‘The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one’

sick quote.

good to see ya crushing. gl this summer, maybe cya around

May Recap + Goals Going Forward



Online looks decent but between bricking everything under the sun SCOOP wise and getting my ass handed to me in 5card games I probably ended up down $40-45k or so. Pretty savage month, didn’t play well for a ton of it and it shows in the back end of the graph. I think my A game absolutely destroys zoom but I barely use it and I think zoom is a waste of time for me. My plan going forward will be to try and play less of it. I won’t be continuing in the big 5card games because my confidence is too low, my heart is too weak, my money is too dwindling and my backing is too buried.



Live went fine on the the occasions I played. I’ve played really awfully the past few sessions and that’s been a drop back from having such an awful SCOOP and not really caring. That mixed with the fact that I really hate live poker, I hate the Vic and London even more and everyone is so mind numbingly terrible that I can barely adjust myself to sitting in the seat for all those hours without thinking ‘where the living f*** did I go so amazingly wrong in life?’. I mean beating live poker except for the highest of stakes (aka the SHRB or the big games in Macau) is just not an achievement. If we are to take it as one then it is merely an achievement of mediocrity, alas we weren’t able to do anything else in our lives so we’ve mastered being able to sit in chair for 6-8 hours a session and not doing anything entirely ******ed (for the most part).

So what now? Vegas right?

I’m booked to fly to Vegas on the 7th June. My schedule is basically every PLO event with the exception of the $25k, ironically the $25k will likely be softer than the $10k, but I’m too bowl and too busto to contemplate firing it and my confidence lies at a level that’d have be doubting my ability to beat a live 1/2 cash game never mind a high stakes tournament filled with the world’s best (and worst). I will be playing all the small ones though and the $10k, the $10k I’ll likely be neutral to slightly small loser depending on the pre tournament work I do. In the smaller ones I should have a significant edge and will enjoy the fact that they should be stress free and probably full of some interesting characters.

I guess in between tournaments the idea will be to play cash but I’m so buried in make up that the idea of playing $10/25 on my days off in between tournament Omaha makes me as exciting as going to the doctors and being told I’ve got herpes. Given I never hook up with any women I would have to guess I contracted the herpes licking a toilet seat whilst overdosing on my daily medication. If I bink a tournament or if I regain my composure (‘we’ve got to keep our composure!’ Will Ferrell, Old School) then I’ll be in the Bellagio trying to beat a $25/50+ selection of games that I’ll convince myself and my backer that I have an edge in whilst probably losing at about 2bb per hour.

Outside of Poker life is good, I live at home on my own and barely ever go out (in London). I contemplate doing exercise daily before usually giving up the idea in order to eat takeaway food instead. Logic is warped and I believe doing the exercise carries an inherently larger possibility of either death or injury when it reality eating the junk food every meal is probably slowly edging me towards poor health and an early and painful death. I did go to Holland on the weekend and had a great time, was good to get out of London and just be in a more slow paced, chilled environment. Was even better to hang out with my lifelong friends from Manchester and feel a vague sense of happiness that is all to often not present.

Leading up the Vegas I’ll be trying to work on my game so that perhaps some confidence returns. I’ll be trying to upset and piss off my backer a hell of a lot less than I have been doing in order to retain my ‘job’. In reality I’m sure I would have been dropped but a concoction of him being a really good guy/me being buried in some amount of make up that he’d rather me clear than just to write off has kept me on the roster.

I need to work on my physical health for sure in order to be prepared for the long days and gruelling grind on the RIO tournament grind. That said after reading this back it’s probably just as important that I continue to work on improving my mental health which appears to be slipping towards an all time low. Meditation will be paramount as will be improving my current sleeping pattern and schedule that has been going to bed as the sun comes up and then wake shortly after, not optimal.

I haven’t decided whether I’ll be updating this during the series or not, truthfully right now I don’t really want to go to the series but know what I should given everything is booked and paid for. If updating this helps with my motivation then I’ll do so. Watch this space, I have a good feeling I’ll be bringing back a bracelet….

