet some rivers vs GTO to try and understand what is happening with the pool vs betting medium size, but I don't think there is a lot of EV in doing this, but it just helps me brain have some kind of mental model.

This was my graph (HERE) as of Friday or something and I think it's fine to just focus more on volume for a while, so for March I am going to make a volume goal, and try focus on this. I am like one heater from shooting NL50.

Work was very busy and I think it was hard to do this and poker at the same time. This has changed now, and moving onto a project that has variables that more inside my control, so I think it will be less stressful.

I think my results are pretty good, the volume is still low, but the total results ate 22bb/100, and then just the NL25 part is 13bb/100.

My main fear is "cheating" my way to some limit with some fundamentals missing and having to go backwards, so I have been taking it slow. Even in a soft fishpool like bodog poker is ****ing hard. The nice thing about it is there is enough punters where having a winrate > 0 is not that hard so you have 1 less thing to worry about.

Pushing myself to do lines that are uncomfortable is still hard.

Overbetting a scare card on the river IP cause both players are super capped is scary, but that's how you make more money I think.

Risk reward is a big thing in finance as well, and I think it's true here too. People are scared of losing.
Higher risk plays in finance usually involve taking out a loan to leverage your investment. No one likes doing this, despite mathematical models showing it's optimality for return per unit of risk paid, everyone just un-diverisfies their portfolio when they want more risk (ex ALL IN ON TESLA), but the idea of losing seems to rattle them. I see the same analogy in poker. OVERBETTING IS SCARY.

Overbetting is scary when you have a good hand cause they fold a lot. It's scary when you're bluffing cause you can lose a lot.

The emotional journey..especally when I have been feeling really anxious in general has been very interesting.

The next challenge to break through here is to play more.

This week was good. I am back to exercising regularly and I made some really break throughs with my anxiety. Therapy has been helpful, and I recommend it if you’re dealing with these issues.

I started a more structured routine for poker and that has been very helpful. During the week I study Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, and play Tuesday Thursday. Then Friday Saturday Sunday I try and play a lot. The structure has been much easier. When I study, I spend 30-60 minutes on pre-flop, and then 60-90 minutes on post flop.

This week I really focused on playing from the BB vs SB and BTN and developed some basic heuristics for check raising. I do find this very difficult to distill the bluff / merged raises because the mixing makes it tough to simplify. I would browse solutions write notes, and then distill those notes into heuristics, and dedicating a full week to do this is boring, but it is effective for improvement.
Once I distilled the heuristics I would use the trainer in GTO wizard, but I used it ask the question if a raise here is mixed in GTO, so I at least know what the candidates are.

Turn play get’s more complicated especially raising depolarized, and I am still uncertain in a lot of these spots. It takes a while to really understand, but we can use the same trainer to figure these things out.
Next week I will continue with BB but look and turn probes vs BTN.

When it comes to hand reviews, I am finding I look more at villains’ range in GTO Wizard to help understand a spot better, rather than just look at my range. I find it easier to understand what the rest of my range wants to do, and really help answer the question why. When you combine that with data, to know if pop gets to that spot with a wider or thinner range you can adjust. And learning how to adjust is what I find interesting about poker.

The game feels very different now. Not harder or easier, but just different. Asking the right questions is hard, but I think that is what I am improving at.

I still think (GTO / Data / Exploitative) maximalists avoiding the wonderful tools on the other side of things. Nash equilibrium gives you a structural framework for the game, and data work gives you directions to adjust. It’s beautiful.
Poker is really cool.

about being a life nit. I feel you. I have deep anxiety (a somewhat acquintance tried to kill me from behind with a knife 15 years ago) since then I have A LOT of trouble having anyone behind me and it prevents me from going shopping for food or just browsing stores. I will read your blog with deep concentration and follow along on your journey and might try some new stuff myself. I am getting help from therapy! no worries.


I wish you the best Good Luck!

Best of luck with your goals, very interesting read so far!

How is the jiu jitsu coming along?

A friend of mine got into this a few years ago and has never looked back... Now i rarely see him as he is always doing something related to the sport

Dont screw yourself by trying to do too much, you will get anxious.
I also belong to the anxious club like most of what makes us us, its genetic.
Nobodys who matters is marking you out of ten except you, dont be so hard on yourself.

