I also do realize that there's a very realistic chance that this writer career path will fail and I'm 99% sure I'd make significantly more money focusing on poker. You don't have to tell me that. But life is short, gotta do what you love, and I'm imo being pretty damn smart and rational doing it 50/50 with poker at the moment even that all I want to do is to jump head first into writing and never play a hand of poker again.

I'm pretty certain I've reached my ceiling in poker. I couldn't realistically become much better vs the competition, my results in it rely almost entirely on volume. It's just not motivating for me anymore and I don't care for printing money robotically when I could be pursuing what I really love. On the flipside it's pretty inavoidable that I'm far from having reached my peak as a writer given I've only been a published author for a whopping two months. I need to be able to evolve to stay motivated, money alone isn't enough for me. BUT here I am still, playing poker 40 hrs a week, I've played like 25 days this month, and I've just started the retirement fund project. I've spent more time toying with ranges in hrc this week than most do in a month. I'm still doing this poker thing because I'm being responsible, I just don't really want to.

Btw I think it is a far stretch to be the best poker autobiography ever written. Lmao!!!

Solid join date.

Discipline please stfu and never come back. Thanks

Chuck, more updates on Cuba et al plz thanks

WOW. So modest. So. So. Modest.
Self proclaimed, best in the Universe.
This is also quite the exaggeration. LOL


Wow, more modesty. A sheet of paper with your writing on it, would be worth 50 U.S. dollars. WOW. WOW WOW WOW.

Dude, your writing is worth nothing. I ordered your book, I had to stop midway through. It was a waste of my ****ing time. You owe me $6, and I usually like 99% of poker literature.
Here are some much better, hard copy auto-bio book alternatives that are worth every penny:

The Godfather of Poker: The Doyle Brunson Story
KingKrab The Degenerate Journey: From Homeless to Poker Pro
One of a Kind (Stu Ungar story)

Well there are 0 people besides me/editor who have read the entire book so it's pretty hard for you to judge. If you stopped midway through #1 I assume it's because you didn't even get to the poker parts which start 55%ish way in and the rest is basically poker for all of the parts. Anyway I will be happy to refund you your 5.99 from my own pocket. Send me an email to onceagamblerbook at gmail.com from the same email address you bought it from and I'll get someone to send a refund to you. It will take a couple of days if you ordered from Gumroad and 2 months if you ordered from Amazon since their reports come with a 60 day delay. I'm not promising to do this for everyone but since you seem very distraught I consider hopefully saving your day worth my $6 (which will end me up at -$4 on your purchase).

Also, last I checked you haven't read my inbox (hopefully). I literally had to empty some of it yesterday because it was full (1000 messages) of book related questions

if 0 people have finished your book, that means those 2 reviews on amazon were falsified, which would make a lot of sense.

Also, if the beginning and middle of the book were absolute horse poop, why would I assume that the ending of that horsepoop sandwich would much better? Maybe you're a better writer in french, or whatever. Like the guy above said, stick to what you're good at.

I meant that the book is in 3 parts. Only part 1 is out. I was talking about the book as an entity, no one has read 2/3 of the story.

The story has ~600 pages and based on your post you have read 85. While I can't be arsed to check the exact page right now, from memory the poker starts pretty much exactly around page 90 and carries on throughout the next 500 pages from there. Since the entire book is thematically about compulsive gambling and my several personality flaws that led into all the disastrous decisions I made that messed up my entire life, I found it necessary (and my editor agreed) to write about my youth and the things that happened then, because all that played a big part in what I eventually became. I know that people around these forums only want to hear cool degen stories and I could have written 600 pages about my 50/100 shots with 10k bankroll alone. But it wouldn't have been much of a story.

Also, you can read the first 20-30 (again can't remember exactly) pages for free on Amazon anytime before making the purchase. There's zero poker in there apart from the short introduction chapter, so it's not like I'd have tried to somehow hide this fact.

Anyway I am sorry that the book didn't meet your expectations, send me the email and I'll refund you. I can't do much about the time you wasted reading "horse poop" though.

There's also a thread on 2+2 to discuss the book precisely: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/33...-book-1598855/

I am not afraid of negative reviews and I thought maybe you'd appreciate this link. Go ahead and make a review as negative as you wish. The only thing I ask for is to please be even a tiny bit specific. Again, it's your choice, but it doesn't help me in any way if you just write "this was horse poop" but if you could give me some kind of breakdown about why it was horse poop, at least I could learn from it.

Discipline12 gtfo.

OP, Keep doing what you're doing to the best of your abilities.

**** the haterz.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Chuck, I have no idea what's going on in this thread, but I see a whole lot of book discussion. I knew there was some in this thread already, and wasn't especially concerned as I don't think you were being overly promotional about it (and I assume you still aren't), but I'll just say that if this starts turning into a book promotional thread, it'll get shut down. Everyone else, if you want updates on his book, send him a PM or check out his website - it's in his profile. Thanks.