…it’s just that it’ll be from Tiffany’s and it’ll be a present for my mum.

Well that was a read and a half

I feel good, I feel fine, I feel fantastic.


Goodluck in Vegas

Big fan of your PGC but that was a pretty bleak read. Hopefully it’s pretty exaggerated, it sounds like you could definitely do with some time away from the game and back home. Gl BigA

gl man I know what it's like to grind thru 70k of makeup in "small" games. Dunno what you are at with your backer but it's completely doable especially at the series to have a huge summer. Try to stay positive.. how we think causes how we feel. If you tell yourself life is great 15x/day for a year you'll end up feeling that way it's just how we are wired. Likewise for the opposite, this negative reinforcement is actually manifesting your worries into reality. My $0.02

I think you need to de-tilt a little.

I know advice comes from all angles on the internet but it sounds like you should just take a break for a (couple?) days. When we get caught up in it we forget how taxing poker can be mentally, and when we swing too much in direction it’s important to recalibrate back to a normal frequency. I’m a huge fan of your blog and have read every word, and this is obv just a stranger’s 2c but I think going to LV fresh would be worth way more than any amount of money you’d win between now and then.

Anyways GL

Sorry to hear about this Big A.

You’ll pick yourself up.

I think; you need to re-read what you had previously written.

You’re a professional and whilst times get fkn tough, you’re tough and will endure.

It's kind of painful to watch. OP can be such a chill down to earth guy, but I swear just randomly flips on the switch and legit I'd consider it maybe delusions of gradeur. Like Phil, you KNOW you'd be happy to make whatever you're making at 10/25, just a few weeks back you said you're ready for 2/5, but because you got a small taste of success, you lose it and now think you're too good for 10/25? I'm serious Phil, you're really letting the taste of success hurt you. Maybe you should intentionally avoid that type of success if that's what it takes. Otherwise this will just keep repeating itself.

If you literally just stuck to a BRM and stop shotting, you'd be a lot happier. Do you really think it's sustainable (or that you even want) to be the kind of person who thinks they're too good for a 300/hourly job?

I don't know if your personality suppresses some of that bitterness and that's why it explodes like this, but you're generally super nice, but then have these "I'm too good for this" streaks, when "this" is better than 99% of people, that, honestly, is pretty douchey.

All this talk about what achievements are and are not mediocre completely inaccurate, but I won't even get into that because it shouldn't even matter. Like, why does it matter if an achievement is hero-worthy. Why does a person need to be a hero? Who really cares about "achievements". Just be happy goddammit.

Phil, I am frequent lurker on the PGC forum. I have to give it to you... your posts are some of the best material out here. I love the brutal honesty in the high and lows and go through very similar feelings myself.

Keep your chin up - you are an incredibly skilled player and I'm sure you'll ship a bracelet in vegas.

BoL

Rob

Amen to robs post. Love your writing style and look forward to every update. Keep ur head up bud and glgl

Infestus - The Gambler: Diary Of a Man Trapped With His Own Degenerate Mind

I can’t really remember the first hand of poker I ever played. I remember like most, I found myself idly making my way through the most obscure cable channels and stumbled across some WPT footage or something, it was likely 2005. I had gambled prior to this, in small amounts, on things like accumulators on English football. I remember I started playing tournaments on Party Poker and would grind out these $2 MTTs until the early hours of the morning. I’d then go to my summer job, working in a supermarket at the time. I wasn’t any good really, I was just able to realise what was truly awful and what wasn’t.

I moved onto university, this is where I first started to go broke. I remember playing 5/10 or something ridiculous at the time when my first student loan payment came in. I won a few thousand pounds at the time. I remember I’d never seen anywhere close to this sort of money, I went out and bought some Diesel jeans for like £250. I remember I had no attachment to the money. This was probably the first excessive warning sign. I lost all that money and lost what was in my overdraft. My dad, not wanting me to miss out on any experiences, reloaded me up with some money and told me not to gamble. I was so upset, ‘I’ll never play again’…the next year in university I was winning a tournament on Mansion for $24k. I thought I was a really big deal. Again I lost all of this money within a few months, again, my poor dad bailed me out again and reloaded me up so I wouldn’t miss out on any experiences.

