Hi everyone,

I’m Tony, a former poker player from Scotland who has recently become a former former poker player (still from Scotland). I am going to record my encore performance in this thread. Let’s address the basics in this post. Almost certainly tl;dr but wanted to provide some background info before I dive into the poker!

What did I play?

I played online cash games (primarily heads up with a bit of 6max bum hunting) between 2009 and 2017, going full time after I graduated in 2013. I played up to $10knl (staked) on those silly Chinese apps in my final year but I’d say my actual skill level compared to the field was more something like good $3/6 reg, decent $5/10 reg, bad $10/20 reg.

Why did I quit?

I quit at the end of 2017 after having some pretty wild swings on the apps. I started off with a pretty substantial upswing. I’m pretty sure my first two months were back to back six figures. Given that my previous biggest month had been $40k (and that was a bit of an outlier), this was a pretty big chunk of cash to me. I ended up in a situation where that balance was owed to me and there was a bit of a fallout between the agent and the club owner. I found that quite stressful but eventually it was resolved. I then proceeded to lose all of my profits and more back (it got to the point where I stopped looking at the results for a long time). I ended up in make up and spent the end of the year grinding lower to get out of that. I got to a point where my backer was even and he graciously offered to end the deal (he knew I was done with poker). The way it worked out, I ended up having not too bad a year because I’d been paid pre downswing but it was a lot of stress to make what I prob would have made if I’d just played lower stakes.

Those swings definitely factored into why I quit, but there was an underlying unhappiness with my life that certainly ran deeper than the results of a card game. I know it sounds like a cliched rationalisation to say “losing that money was the best thing that ever happened to me”, but I’m genuinely glad I went on that big downswing. I remember on the initial upswing thinking, “sweet, I’ll just grind this out until the end of the year and make a milly.” I’m certain that if that had transpired I’d just have continued playing, trying to get to a bigger number in my bank account and accumulate more stuff while deep down feeling unhappy and unfulfilled. Now don’t get me wrong - there’s no doubt that winning a bunch of money can be fun and there’s nothing bad about enjoying that. The issue is that it’s a kind of superficial fulfilment that is very short lived. If you build your identity around that you can end up neglecting other areas of your life where things aren’t going to plan. That was certainly the case for me - I had a big (and rather unjustified) ego around poker, I was extremely concerned with what other people thought about me, low on genuine confidence and my family and personal relationships left a lot to be desired. Once I wasn’t doing as well as I wanted at poker, I stopped being able to take my significance in the world from it. I was no longer able to overlook those other areas which I had covered up with the short term buzz of making a bunch of cash. I was depressed and unhappy enough that I was forced to do some introspection about what the hell I was doing with my life and I decided to quit poker to work on everything else.

What have I been doing for 1.5 years?

In the intervening 1.5 years between quitting poker and starting this thread I have worked on myself and taken the time to do a lot of things that I’d always wanted to do but hadn’t because of poker. To name some: I attended a ten day silent vipassana meditation retreat; went to culinary school; did a coding boot camp; drank ayahuasca; started a crypto business that got shut down by the banks; participated in psychedelic breathing workshops and (most importantly) did a LOT of therapy. Obviously I picked up a few practical skills that I hope to be useful in my future career and life, but I can’t overstate how important dealing with what poker players might call “mental game” issues was. I’m sure I’ll get into it a bit more throughout the blog (although will try keep it poker centric), but long story short I now feel like a much more well-rounded person. I have less insecurity and ego and am far more confident and sure of who I want to be in the world. Especially towards the end of my poker career I used to get pretty bad depression. While I undoubtedly still have really bad days, they are far less frequent and intense and I feel I have the perspective and tools to deal with them much better. My lust for life has returned.

As I write that I realise that it may come off like I’m trying to paint some sort of redemption story so let’s be clear: I continue to have many many flaws. I don’t always act in the way that I would like to and I am basically still just a work in progress trying to figure it all out (as I suspect I always will be.)

What’s the plan career wise?

Already this post feels like just I’m regurgitating self-help material but this is the last one I promise . I’ve read Tony Robbins quoted as saying something like, “people overestimate what they can do in 1 year, but underestimate what they can do in 5 or 10”. That struck a chord with me because I’ve always been a bit partial to a get-rich-quick scheme (see punting large amounts of money in mtts in Vegas multiple times for evidence). So I think it’s important to distinguish what I want to do long term and what I want to do short term.