How goes it?

hi buddy i aint read all ur post cept da 1st 1, i say im rootin 4 u n im sayin 2, if u wana b free, u gota lern 2 kontrol ur thots, kan u sit in seye lence 4 10 min n b in kontrol uv all da thots u got? if u aint able 2 do dat u a slave 2 passion, it aint madda how mutch munny u got or how mutch sucksess u seein........................................ think abt it

Very interesting read. Graph looked nice, although ofc not really a sample Maybe focus more on grinding 50-100k hands the next 2 months and see how your strat plays out? And then optimize from there?

With your programming skills you could probably watch out for any new poker variant catching on and then build a solver tool for that

Since you seem like one of the few guys that is very keen on the studying part - remember that the big $$$ comes from understanding how opponents differ from gto, not by playing gto ourselves

Im a life nit too. Im trying to get out of my comfort zone, is a daily fight, some weeks i do fine, others weeks not and go a lot back . I think small steps is the right aproach, its not easy, dont be hard with yourself, being a life nit is not the worst, some people have bigger isues like drugs, unemployed, etc

If you want the formula for maximum possible happiness, here it is.

Imagine your life as an XY graph with X axis being how long you live and Y axis representing how happy you are in any given point in time.
You don't know for absolute certain how long X is, but assume it represents 80 years unless you know otherwise (and alter your decisions accordingly)

Every decision you make determines where you are on the Y axis, at that point in time.
Focus on taking sustainable actions that positively compound upwardly on the Y axis of life. Stability on the Y axis is the garden in which happiness grows.

Too many people's Y axis is an inconsistent mess of high highs and low lows.
IM GUNNA BE A POKER PLAYER! ... now I'm a homeless bum.
IM GUNNA BE A CRYPTO TRADER! HOORAY I MADE A TON OF MONEY! ... I tripled down on a shitty altcoin at its peak and now I'm back to where I started, 2 years later...

Y axis consistency is all about realizing that each decision you make is contingent on all the decisions that came before it. Here you are talking about bailing on a job with Microsoft as an AI developer, to play poker for a living? OK, but taking overly optimistic risks with too much downside can set your Y axis back years, which lowers your Y axis trajectory going forward... and if you think the regret of not having taken some crackpot risk is bad, try the much deeper regret of screwing up an otherwise good life by taking a moronic leap into an unknown that has a range of potential negative outcomes significantly worse than anything you might have faced in the 'regular, good life' as a software developer. Its not that being a bartender in Cabo when you're in your 20s isn't 'worth it', its just that when you finally age out of the game and want to enter the real world again, you're pretty far behind the 8 ball.

The poker boom took a lot of GREAT brains and set them back a decade in their lives. That Y axis spiked up, hard, during those gravy train years, but came crashing back down to earth eventually and now you have all sorts of really smart guys grinding midstakes, or who weaseled back into the corporate world at a much lower point than they would've been had they just focused on a career... or they're just working selling mattresses... because their 20s were hollowed out by playing a game.

If you're someone who's developing AI for Microsoft, that means you will certainly have the IQ required to be a winning poker player, at some level that would at least allow you to pay your bills... but be very, very ****ing careful about ditching that life for one that seems more 'exciting' - you may not fully understand just how gross the 'poker life' and the 'poker world' actually is and by the time you find out, here you are a decade on still talking up that next big AI project that hasn't really ever left the whiteboard in your mind, since you've focused all your energies for the past decade robbing businessmen out of their big blind.

Its possible that upon reflection, you realize those 10 poker years on your Y axis left you at a much lower point in life than they would have been had you just stuck with Microsoft and retired early. The poker life is best left to clever degenerates who offer little else of value.

If you're just super burned out on the corporate world and realize you can 'check out' and make a living at poker because of an innate natural talent, I get that, I truly do, but its not a decision to be made lightly. You'll eventually look back on the life you chose and will realize that you spent most of it sitting at a table playing cards, which is no more substantial a life than just living in your moms basement playing video games all day.

Hey 2p2 people. Thanks for all the replies, I cross post this on RIO and I got locked out of this account for a while.