No, you're done here. We don't have votes on whether people are allowed to troll threads. If I see another post from you ITT, you'll be banned.

And everyone else who keeps responding to him, why the **** do you keep feeding him?

Hey man and thanks about that.


Yeah I have a lot of respect for 2+2 and was not trying to promote - it was other people who brought it up. I have brought it up ITT (solely ITT) before though, if you want you can skim through the earlier posts and if you think it's even remotely too promotional let me know and I will fix it / stop. I believe all posts I've written that mention the book are on page 1, but for some reason today people have randomly decided to bash it and it got brought up without me playing a part really.

Since I assume you're busy the cliff notes I guess are that I'm doing 50/50 poker/writing and this pgc somewhat reflects that. Since the book just came out I write a bit about it, but it's mainly about my experiences during this time. So I'm not posting "hey here's my book *link* go buy it", but about my current process of going into writing and the issues blending my aspirations with poker. Then some people commented about the book specifically randomly today, and I actually just tried to redirect them to the proper thread like 5 mins before you posted (see above).

If mentioning any book related stuff at all is forbidden then I'm definitely guilty and probably also worthy of the banhammer, I used my own judgement in my posts and I think a bunch of mods have read this and at least no one's said anything. But maybe you want to skim through just in case - if I have still somehow violated 2p2 guidelines then I'm really sorry. I'd also like to point out that I really haven't spammed about the book anywhere on 2p2 at all, but I certainly thought bringing it up in my personal pgc wouldn't be different from the guy who sells his paintings in his pgc here etc. Let me know what you think.


And yeah I have no idea what is going on in this thread either, this has been one strange day.

Nah, no need to go back over all stuff. Honestly, I'm not especially concerned as you're a long-time contributor and it's not like you've been spamming or are making a tonne of money off it AFAIK. Having mentioned it once in a while isn't a big deal IMO, especially when we're getting no complaints.

You posted the link to B&P while I was writing my post, so I didn't see it. Yeah, that's definitely where people who want to talk about the book should be going.

Cliffs: Carry on, nothing to see here.

What an absolute trainwreck of a day. After losing at least 1000 euros earlier this week to disconnects I now lost half my tables to the aforementioned accidental mid-tournament self-ban episode and MPN booting me out. And then of all days somehow today everyone decided to take it out on me in this thread plus had a couple of ill-timed irl drama episodes as well. All whip and no carrots from life today. Oh well, I guess we all have days when you're just doomed to fail at everything. Pretty funny, today is Vappu, my favourite day of the year (Finnish national drinking day / first day of spring). The whole nation is just chilling in parks getting drunk, it's always the first day of the year when the brutal winter is over and you can see the first signs of the summer that's lurking around the corner. I love vappu so much but this was the biggest anti-vappu I've ever had. Oh well, I don't have very high expectations for the remaining 1,5 hours of the day, so I'm going to go to sleep at 10:30PM on a Saturday night to wake up early tomorrow, so I can save the week by binking something. Peace.

Love the thread subed


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

dude it's already sunday. GL going to bed on saturday

+1, thanks. BTW, if this (Discipline) is the poster I think it is, I'm done defending your likely IP ban. Done with the trolling dude. It is not high art.

ETA: This is a thing of beauty:

Damn I was calm today, had just incredible serenity all day. Played like a wonder child, didn't really bink much but had good runs and some unfortunate outcomes. Won a bit tho, including a tournament on Starsfr which just never happens.

Retirement fund, week #1

Monday 7h +600
Tuesday 4h -296
Wednesday 6,5h -221
Thursday 6,25h +31
Friday 5,25h +35
Saturday 7h +345
Sunday 6h +382
= 42h +876€

Retirement fund deposit: 175,20€
Deposits total since 1.5.2016: 175,20€


Very strange week - I overall played really well, had so many dumb obstacles, lost ~2/3 of profits to disconnects and other bs. But my head was remarkably straight, with all the setbacks I should have lost on at least 4 of the days, but I pushed through and take strange pride in this week despite the result being pretty poor. But we can only control what we can control, I did fine. Not to say I didn't make a bunch of mistakes, I spewed a lot as per usual, but I don't tend to care about individual hands a lot vs just my overall headspace and attitude. This week it was elite. One of the hardest things for me to accept has always been grinding that last tournament when you already know your session is going to be a losing one and you're onetabling some small donkament with less for 1st than what you're down for the day. But damn I crushed those things this week, both of the miniscule +35ish days were when I was down 300 before the last tournament which happened to be some supertiny thing that I then went on to win. Feels good to make deposit #1 too! Also I very uncharacteristically played short sessions every day. If I had 42 hours to use for poker every week, this would be by far the most profitable way to do it, just play the best hours every day. But I'm one of the guys who much prefer to play 4 days of 10,5 hour sessions instead and take a few days off entirely, so I don't expect to be doing this a lot, but irl stuff allowed me to have a 7/7 week so why not. I also studied a ridiculous amount this week, all in all this was by far my most productive poker week in absolutely forever despite ****ty results so I'm happy.