Long term

My long term goal is to have a business (or portfolio of businesses) that generates me a solid income. Having money beyond what I need for my expenses isn’t that important to me but I do think I’m lucky enough with my circumstances in life that I should be aiming pretty high. And if this is a 5 year goal then who knows; I may have relationships or dependents to support in the future and I’d want to be able to comfortably take care of that. (Also if I build up a big wad of cash then I can keep doing my punting in Vegas MTTs thing, but for fun .).

While I'm working on that long term goal, making any significant amount of money seems quite far off, so I need to make some revenue in the short/medium term. I haven’t had any income in 1.5 years and I don’t have unlimited runway. I could get a job as a software developer which would be great in terms of learning and getting experience coding, but I’d have to go for junior developer jobs and they aren’t that well paid.

Short/medium term - POKER

Luckily, I still have a monetizable, if slightly rusty, skill set with poker. I bumhunted a bit on the side while working on business stuff (coding) and started watching a bunch of YouTube content that rekindled my desire to play. I’m not naive enough to think I can just jump back in and crush when I’ve given the field 1.5 years of pio study head start but I’m looking forward to getting back in the mix and just dedicating myself to poker for a while. I also resubscribed to RunitOnce and found that got me excited about studying strategy again.

I think heads up is pretty dead at this point so will be playing a bunch of 6max and maybe some live cash games in London. I’ll basically see what seems most +ev. I've probably played enough heads up hands for one life time so playing a format I'm not as used to should hopefully keep the freshness there to help me grind and study.

I’ve been a long time lurker in PGC and am hoping to make the transition to OP with a thread that provides half as much value and entertainment as some of my favourites on here. So vamoooo/LFG/GL us!

Gl bro. Think that's the longest post ive actually read word for word.

Gl! Poker is a lot better when you're having fun.

It was long but worthy read
good luck
will be following your journey

Haha thank you. I'll try to keep things more concise going forward.

Yup, agreed. Mental game is everything so key, from emotional control to just plain focus. Noticed some interesting changes in that regard since I've been back playing. Negative thoughts are still generated when I'm on a bad run but I'm more able to observe them and not let myself become them. I find myself laughing at the stuff my brain generates:

"Omg I must be the most unlucky player in the world". (Because I lost a few 60bb pots at $1/2)

"You ****ing lucky ****!!!!" (Because I double some fish)

etc etc.

Quite hilarious once you realise there is some random process going on in your brain producing these thoughts and that you have no real choice in the next thing you think.

Cheers. Will try keep it interesting.

I played online today and it went reasonably well. I ran quite hot and found some interesting spots I need to study in 6 max. The issue is I was playing on Party Poker and as far as I can tell there is now no way to share hand histories from there. I'm ambivalent about the banning HUDs thing but not being able to post nice hand histories would be a bummer for this thread. If it's possible let me know, otherwise I guess I'll expand to some other sites.

Put in a good grind session today. Had a couple of interesting discussions over the last few days about flow and deep work. Been trying to incorporate them into my sessions and it feels like it’s paying off. When I used to play heads up I’d be waiting for action a lot of the time and end up browsing online. So when someone sat me I’d half want to finish whatever article I was reading or video I was watching and end up auto piloting the poker. It might already be obvious to everyone who isn’t me but focus is soooooo important for maximising your edge. So I’ve been setting up my work environment to totally rid me of distractions so that I’m paying total attention to the task at hand. Not only do I definitely play better like this but it’s much more enjoyable because your mind isn’t wanting to be elsewhere. I’ve read Deep Work by Cal Newport and highly recommend it but ‘flow’ is a new concept to me. Planning to do some more research and keep incorporating these things into my grind/life.



Results have been pretty decent but lack of tracking software where I’m playing means I don’t know exact numbers. I’d guess I’m up between $1000 and $1500. If I keep playing on sites with no HUD I’ll start taking a note of balances so that I can at least keep an excel spreadsheet of this stuff and maybe make a graph that way. The no hand histories thing is a bummer because they do punctuate rambly posts like this one nicely. I can’t play on stars because I switched to .pt when I was living in Portugal last year. A surprising number of the sites I’ve looked at either aren’t open to UK customers, are rumoured to be infested with bots or don’t support HM2 or PT4. I think 888.com is the only option that fills my criteria. Hopefully there’s some action there.