TLDR - I got up to NL100, and work stress got to me and I shut down poker for a while and withdrew.

Was winning around 10bb/100, but the bodog swings were a lot. I decided I just want to work on building a better strategy from using data + solvers, and just put in $700 CAD to run it back up.

I reloaded a little while ago and am still studying + playing. Going to quit MS in the fall, and go out on my own, and spend time being a bit of a nomad and work on my passions. One of which is poker .

I will continue with the normal posts .

Poker has been going great the last few weeks. I have continued to study BTN vs BB spots, and I am feeling the upgrades. I spent two weeks really focusing on solver work and I find it takes a really long time to understand WHY a solver is doing what it's doing and GTOW is great for that.

Coming up with a hypothesis and testing it on a similar texture / run out and then updating why really helps build understanding even though it can be tough. Generally I say something along the lines of: "This turn card brings in a lot of 2pair combos from his calling range" instead of.."9+ turn cards are bad for us here". One is learning a concept and one is memorizing.

Being able to do this same thing with node locking is something I am looking forward to doing in the future to really understand how changes in villians range affects our strategy.

Play wise this week was tough, so I am going to try and make up for lost volume over this weekend. But since starting up again after withdrawing:





As you can see I am running really good in the streets, and my redline is boarder line spewtard. I am not really sure what I changed from before. I have really just been working on value betting hah. I really have had a focus on making sure I am hitting my overbets, since they generate so much EV, and I was overdoing it in the middle there, so maybe this is it. I am not sure. This is just NL25 and I think a lot of the regs are able to get away with some wacky stuff:



My study plan is about to get a major overhaul in the next few weeks here, but until then I am going to switch to a SB vs BB focus, starting with the BBB, and BXB nodes when OOP.

What I really want to try and figure out is how some of my simplified flop strategies do when: being max exploited, against the nash equilibrium strategy for that spot (do we get some ev back?), and adjustments vs some very exaggerated strategies. Ideally we can get a good overall idea for how to play verses different player types.

My hot take is "theory players" are often miss associated with "nash equilibrium players" and I think being a theory player is ideal, and a nash equilibrium player is dangerous for a variety of reasons, but I I think the "GTO vs Exploit" argument in twitch poker is boring, done to death and unproductive, so I will stop here.

For the first time I am not anxious about having holes in my game. I am okay without knowing everything, and without being perfect. I have a plan for improvement and I am sticking too it. I really get a lot of satisfaction from improving my game. I think this is what keeps poker fresh and fun. Playing for me is really collecting data points to find leaks or learn a new concept. Eventually I want to play against the best players to improve in this way. I have the same motivation for BJJ. Building a strategy, improving that strategy and seeing how people who are better break my strategy and then improving it. I think this is the secret for rapid improvement. You can't be scared to experiment with it, and you need to to see it go wrong to improve.

My blog kind of fell off a cliff here, and I want to re-new it with interesting posts so I want to spend the next few posts without having updates to posting about new topics and not just a place for me to post graphs. So my next few posts will be based around finance with poker.
When my Dad passed I was left some money that was enough where I needed to really understand what to do, and like the nerd I am I went off into the weeds reading all these finance text books only to come back to a simplified strategy haha. But from my background in math, stats, probability that I use in AI, and the algotrading start up I use to work at I have some ideas for applied lessons from finance to poker.

Poker professionals and investing professionally are not that different from one another. Both use strategies to maximize long run EV while managing risk of ruin. The main difference is finance makes a lot more use of risk management by utilizing risk models and diversification. This is something I feel most professional poker players are lacking.

I want to make a three to four series of blog posts that will explore poker from a finance lens to help maximize long run expected value. I will cover the following topics:
-Return on Investment and risk: why a high win rate is so important in poker.
-Diversification is the only free lunch, and why Poker players should use it more.
-Running poker like a business: Why, and how, we should separate our poker bankroll from our life roll.

I will make new topics in the next post.

Thanks .

I am really sorry that happened to you.

It's good I really like studying John Danahers stuff I find it super helpful and cuts down stress

Thanks! Yes I am really more on the exploit end of things!

Thanks!

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Nice to see you back