Gonna move houses again tomorrow so will be taking the day off, and I've got some stuff next week in general so will play less days but I'll try to get close to 40h in.


Funny hand, I had infinite tables and somehow I thought that I had isoed his limp pre, and that he was thus donking flop (otherwise I'd just call). He was some absurd buttonclicker who limped 65% hands and donked every single flop so at a quick glance that seemed like what would have happened. Anyway when I get to the turn like this, I guess I have to do this, nothing like the good old 113BB punt with 7 high preante

Nicaragua, part 1

I didn't have a blog anywhere last winter, so I've never blogged about this trip. A lot's gone down since, and my memory is a bit hazy regarding many of the details, so I'm just going to let the pictures talk for the most part.

So, last winter, I had reached a point with the book where it was sort of ready, but I really needed to get away from Finland to work on the toughest parts to write about. I basically had 98% of the text ready, but the remaining two percent made for all the parts I had consciously saved for last; the things that were hardest for me to write about, things I had never written or even told people about. Helsinki is a pretty small place, and every time I tried to write about these things I felt claustrophobic, since most of the people involved were within a couple of miles. I needed to get out, as far and rural as possible. I googled keywords such as "holiday destinations without electricity" and "Robinson Crusoe 2.0" to search for a place that'd give me a creative escape from the modern world and everything that comes with it. This is how I came up with Corn Islands, Nicaragua. My girlfriend had just quit her job and her new one wouldn't start for a few weeks, so we decided to come up with a strange itienary where she'd only be there for half the time, and I told her beforehands that I'd be spending a lot of time writing and not being very communicative.

I'm going to skip the boring parts such as the few days we spent in Miami on the way (I really dislike Miami, was my ~5th time there). I'll skip to a Tuesday night last January when we landed in Managua, Nicaragua's capital, shortly before sunset. Now I should probably point out that unlike me, my girlfriend had never traveled in the third world before, and while I had done my best to prepare her for what to expect, in hindsight I did a terrible job and she ended up having next to no clue what she had agreed to. When we were waiting to get our passports stamped, I now understand she probably thought we were going to some place with lots of other young travelers, and our biggest issues would be flaky internet or brightly coloured spiders in our bedroom.

By the time we'd finally got out passports stamped the sun had already set, and stepping out of the airport doors I couldn't see anything but darkness in any direction. Pretty much what I expected, since I knew Managua to be a bit of a dump, and our plan was to ride straight to Granada. Unluckily, among the things that were nowhere to be seen in any direction was our pre-booked driver. We waited for quite a while, but he had completely flaked on us, which left us with just one option; a taxi. This wouldn't be a problem in the first world, but can be a bit more problematic in the third world where taxi scams happen quite a bit. Lonely Planet's number one warning was to never board these taxis in Managua, especially at night time. We didn't want to spend the night at the airport, though, so we hopped in a taxi anyway and negotiated a price that was about twice what the pre-booked ride would've cost, but still somewhat reasonable for the one-hour ride.

We couldn't see a damn thing during almost the entire ride from Managua to Granada. Just a black road without streetlights, and for some reason we were traveling on bumpy side roads, not the motorway. Occasionally we went through some ghetto-like area where people lived in cardboard-walled houses and gangs of people were loitering around, halfway blocking the roads. I'd read about taxis taking unsuspecting customers to these side roads to get beaten up and stripped out of everything, and when we'd driven for about thirty minutes without passing a single road sign with the word Granada in it (or any other road sign for that matter), and it had been at least fifteen minutes since we had radio or cell phone reception, I have to admit I was getting a bit nervous listening to the buzzing sound of the car radio. It was so, so dark, as if both the moon and the stars had decided to take a day off, and the only source of light was the front lights of our car that was without a doubt manufactured before the Berlin wall was built. But then I realized that as always, if the guy is taking us somewhere to get beaten up and/or killed, there's not a whole lot I can do about it at this point. Only worry about things you can control. So instead of worrying I spent the rest of the trip comforting my somewhat frantic girlfriend, who was only beginning to realize that she was pretty damn far away from home.