Have a few 6max spots that are probably super standard to 6m regs but I’m just not as familiar with ranges and frequencies in that format as I am heads up. The nice thing is that it means that the marginal utility of study is quite high. I’m able to extrapolate a lot from every sim as I get more familiar with what ends up being a cutoff value hand or cutoff call down hand in a particular spot. In lieu of hand histories I’ll post some findings from my studies once done. Buena suerte at the tables!

Eye Candy

As a former PGC lurker myself I know that most of you are only on here to commit sordid acts of self-abuse to Pokertracker results graphs. To that end, here is all I've got on PT4 at the moment:



iPoker is the only site I'm playing on that's supported at the moment so that's some heads up I've played there. Obv caught some heat. I'm about even elsewhere so that's more or less my results thus far.

New Sites

I took a look at 888.com but the prevalence of Ukranian/Russian flags in the lobby put me off a bit. No, I'm not some Brexiteer xenophobe. I'm just a bit worried about botting. I would grind the 6max games on iPoker but this thread puts me off a bit:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...ntage-1704108/

I see that quite a few folk seem to be grinding the apps and are able to track results on there. I'll maybe get in touch with my former backer on PokerMaster about getting involved there.

But in the meantime I'm just going to grind on sites without hand histories and just keep a track of my results manually. I actually have coded a wee app for recording live poker results that I could use but it's not quite ready yet so I'll just use excel. Two benefits to this:

1. I can create a nice wee graph for the thread
2. I won't die a little inside every month when I get the email telling me my office 365 subscription has been renewed and I realise I've not used it in a year

For entertaining hand histories I'll just have to take screenshot/describe the action.

Ear Candy

I only discovered this guy last week and have been loving these live performances. Discovering new music I like always lifts my mood. He's from a quite deprived area near where I grew up and makes me pine for home a bit. Btw is it a Scottish thing to chant "here we, here we, here we ****ing go!" as a new song starts or do people do that everywhere? Reminds me of my teenage years in Glasgow anyway.

Freerolls

I mentioned in the first post that I did a meditation retreat last year, in which I spent ten days in silence with nothing but my own thoughts. Well this thread is beginning to remind me of that experience so in order to encourage a bit more engagement I'm going to offer some freerolls to people who post. I do these all the time with friends for things we want to do but don't due to laziness or bad habits. In the most recent one, I made a 'no coffee' one with a poker friend with $100 fine per transgression. Embarrassingly I caved and drank a coffee one day which cost me $100. I'm really not rich enough to be doing that. Before that I did get a very swanky meal in London paid for on account of my friend failing to show up for 6.30am yoga. So there is some value. Obviously it will be better if I make them something that can be tracked in the thread - for example I have to post x number of Pio hand breakdowns. Or I have to post with 3 hand histories and analysis every day for a week. Or maybe just x hands played since I've always struggled with volume. Anyway, open to ideas but watch this space.

Morning session

I deposited money on a site which rhymes with looneybet and I honestly think that would be a more appropriate name given some of the play I've seen there this morning. I made a royal flush AND got paid with a turn check raise and pot sized river bet (by pocket 3s with the suit no less) a couple of hours ago. Here's a receipt to prove to myself that actually happened as much as to anybody else (I can't export the HH text unfortunately):




In a less fortunate turn of events, this happened soon after:



Not often you get a whale like that heads up these days. Felt like I'd been slipped through some sort of wormhole into 2008. He left straight after binking there unfortunately. Feeling more in flow today, going to put in another session then update results.

I'm taking some time off the grind this afternoon to study. I'm getting more comfortable with the 6max grind and am slowly building intuitions about player pool tendencies but undoubtedly still a bit of a novice.


Results

Ended up having a losing day yesterday when I was up a decent bit at one point. But I played for maybe an hour this morning and booked a $385 win. It's reassuring that action has been good. I can probably hold off any Chinese site shenanigans for a while yet while I grind out these games. I've started the excel recording but I'll wait till I have a few more data points before I start posting graphs. On top of that iPoker graph we are net $179.88 in profit.

