^ nice. Yea after it was the same for that scenario I would have guessed there'd be a way to prove it would always be the same

Any life updates?
Where you're playing mostly and if you're happy with your game?

Hihi

I play at all the same places still, Palomar/Oceans/Commerce/Hawaiian Gardens. My work ethic/volume has been quite low recently though, perhaps getting a bit tired of live poker unfortunately.

Being out of practice is definitely noticeable, I have to take longer with decisions that would previously be trivial when I was playing a ton.

2012 me was a pretty damn strong believer in "you work to live, not live to work". While I still advocate a self-indulgent lifestyle ("do whatever makes you happy"), I definitely have more mixed feelings than ever that it's acceptable to play as few hours as I'm playing- aka be this lazy.

So while I'm extremely happy on a day-to-day basis, sometimes I worry about losing my passion for poker!

Hi guys I did an interview with a fellow PG&C'er, Sol Reader. I met him when I randomly ran into him at the WSOP this year, although I've sparsely interacted with him online before. You can check it out in his thread here. This is the first time I've tried anything like this, would appreciate any suggestions.

Was going to say Aesah is the best, then remembered he said he'd come to london to grind and chill, but he never did. I am rescinding that.

It's cold out there, but it sure is warm in here!

Got a new computer recently and while transferring my data, I discovered like 20 posts throughout the past 3 years that I originally planned to post in this thread but never got around to editing, etc.

Here's one. I'll post more soon:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

People in general just have a really hard time understanding the perspective of other people- for example, let's say a recreational player slowrolls a veteran in poker. The veterans are usually disciplined enough to put on a smile at the table and say "nice hand", but I see it all the time where they then go and vent to their friends off the felt saying something like "ugh some moron slowrolled me in a big pot, what a ****ing *******, I have no idea wtf he was thinking", and the irony is they're right on the latter part- they *do* have no idea what it's like to be in that guy's head. From the veteran's perspective, it seems so obvious that if a player goes all in preflop and makes a Q-high straight, and his opponent has had his black aces turned hand face-up on the felt for several seconds after the river card has been dealt, that said player turn his cards over. So the veteran is pretty unforgiving and thinks this guy is just an ******* because he doesn't stop to think about how the other guy might feel.

There are a million reasons that could happen. Maybe he is new to casino poker and he was CORRECTLY informed by his friend who taught him the day before to protect himself: "if there is any doubt on what to do, don't turn your hand over unless the dealer asks you to". Maybe he's struggling with sensory overload and trying his best to not only do all the things about poker that veterans like me can naturally do in a split-second (making sure the pot is right, etc.), but also trying his best to even remember what they are. Maybe he is a bit in shock since all of a sudden for the first time in the couple hours he's been here, all 8 of the other players at the table are starting at him for the first time now that he's involved in a big pot. Maybe he's struggling to even figure out if his hand is good.

There are all kinds of things, not just related to poker. For example I used to get *extremely* frustrated if my friend said like "oh I'll call you tomorrow" and then not call tomorrow. How could they possibly betray my trust like that!? But now I can accept the fact that not everyone views upholding a statement like that to be as important as I viewed it if something else came up and they were busy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What are some things that you guys think that sometimes you are too unforgiving about?

very wide question Aesah.

my thing is lending money and it not being paid back. this isn't a poker thing, because I never lend to poker acquaintances, but my 'thing' with lending stuff is that I will never ever ask for it back. It's up to the borrower to manage that and manage me and get it back to me and I will never chase it.

but if somebody has taken a loan (and my brother in law borrowed 8k 12 months ago), if they haven't started paying back or managed me about the process about when and how they'll pay it back then I pretty much can't think about them in the same way from then on....likely even after it's paid back

like my brother in law promised to pay $50/100 a week til it was paid. the money is a decent amount but relatively inconsequential in the scheme of things to my life, but I am super bothered by the fact that he's never called me to explain why he hasn't started, or spoken about it to my wife at all. There's just a vacuum and has been for a year and I honestly don't think I'll ever be able to think as positively about him again

Yea exactly. I'm the same as you where I'm like "wtf is wrong with you", because if I told someone I would pay them $100 a week, I'm gonna pay them $100 a week unless I will literally starve/freeze to death if I do.