I exited university penniless and with a fairly worthless degree. I had a ton of great ‘experiences’ but alas I’d achieved very little. I was a bright student, it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch for me to get good grades but I was lost in squandering money playing poker. I had gained some friends in poker by the time I’d left, some of them have gone on to be the greatest poker exports this country has ever produced.

2009 I met the love of my life, poker took a back seat, I’d found the one thing in life that was more important than battling out under my Infestus moniker. Eventually though, as the girl was American, she had to move back to Florida and asked if there was anything that could be done. I’d saved up some money and I told her that I could play some online poker out there in order for us to get by. I did this for a while and started to profit pretty well in early 2011, we moved into a shared house in Orlando. I squandered all that money, had to return to the UK, it was ok, we were going to make it work. I remember asking to borrow from her student loan, I had a system, a bankroll plan, we couldn’t lose. The start of 2012 rolled around and I’d squandered the money she had loaned me. I was sat in bed, probably idly being a total waster around 11am or something. She’d started asking me about paying back this loan, I called her a loan shark, we’d been dating 2 years at this point. I woke up the next day to an email, she said I was now a pathological gambler in her eyes, that she didn’t want that as a future. The love of my life had moved on and I was left with just poker, in the same month my dog died and my dad got cancer, depressingly the combination of these series of events kept me in the game with my greatest chance yet.

My friends, Andy and Jon (to this day two of the most winningest players in the history of the game) had been making huge money out in Macau. They were all live holdem players, incredible ones but none of them played Omaha, I did exclusively, and Omaha games were starting to run in Macau. I remember sitting with Andy and he knew I’d been through a lot of **** that year and he wanted to offer me an opportunity to back me in big PLO games out East. Suffice to say it was basically the deal of a lifetime. I moved to Macau for a few years, played some enormous games, really became a ‘poker player’, it was now my job, my profession, something to be proud of, my friends were poker players, my family were happy I was a poker player. Within the 2 years I squandered it. I remember I’d be playing £25/50+ games on the stake in the most obscene line ups but after grinding 14 hour sessions I’d come home and battle 6 tables of $10/20+ on my own short roll, everything I won in the live games I just did in, playing the online games.

That took me briefly to Australia where I won a lot in sick live games, I got scammed for 6 figures but I returned to London after 5 years out of the UK with a roll and a renewed sense of hope. It was 2015, PLO games were great and I was loving it. By the start of 2016 I was completely broke again, I had degened it all away. I hadn’t just lost my money but I’d lost my mind. My body and mind were riddled with anxiety, I couldn’t leave the house some days, the most basic of human tasks has me wondering how I could possibly die whilst doing them. I knew I’d never be the same again. I had a gf at the time and she was so supportive and said she believed in me as a person, believed that it’d all be ok. 2016 was the worse year of my life, hands down and I should probably have ended my life that year.

2017 I got on medication and decided I no longer wanted to just feel like a loser. I got a deal with my current backer (ironically my 2nd deal with him, the first deal was at the start of 2016 when I’d lost my marbles, he gave me £4000 to play £1/2 on a stake, and I ran it up to £90,000, a few weeks later I’d ran it down to £0 again and we had parted ways). I studied hard, I wanted to have earned my second chance. I went into the lab and really tried to understand the game, I wanted to actually be a shark and not just be seen as one because of the ridiculous image and luck I’d had to have somehow grinded In some of the world’s largest games. I started to absolutely crush the live games, my hard work was paying off and my backer basically would let me play whatever I wanted. I was degening less but definitely still degening. By 2018 I was kinda broke again somehow, I had just been degening it all away hard. I went in on the 6th Jan, there was a £50/100+ 5/6card game running. I got it all in flipping for a £80k pot where the fish onced me, he turned me to 3 outs on the turn and I hit the river. I won £50k that session and I remember we basically chopped it to give me some breathing room. I carried on crushing the live games but we started to fire big online stuff, loads of $25/50+ 5card stuff and beyond. The wheels started to come off again. I 6 tabled $25/50 on Party one night and won close to $75k on the night, nearly $100k on the week. I degened it all back pretty quick.