Hands

Couple of dicey hands. Think this is fine but do chime in if you think I butchered it:




This one felt really misplayed and I convinced myself it was really bad afterwards. Did not expect him to have much of a shoving range on the K high board since his top pairs need less protection vs overs. Then I just had no intuition as to whether the player pool is too value or draw heavy here. Turns out my line is actually Pio approved. He does shove KQ at equilibrium. Pio bet/calls AhQh but check/calls both AQ flush draw combos more frequently on the turn.




Let me know what you guys think about the GIF hand histories. Seem like a good solution for not being able to export the text but if they are super annoying then I'll stop.

It was at the back of my memory but we met a couple of times in Budapest years ago.

I finished my second vipassana course last week and it was a total cluster**** haha.

How did you find culinary school? Sitting on the mat for hours I was thinking that I need to follow a passion again and for me that's food currently.

Haha yes, I remember it well. We went for dinner with a group and then you and I stayed out longer. We met a couple of Canadian girls in Szimpla and then went to Insztant. I was a bit of a troll back then... I remember passing this really rubbish, run down nightclub with them called “Moulin Rouge” and telling them that was the original Moulin Rouge that the Paris one was based on it. They totally bought it and were taking photos and stuff outside. Haha good times - I was def more party than poker that summer.

On a very different note, that’s cool that you did Vipassana - whereabouts and how did you find it? I’m considering a second one at some point too. Mine was in Calabria, Italy. Everyone has their own experience but mine was basically misery days 1-6 followed by euphoria days 7-10. I can honestly say that I’ve never felt happier than during those last few days. It was a state of consciousness that is so far removed from our normal day to day experience and it kinda blew my mind. I still sometimes think “Well if everything in poker/business goes to ****, at least I’ve got Buddism as a solid plan B.” Maybe this thread will end with me moving to sit on a mountain in Tibet buzzing out my nut on meditation.

Re: culinary school, I went to this place:

https://entcs.co.uk

I was just doing it on a week to week basis. It was good but I ended up stopping quite quickly because I didn’t like that fact that almost 50% of the dishes we did were desserts or sweets. It gave me the basic skills/confidence to go out and experiment with recipes on my own. I was terrible before, basically ate out every meal. But yeah, it’s not like I did Cordon Bleu or something so can’t really give much advice other than that following your passions seems like a pretty solid plan!

Ended up +$413.96 yesterday, taking the total on top of that iPoker graph to $593.84. So a smidgeon above $2k profit for the thread.



Nice to catch a bit of heat. I've been playing a bit of 200nl 6m on top of 100nl but not rushing to go beyond that yet. Still a tonne of leaks in my 6m game and I want to study solidly and get a half decent sample before I start thinking I'm some 6m crusher. Despite playing this game for more than 10 years I still tend to underestimate variance when I'm running well. Sadly I didn't get round to making the post until now and I've not got the hand replays available anymore. I do have this old fashioned one from iPoker though:

iPoker, Hold'em No Limit - £1/£2 - 2 players
Replay this hand on Upswing Poker

SB (Hero): £243.08 (122 bb)
BB: £124.13 (62 bb)

Pre-Flop: (£3) Hero is SB with A♦ T♠
Hero raises to £4, BB calls £2

Flop: (£8) A♠ T♥ 5♠ (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets £2.40, BB raises to £120.13 (all-in), Hero calls £117.73

Turn: (£248.26) 6♦ (2 players, 1 all-in)

River: (£248.26) Q♠ (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: £248.26 (Rake: £1)

Showdown:
BB shows 9♠ 6♠ (a flush, Ace high)
(Equity - Pre-Flop: 38%, Flop: 28%, Turn: 23%, River: 100%)

SB (Hero) mucks A♦ T♠ (two pair, Aces and Tens)
(Equity - Pre-Flop: 62%, Flop: 72%, Turn: 77%, River: 0%)

BB wins £247.26

I went to see the film Diego Maradona yesterday, and I think this GIF of him sums up my thoughts on the river there rather well:



Good film btw, directed by the same guy as Senna and Amy. There are some hilarious moments but it's also pretty sad how his life has played out. I always try to take one full day off per week and that's today so I'm off to meet my pals and will be back on the grind tomorrow.