But for him it's probably not something that crosses his mind often, he just doesn't think it's that important, etc. Obviously not saying that's acceptable, especially if we consider some even more extreme scenarios, but yea that's a great example of something that might be very hard for most people to understand why he isn't paying you, but there could be like a million reasons that I can't even think of why that would be the case.

My personal example is not pertaining to empathy (or lack of), but cultural differences. When I first came to South-East Asia, I would be shocked and utterly insulted by the locals that would slowroll me, and it did take me a while to come to the realization that not only is it acceptable over here, but thought to be humorous

Nice to see you post you again Aesah

Good example. A lot of ignorance in this post.

A semi tangent but the old saying has literally been beat to death "don't lend money to family". I always thought it was funny because reading into that idea, lending to strangers > lending to family which seems wrong on the surface. But deeper down lending to someone close to you, who then betrays a trust, it's just so soul crushing.

Anywho, if a close family member asked me for money, and I knew they really needed it, Id tell them it was a one time gift, that Id hope they could return one day. You just gotta take those things as a loss up front man or not engage in them at all.

Friend of mine ruined the friendship over a few hundred

Lending money to anyone usually leads to nothing but headaches and stress. They better have an extremely good reason to borrow money in the first place imo

My guess is in Feelies case, the brother in law reasons "he's rich (at least compared to me) so I shouldn't really have to pay him back, and anyway there is no rush and he should not care about it". Which is a good reason not to loan to friends and family if (a) they think you are well off compared to them and (b) they are not the kind who will take it as a serious obligation. For those types either make it a gift or say "sorry can't do it".

It's possible jrr, but in my case what is annoying is that he hasn't spoken to me about it. If he was just to acknowledge the debt and tell me he is struggling to make ends meet, then it'd be all good. But I don't understand how he can act all normal and not reference it at all for more than 12 months.

Either way, end derail

Aesah, I had a personal question for you that I'm interested in the answer but you may not think is appropriate. The title of this thread is 'quit my 6 figure salary to play poker'.

How many years since have you made more than your 9-5 salary?

1/3, but i'm also working like less than half the hours too. Also keep in mind the expectation was to make much, much less money

Pretty much no question is too personal for me. I dunno back to the subject we were just talking about, from my perspective I can't see why many other people like to keep their relationships/work/hobbies secret from their friends/family/dates, barring extreme scenarios.

Here's an old post I wrote almost exactly a year ago after playing on Live at the Bike in December 2014.

~~~~~~~~~~~

fk the haters

I got berated extremely hard for folding TP2K on the river to a triple barrel where flop/turn were multiway, and both the flopped OESD/flush got there on the river against a guy who had never shown down a single bluff and had made his first raise preflop in 2 hours that hand (I almost folded my AQ preflop actually). Turns out he was randomly going HAM with his zero equity Q9. My fold was criticized by 20+ different people- that I know of!- by the live commentators, in my 2+2 thread, on CrushLivePoker forums, in text messages, private messages, and in person. Then there were some people who publicly "defended" me by saying you can't judge a player off 1 session. Except while I understand these guys had good intentions, from my perspective they weren't really defending me at all- that statement implies that I played poorly.

OK in a vacuum that's whatever- I couldn't really say anything about it. Fortunately, there was a 2nd hand. In retrospect I'm really, really glad both of these two hands happened in the same show because I might have never had this realization if only one of them happened. Anyway, in the 2nd hand, I called a river lead with middle pair against a different villain who had been playing tight after he check/called my flop cbet and check/raised my turn bet and won.

Not a single person said "wow that was a good call". But, that alone wasn't surprising to me at all- people tend to focus on mistakes over well-played hands, as they should! As a mistake is more of an outlier than a well-played hand from a pro. The surprising part is that not a single person said that it was a terrible call; no one mentioned that hand at all.

So that's when I realized. Yo fk the haters. First of all, they couldn't even know the reasoning behind why I played each of the two hands that way (and I admit that, knowing this, I shouldn't have let the criticism upset me. But I'm human, and it did.). But seriously it's almost mindblowing how results oriented people are. If for whatever reason I folded correctly in the first hand and called incorrectly in the second, I can only imagine how badly I would have been berated. Like I said, 20+ people "wtf'd" at my fold in the first hand and literally zero people commented on the second hand. If results were flipped, I imagine I would have gotten berated even harder than I actually did because when you compare the two hands side by side WITHOUT RESULTS, the 2nd hand is way more "wtf"-inducing than the first. But everyone chose to only pick on the first one because I made the wrong decision against villain's exact hand ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

TLDR: HATERS GONNA HATE.