With all the degening my backer’s patience ran thin, we started to argue a lot. We had become good friends but now he was having to get angry and to try and keep me in line. Back when I hadn’t lost my mind I would have seen that as a sign to sort myself out and appreciate the spot. Nowadays I have no idea where the line is between good/bad, right or wrong. That brings us to today..

I fly to Vegas on Thursday but today my backer decided, after he’d caught me degening on Stars for the millionth time tonight, that after Vegas we’d be concluding our backing deal. It was disheartening and sad. I didn’t have any fight left though, he knew it, I knew it. All the spark behind my eyes has gone, I lay listless, drowning in a sea of bad decisions and rampant degeneracy. It’ll be weird to head out to Vegas on the equivalent of a poker death sentence. I’m steeped in a fair amount of make up, so it’ll be a test of character to see if I can go out there and try and play A game everyday or whether I’ll just punt it all off in one last hurrah.

There’s many people who would say everything is ok, that I’m a good guy. I want these people to know that I’m not a good guy. I’m an ill guy and I’m a guy who’s lost it completely. I don’t deserve any sympathy. I think that it’s prudent that I now stop a poker blog, mainly as this isn’t a poker blog, it’s the twisted diary of a mad man. PGC is for those with goals, aspirations and those who are willing to battle the challenge. My challenge going forward isn’t going to be to do with poker, it’ll be with existence.

Tl;dr

Cliffs: End of blog, thanks for reading.

Sorry to read all of that - I hope you have a change of heart and keep up the blog.

I arrived here in Vegas 2 days ago to grind NL MTTs with renewed discipline / mental focus / lab work and feel ready to crush (min-cashed my first event yesterday). Hopefully you can do the same, get some good PLO results in, and we can make a rendezvous to watch England's World Cup efforts in a couple of weeks.

Keep the dream alive!

Stu.

PS: We probably played together back in the day on Mansion when they were running their $100k GTDs with ridic overlays. I won one too, with a few other good scores!

****. What a read. I hope it works out for you somehow, I have a feeling this is going to end badly though. GL

If you want to live a "normal" and somewhat happy life, you probably need to get out of poker/gambling, possibly for good. If the live results screenshots from your poker app weren´t tampered with in some way (which I personally do not think they are FWIW), that really sucks, since you are forced to give up a very lucrative source of income, but on the other hand there are plenty of other opportunities in life.

The problem is that your brain is wired in a way that makes long-term success very improbable. No matter how good you play and run, there will always be a bigger game to take a shot at. There will always be a seat open at a 100/200 table on Party or Stars. There will always be this private 100/200/400 game that you just might get an invite to. Oh, and there will always be the generous and warming embrace of the pits just waiting to turn your micro-tilt into a huge bankroll-busting losing session.

And in the end, what good is it to make XXX/hr playing poker if this amount sooner or later gets lost due to variance/tilt/pits etc?

I mean, even if you run great in Vegas and bink some tournament(s) to get out of makeup and turn a profit and start over with a bankroll, how long is it going to last? Even you make 10k/month live, that is "only" two buy-ins online. It´s only a few bad drunken decisions at the roulette table. Etc.

The only other option I see is to self-exclude for life (or at least a few years) on all major poker/gambling sites and keep grinding live (since you obviously seem to make a very nice profit in these games), however in the long run that is probably just pushing the inevitable forward by a year or three.

Whatever you choose to do, I wish you the best of luck - I have really enjoyed reading this thread.

I can't reply in full now, so this is a placeholder, but I have to make a post soon in defense of Phil against Phil. We all have our flaws, but you're not giving yourself credit for all the ways you are a good guy.