Had a bit of swinging the last couple of days but the end result was an unremarkable +$46.41. Been running better in 6max than heads up. Also feel like I'm getting more comfortable there so hopefully my expected winrate is increasing too. So we are $640.25 + the ipoker results from before (from next time I'm just going to add them to the excel to make things easier).



Found this spot interesting vs another reg interesting. I could be wrong about this but I imagine that regs at this stake level are likely to under bluff in these spots. So while I need to call down a lot of the time here with my hand in theory, I think in reality it’s either a shove or a fold vs the actual strategy of villain. Which one obviously depends on how often he bet folds and that in turn depends on how thin he’s going here and whether he is finding appropriate bluffs with his line (which I kinda doubt). So ended up just folding river.

GIF HHs are cool , nice change of pace, last hand his bet pattern is super unusual, think line is good

Thanks for the feedback. I'll keep the gifs going then. I've actually just seen that Gyazo pro would allow me to record longer gifs for $5 a month so they won't be truncated. Will consider getting that. And yeah I think at these stakes less commonly seen lines by regs tend to be overweighted towards the hands that make sense for those sizes for value.

Results

Not the best session today. Some runbad (lost preflop all ins w QQ vs AA blind vs blind and AK vs JJ co vs sb), and some playbad (see below). But I think more than half of the losses are actually vs fish heads up. So not too worried about that. I'll spare you the GIF bad beat stories. Games have been pretty good in general, just need to make sure I keep up my volume (that was always a leak of mine) and try to spend as much time as possible in that flow state. The flow state is the goal and the $ will follow.



Battling the regs?

I'm being pretty nitty with 6max game selection at 100nl. Rake is high and I don't really think in my situation the 'playing against better players will improve your game' argument applies. That certainly was the case in the pre-pio days when I was moving up at HUNL though. I remember playing against a certain WCGrider back in 2010 at midstakes and receiving a bit of a beatdown. Fast forward a few years and it was his minions who were kicking my arse on his behalf - Donger Kim, Kaarem, Dougiedan etc all took small chunks of my future children's inheritance on the rare occasions when I would jump into the games on Stars. They were a good bit ahead of me and I remember it feeling like I was playing some sort of bot. Not an accusation obviously, they just played really solid and weren't prone to the obvious spews most regs (myself included) were making. The good thing was that I would play them lower at $2/4 or whatever to limit how much I lost and try to learn from them as much as possible. Then when I would jump into $5/10 or higher games on random euro sites it would be like playing the game on easy. I remember PKR being an absolute goldmine for me for a while. Thankfully none of the WCG stakees were on there and there were two regs in particular who were the $5/10 6 max table starters. Heads up they were about 5 years behind the curve and they had deep pockets so I was able to take them for quite a bit each. Also managed to get all my money off that site before it went busto. Ran super well with that.

Anyway I don't really think the value of battling in that sense is really there for me at the moment so I'll only be playing 6max games that have at least one purely recreational player.

A misplayed hand?

Levelled myself in this hand because I've seen villain make pretty spewy calldowns. Think I need to bet turn and/or river but very unsure of frequencies. Overall, feel a bit lost in this spot. I think villain has a lot of hands that c/c turn which put me off betting and on river he can put me on counterfeited pocket pairs so I ended up not pulling the trigger. Going to look at this one in pio.

Strategy Advice

For any misguided souls who come to PGC for poker strat, here is a pro tip:

Beg, borrow or steal a RunItOnce membership to watch Uri Peleg's two videos.

Best videos I've seen in soooo long. He doesn't use a random number generator and instead is totally focused on how to deviate from equilibrium in game.

This is particularly useful for me. I was a bit of an RNG hipster way back when (I used random.org before it was cool). But the truth is I often used it like a moron. I was basically just copying a $5knl reg I lived with. The thing is he actually knew what his frequencies were whereas I would just randomize based on my whims. I remember one particularly traumatic shove vs Kaarem where it went something like cr/3bet on the river deep and I was like "hmmmm, guess I'll bluff here 10% of the time", binked it on random.org and proceeded to set the $ left in my stack on fire. Obviously this is an extreme example and I did learn how to use it smarter but I think I often used it as a crutch instead of thinking hard about making the most +EV play. Since I got back to playing I've not used an RNG once because it's almost always correct to deviate from equilibrium in the games I'm playing. People are telegraphing their hand strengths with betsizings and their frequencies are really far from GTO so you can just play pure strategies most of the time. I feel as if I'm more tuned into doing that sans RNG.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to running the KQ hand on Pio then start my session. Watch those videos. Tell 'em OMGgarycaldwell sent you

Great story man, good luck !