~~~~~~~~~~~

In retrospect, I think it's pretty funny imagining how tilted I was when I was writing out this entire rant, but I think it's a good anecdote showing why we have to be careful when developing our games, and use all of our resources as stimulants to help us think rather than blindly accepting them.

The "rant", of course, is a great example of how to deal with tilt. When reading it, I kept thinking about how so many would inevitably accept the criticism and incorrectly believe they made a bad fold with TP2K on the river. Due to the emotional baggage of the hand being in the public eye, the pull of the consensus view is particularly powerful and could easily weaken many players' analytical muscle. How many have incorrectly called in such spots on the river, because they "supposedly" incorrectly folded in such a spot in the immediate past? It's a perfect case of "shame" creating an emotional charge that causes us to deviate from probabilistic thinking---all the "hate" you identified at the time was effectively a whole bunch of people saying to you: "not matter how illogical it might be to say this, all I care about is NOT being that guy who was bluffed on TV because if I'm that guy the world will never accept that I'm a genuine poker player".

OMG, you're such a fish

Also I'm curious on details here if you don't mind sharing

Ehhh I never seem to gave this unfinished post from a direction- it started out as advice I wish I'd given myself as I was starting out. I think the list at the end of "potential things you could work on" is great though.

~~~~~~~~~~~

It's important not to underestimate someone because you saw him consistently make an "obvious" error, and assume they are a bad player. The fact is there are thousands of facets of "being good at poker", and it's easier for our human brains to zero in on what we're good at. Which makes sense, because part of the reason we're good at what we are is because we placed an emphasis on it. In fact, if you witness a consistent winner exhibit a horrible leak, that could imply that other aspects of their game that you might not be aware about must be even stronger than you might expect from a "bad player" to compensate.

Therefore, without conscious effort, we natural focus on improving the depth of our skill rather than width; i.e., getting even better at the facets of poker we're already good at, rather than improving the ones we're weak at. Specifically, people typically don't study things that they aren't comfortable with, things that they don't think are important, and things they aren't even aware of. However, it's probably worthwhile to spend less time mastering our skills and instead brush up on some of the weaker aspects of our game (and life, even).

So some things (in no order) it may be worth doing a self-assessment on are:
1. Discipline: patience, work ethic, study ethic, emotional control, bankroll management
2. Math: probabilities, pot odds, percentage of hand combinations, equities against ranges, multi-street bet-sizing in consideration of stacks
3. Psychology: leveling, pattern recognition, understanding motives, identifying tilt, predicting future actions, predicting responses to your betsizings, population tendencies, fearlessness
4. Live tells: being readless, giving off reverse tells, knowledge of common tells, conscious body language, unconscious body language, betting motions, talking
5. Charisma: getting in good games, donators following you/willing to gamble with you, entertain customers to play longer, stopping fights that would break the game, profitable side bets, ability to loosen up a game
6. Awareness: identifying personal strengths and weaknesses, identifying leaks, assessing game quality, finding good games, identifying self-tilt
7. Initiative: moving up, table changes, seat changes, convincing floor/other players to start games, learning new games, seeking out new locations, seeking coaching, changing study focus, starting rounds of straddles

~~~~~~~~~~~

Many things fall under multiple categories, but yea that's a loose guide- IMO worth going through each item 1 by 1 and assessing if it's worth practicing. I never got around to actually using my own chart for a full self-assessment, sad I know, but I will very soon and post it here.

Buddy moved out to LA to work as a computer programmer and got a place on Craigslist. In the first couple weeks the guys he is living with get evicted. He is flat broke and can't get a new place until he gets paid. I ask him how much he needs to get a roof over his head and he says 400. I ship him the 400 agree he just hits me back next tax season. That rolls around and nothing. Says there's been a paper work mistake and he'll get me it later. Then he gets sick and has medical bills. Then he just stops answering my calls all together.

Then after two years he calls me up before he's going to see me at a wedding and basically apologizes and sends me 200. Never pays back the other 200, I send him a text saying of he's hard up for money then the debt is forgiven but if he has it I want my 200. He changes his phone number and de friends me on Facebook.

Aesah, that last post was excellent.

Great check list, now is the time of year everyone should be doing some selfreflection.