In the meantime, hope you stay okay.

there's always a "bubble" boy in every profession- they have almost the right pieces except an extreme flaw that ****s them up. Personally, I think your situation is much more common the in the poker world than people would like to imagine.

Forget about poker. Forget about the life you *could* have had if you straightened things out. It will only cause more pain. That might even mean cutting off all ties/ friendships with fellow poker players which might be the hardest of all. Find a way to BE HAPPY. When you're old and look back at this you will be able to laugh and be thankful you got off the ride before anything truly bad happened.

I just wanted to write something sort on the positive nature of this poker community the majority of us exist in.

I read a bunch of the PG&C’s in here and sometimes, I guess due to the competitive nature of the game, that a lot of them can sometimes get a little toxic. Some of the NL threads have a lot of childish **** flinging and calling one and other out and stuff. Things that I would say on the whole should and would be reflected on badly.

Over the course of the threads that I’ve ran on 2p2 in PGC the majority of them have had a tendency to perhaps be a little too honest and open, perhaps to my detriment on occasions, or the topics or prose has got a little too dark and twisted.

One of things I’ve always been incredible humbled by is the way that when I’ve written something a little out there, or raw, I’ll wake up the next day and my PM box will have a ton of messages either from people who can relate to the struggles, or to people who have suffered similar health and gambling issues or just to people saying that the empathise with the stories and that they’d be happy to have a beer whenever etc. I think when times are going tough it feels pretty good, in my option anyway, that this is how I view the poker community, amongst all the bad stories and the scams and the spats and so on.

So I guess as I sign this blog off I’d just like to say thanks to all those who have read my posts and have in turn offered advice, or compliments or strategies for moving forward. It really is appreciated and if I’d be happy to return the favour and help out anyone who’s struggling and wants to reach out to me on here whenever they’re going through a rough stretch.

Finally, a special shout out to Marginal, Sol_Reader and Gazzy who are 3 guys I’ve become close with in real life and 3 just really warm hearted and good people who seem to have my back a lot of the time.

Cheers & Adios; I fly to Vegas tomorrow morning and will be a blast to see a bunch of y’all out there.

Best of luck going forward man

what he said, glgl

I know IT, you know IT. Today is just one of the im such a looser days every gambler feels. You been down this road before...so no reason being so dramatic! Stop gambling and get help ,or quit being so depressed when the gambling gets the best of you. Cant win before you get your head straight! You been around for many years and should know how you react after all this time, and learned your lesson by now.

So I basically said a bunch of stuff IRL already and feel like it's better to keep it off the thread, but I want to talk here about OP being a good person or not a good person.

So idk the details about the degenning, and if he broke like explicit game selection rules, though I imagine it's more like soft agreements where it's like gray area. Even then, these things happen, you know, I am sure OP justified it somehow to himself that it was a good decision at the time when degenning and playing big/tough games. But idk the details so I won't say much about that.

What I do know is that OP's been put in spots in the past where he had to pick up other people's mess even when doing so would hurt him very significantly financially, and, though I agree it'd be wrong not to do it and that he "had" to do it, and there was no real choice, he could have justifiably made excuses and not made people whole and just said it's the other guy's fault (which it was), but he didn't.

Of course Phil got into that spot to begin with because he made some silly decisions, but like, we all make bad decisions, but it's taking responsibility of those bad decisions that makes character, and while character is really not black and white, OP is clearly on the upstanding side of things and it's not even close.

Sometimes by succumbing to demons, we end up hurting people around us and putting other people at risk without intending to, so I won't say Phil is 100% never in the wrong in any way. For instance what if he didn't have the money to take on the debt in the example I gave? Then even though he fully has the intention to do so he could've have, and he still put other people at risk.

But fact is: The poker world and world in general is tough and difficult, and OP tries his darndest given the situation he's in and the clear mental blocks he has, so I don't want him to be selling himself short on that. It's hard.

^tl;dr OP is the scoundrel with the heart of gold Disney-type-cast?

Best of luck Phil, hope you bink something huge in Vegas and can live out your retirement on a pile of money