Cheers mate!

The Moral Highground

I'm running 'ikke det beste' at the moment. That's perhaps the only Norwegian phrase I have in my arsenal (it means 'not the best'). I lost with AA all in pre twice and QQ vs JJ. Also this kinda thing has been happening:



The worst part is that without tracking software I can't justify my existence by looking at my all-in EV. It reminded me of why my location on 2+2 is set as "The Moral Highground". I basically haven't used this 2+2 account almost 10 years so it's a joke from back then. I was showing a non-poker friend a graph where my all-in EV was way higher than actual winnings and he commented seriously, "Well, at least you have the moral high ground." I found that quite funny and I guess it was in my head when I made the account. So yeah, I'm enjoying the view from the moral high ground this weekend, even if I don't have a receipt to prove it.

Here's the graph, swinging into the negative. We still have that ipoker graph propping us up, I've just been too lazy to add it to the excel:



Pro Tip Part Deux: ALWAYS rent a car in Vegas

I’m conscious that I've just broken that great unwritten rule about not telling bad beat stories, but while I'm at it I'm going to go meta here and tell a bad beat story about a bad beat story. Just a bit of fun to reminisce about stuff that happened during my poker career and record some of the stories for posterity. Let me know if you enjoy – I have many more!

So, it’s June 2016 and I’ve decided to take a swing in Vegas. I buy into the $10k heads up event with +95% of myself because I am of course convinced I’m going to win it and have no intention of sharing the profits. I’d always wanted to play that event. It was kinda a bucket list thing for me. I also do think I had one of the higher ROI’s in the tournament – I’d had really good results at high stakes HUSNGs online and HU cash was my bread and butter. In spite of that, I think the nature of that tournament means there is a pretty low cap on ROI’s. A good player beats a bad one in a HUSNG maybe 60% of the time so it’s pretty hard to have a really high ROI. Plus in relative WSOP terms, it's a tough field. In fact, despite being a full ring MTT fish, I reckon my ROI might be higher in them at WSOP.

In case all of that wasn’t reason enough not to play this, I should make clear that I’m very much not rolled for it. I suppose that buying into $10k’s without selling action was my way of giving a two finger salute to Kelly and his buzz-kill of a criterion. I bet you he is really, really rubbish on a night out. Anyway I didn’t care about any of that bankroll management stuff because, like I said, I was convinced I was going to win this event and ride off into the sunset. In fact, I’d already spent 1st place money in my head. First round I get drawn against some Russian guy who unfortunately seems to be a HU reg who knows what he’s doing. We are one of the longer running match ups but eventually I get dealt a straight vs a flush quite shallow and it’s gg.

I was staying with Pads1161, Apotheosis and Jakdaripaa (name dropping ftw) quite far off-strip but for whatever reason we’d decided not to rent a car and just use Uber instead. So with a new found understanding of why so many people in the West really hate Russia, I gingerly leave the Rio and head to my Uber pick up point. Now anyone who isn’t familiar with Vegas should understand that 95% of Vegas Uber drivers are also somehow professional poker players. (The other 5% are serial philanderers who waste no time in telling you about their latest exploits.) Unfortunately, given that I was leaving the Rio via the WSOP exit, there was limited scope to lie to this particular driver about what I’d been up to.

“So what were you playing?” he asks when I get in.

“The $10k heads up” I reply.

“Did you win?”

“Nope.” I say curtly, hoping that brings an end to the conversation.

“Well... Wait ‘til you hear this one!” He says, and without flinching launches into a bad beat story that is seriously from the 2015 Colossus. So he’s recounting the action in this hand in an indignant tone while I’m sat in silence in the back thinking, “Yeah, I’ve just lost $10k, but please tell me about the $500 you lost over a year ago”. I tune back in to catch his bad beat story culminating with someone cracking his aces with 43s in a 4bet pot and him concluding, “I mean, THAT GUY SHOULDN’T HAVE EVEN BEEN IN THE HAND!”

The very next day I went to a car rental place and I’ve never set foot in an Uber in Vegas since.

lmfao, great story.

I'm personally of the opinion that Kelly is too aggro, so he's obviously an extreme degen popping off on nights out

Ahah I just googled him and it turns out he died aged 42, so maybe you're right and it was live fast, die young.

Being put through the Grindr

I keep getting sucked out on by the chaps on Unibet. Now to someone who isn't familiar with poker jargon that may sound like something quite exciting - my way of celebrating Pride 2019, perhaps. Unfortunately, it actually means that the downward trajectory continues and we are -$348.56 for the day. Not too worried though, I put in a solid shift today and think I'm def winning in these games. Just need to keep Grindring and reach the long run.

Here's the latest graph:



Just have “one beer”

On Friday there was a kind of an office party going on in the space in London where I’m renting a desk. Action tends to be good on Fridays though so I declined to partake in the festivities. One guy asked me to come for ‘one beer’, as if I would do that then get back to work. I’ve never really understood people who can drink ‘one beer’ to be honest. Drinking one beer then getting back to work or going home sounds like a terrible idea to me. If I drink one beer I just end up feeling a bit stupid and getting a mild headache. I was discussing this with some friends and they had the same feelings. As one of them put it, “The whole fun of beer number 1 is looking forward to beers 2 and 3.” I think there’s a tacit understanding amongst my Glasgow pals that when we arrange to “grab a beer” it actually means sinking 8+ pints and ending up in a kebab shop. I only really have 2 gears – being teetotal or getting ****faced.

That being the case, I try to drink very infrequently – maybe once every 2 or 3 months. I've gone much longer at various points. In 2018 I barely drank at all, but I started to drink semi-frequently for the first half of this year before deciding to take a long break again. It just has too many negative side effects and the last 1.5 years opened my eyes to the fact that there are sober states of consciousness which are far more enjoyable than being drunk anyways. I'm sure my 18 year old self who made this 2+2 account would be shocked and disgusted at reading all of this. But yeah, I'm a boring old man who drinks kombucha now.

Results

Small uptick of +$183.11. *I put in pretty epic shifts of +13 hours per day over the weekend. Obviously not playing non-stop - I was taking breaks every couple of hours unless there is an unleavable game. My brain felt pretty fried afterwards though and I was meeting my business mentor during the middle of the day so I took all of yesterday off.



Fighting off The Black Dog

Despite yesterday being my day off but I didn’t really make the most of it. I felt pretty lethargic and depressed for the entire day. This is a poker thread, so let’s draw a poker analogy while analysing the causes of this. Much like in the equation which determines our poker results, there is a substantial stochastic element in the equation which determines the moods which we experience from day to day. But in both cases there are also a bunch of variables which we are able to tinker with in order to make certain outcomes more likely than others. For me, there are a few habits which have a huge impact on the likelihood of my day being either a BELTER or a STINKER. In spite of having this knowledge, I often wake up in the morning and have some sort of FOMO to just get on the grind as soon as possible. So I end up foregoing my routine in order to ‘be more productive’. Ironically, the things I decide to skip not only increase the chances that I’ll feel happier, but also increase my overall productivity throughout my working day.

My things to do when I wake up are:

1. Exercise. Going to the gym or going on a run is always a good start to my day but if I don’t feel like I have time then 12 minutes of sun salutations while focusing on my breath is also great. I have an amazing outdoor deck for this during the summer.

2. Meditation. I now feel as if I've got a pretty big sample on how much better my days tend to be when I've meditated in the morning and yet sometimes I still find myself skipping it. I'm using the Waking Up app by Sam Harris which I highly recommend.

3. NOT drinking coffee. I drank coffee every day from age 16 for more than 10 years until a couple of years ago when I quit on the advice of another high stakes reg who had noticed a benefit from doing so. It’s pretty insane how quickly after starting to drink coffee we feel that we need to be caffeinated just in order to feel normal. Upon giving it up I noticed more stable energy levels, less anxiety and just generally felt more present and focused. In spite of this, I still sometimes drink it for a short term energy boost. Recently, I’ve been drinking it every morning though and I’ve noticed the negative side effects kicking in.

There are a few others like not checking WhatsApp/browsing online but those are the main 3 which I’ve messed up in the last week and want to make sure I’m nailing going forward. I’ve made a calendar with a rough schedule for the month ahead. In reality I'll be pretty flexible with poker/free time depending on games and social events. But the exercise/meditation morning routine parts are non-negotiable. A wee sample from my schedule:

Results

Booked another win to do an Amy Winehouse and get back to black. Never did understand what that meant in the context of that song.



Hands

Been thinking about this one a lot. I'm pretty unsure if it's good/bad/terrible. Btn raises, weak player calls sb, and I call 75hh. Ad8d5c checks through flop. I call sb 75% pot lead on 4s turn, so does button. Then when checked to I 2x pot on Js river. Think 46s would be a better hand to do this with because it blocks more turned 2 pairs (which are more frequent than flopped 2 pairs from BTN anyways). Also think both players are quite capped with this action but then they may expect me to raise turn with a set or better too. Overbets seem to get too much respect at this limit though so decided to go for it. Got snapped by button w J8. Would need to do some old fashioned combo counting to do a more rigorous analysis since Pio doesn't work multiway and I don't have monker.



All that solver work paying off here. #owned:



Business update

As I mentioned in the last post, I met my business mentor the other day. It’s so useful to have someone who has been there and done that to talk to in whatever you are doing. The way I got him is actually quite similar to something that happened early in my poker career.

When I was a pretty clueless 100nl bumhunter I got +8 hours free coaching for a Deuces Cracked series by Gman06, who was charging $400/hour at the time. I was really lucky in that I happened to refresh the forum at the right time and see the post he made advertising the opportunity very quickly. But I also found his handle on various different sites and messaged him in every way I could with reasons why I would be a good candidate. In the end he picked me and I remember him saying the reason was because I clearly wanted it so much.

I did something similar to get my business mentor. It was mentioned as a bit of throwaway comment at an event I was at and I followed up several times until eventually it happened. He’s really great and we talk a lot about strategy to keep myself focused on the right stuff. Yesterday we had a chat about a crypto brokerage business I had running briefly last year. I was instantly profitable with a pretty big margin but getting banked for it proved to be very difficult. At one point the bank I was using locked my account for several months with a bunch of my money in it and I had basically no recourse. That was pretty stressful and I didn’t want to do the shady stuff that competitors were doing in order to get banked so I shelved the whole thing.

I realised I have a kind of unused asset though in the web app I coded for it so I talked to my mentor about that and he has put me in touch with a few contacts in the industry. So perhaps that business will rise like a phoenix from the ashes. If not, I may just hit up the competition and ask if they want to buy the site from me.

Laughs

Went to a comedy show just off Leicester Square last night. 3 different acts. This guy was my fave:

Results

Continued winning the last couple of days despite not playing my A game. I’ve continued to have a bit of brain fog and not feel that focused. But that is of course of secondary importance to whether your flushes are hitting on the river and you are winning your flips. This game's a lot easier when that is happening.



North of the Wall

Made a last minute decision to head up to Scotland to see my family this weekend. There won’t be a lot of pokering going on. I’ll mostly be familying. But if I get some down time I may dip my toes into the coding waters for the first time in a month.

Glasgow (where I grew up) is often looked down upon by people in London and even the rest of Scotland. It's their loss as far as I'm concerned. The city and the people here have a certain character and sense of humour that I really miss by not living here. I don't imagine children growing up in London or Edinburgh have as much fun as I had growing up here. But then again I'm obviously biased. Maybe there's just no place like home, no matter where it is.

Hope everyone's having a nice weekend

Your right mate, Glasgow is one of my favourite cities the people are friendly and you can have a great night out. Paisley on the other hand, well that's another story.

Haha after I wrote that I came back to delete it because I thought it sounded like I had a chip on my shoulder. Which I guess I do a bit. Last week my flatmate's boyfriend made a joke invoking a stereotype about Glaswegians in London being homeless. I usually just play along but I hear that patter all the time in London and it does come across as quite ignorant. Just thought I'd throw a bit of shade back in their direction I guess.