We got to Granada safely, and checked in to our or hotel (I figured we'd start the trip smoothly, and booked us an actual hotel for the Granada part of it, whereas once we'd get to the islands we'd live without electricity entirely.) It was a pretty standard family-run hotel, nothing wrong with it and nothing particularly enticing about the place either, with its only distinctive feature being the heavily barricaded front entrance that worked as a daily reminder of that Nicaragua isn't the safest country out there (although according to statistics it's still remarkably safe compared to its neighbouring Honduras, for example.) The room was alright, almost like a first-world hotel room.

"See, it's not that bad, this is almost like the first world", I said to my girlfriend.

We were extremely hungry and wanted to get some food, but before we got to change clothes the electricity suddenly went off. SNAP, all of a sudden it was pitch black dark again. I assumed it was just the hotel, no biggie. Let's just change clothes and get some food. It was maybe nine o'clock in the evening, but in a city without street lights, neon signs or any artificial sources of light, it was darker than your typical midnight.

We used our phones as torches and stepped outside - only to notice that it wasn't just our hotel that was suffering from an outbreak. The entire city had lost power completely, as if a zombie apocalypse had swept over it. You couldn't see a damn thing in any direction except for other people waving their cell phone flashlights in the distance like fireflies. I had never been to Granada, either, and I had no idea where to go, but we were decided on getting some food so we stepped into the darkness. I could tell from my girlfriend's breathing that she would've paid a lot of money to get teleported to Helsinki right that moment.

We wandered around side streets and alleys and pathways for quite some time. We walked slowly because of uncovered manholes deep enough to break your leg if you happen to fall in. Eventually we made our way to what looked like a central square of some kind. It too was without electricity, but there were a couple of carts selling hot dogs and Nicaraguan fast food that had battery-operated christmas lights around them. I liked how they looked in the darkness. A childhood flashback made its way into my head - I'm at a carnival, or maybe a circus, it's late at night, dark, but there are christmas lights all around. I think I'm maybe three or four, am I sitting in a stroller or standing? Damn, I'm short - and then it faded away as quickly as it entered my consciousness in the first place, like these flashbacks always do, before I could get anything meaningful out of it.

We decided to keep searching for a restaurant (I don't eat pork, so hot dogs weren't of much help), and if we couldn't find anything, we'd resort to the carts. Eventually we made our way to some expat-ran restaurant that was in full operation despite the lack of power. There were candles on every table, and the chef was baking pizzas in a fire-powered stone oven. We stepped in, and just when your pizzas arrived, so did the electricity. People started clapping, and all was well in the universe. We were soon joined by the owner, some American who had decided to move to Nicaragua to open his own pizza place (he had a semi-interesting a back story, but I've forgotten it completely, sorry). He said that the power goes out like that once or twice a month, no big deal. We drank a couple of Toñas (see picture), and called it a night early.



We spent the next few days mostly in Granada, although we took some trips quite far outside the city. Granada itself was a pretty boring, touristy city (it's Nicaragua's #1 tourist destination), but this didn't come as a surprise as I'd researched the place in advance. We had some serious isolation coming up next, so starting off this way was a good way to ease my girlfriend into the itienary - or so I thought.

Nothing particularly interesting happened in Granada from a storytelling point of view, but I've got some cool pictures so I'll let them do the job. Nearly all pictures in these posts are going to have strange colours. This is because our iphones were destroyed in San Juan del Sur (we'll get there later) and all I have is the photos from my underwater camera, which I very very luckily used quite a bit on dry land, too. A few of these Granada ones are taken with my iphone, too, as I'd uploaded a couple of photos to Facebook before we lost our phones.




Granada at sunset atop some church tower



We went to Laguna de Apoyo, a volcanic lake 175m deep (in other words, really ****ing deep). It was surrounded by jungle in every direction, and it was huge, 21 square kilometres. I seem to recall reading that a meteorite would've originally created the hole, but I can't find this information anywhere on a quick google search. Anyway, according to geological data the lake is 23,000 years old (in other words, really ****ing old.) My pictures from this place failed miserably, so I'm just including this pic of a random dog who spent the day with us. This guy just looooved the water, I've never seen a dog love swimming so much. He was in the water for like 95% of the time from 9am until 5pm. Dogs





I guess you can kinda tell its size from how far the opposite side is. It still felt bigger than it looks like.



I mean, can there ever be too many pics of swimming dogs?


We did a day trip to Masaya on another day. On the way there we stopped at a viewing point on a hillside to take a picture of Laguna de Apoyo, again it looks like a tiny pond in this pic but whatever:




We made our way to the top of the Masaya Volcano. I climbed Mt. Etna (Europe's tallest volcano, 3329m) last fall, which was pretty underwhelming because it was foggy and we couldn't see our own feet in the fog. This was visually much more pleasing, and also there wasn't a damn soul anywhere or a ranger telling you to not do this and that.






It was quite Mordor-esque if you went really close.


A random tourist came by while we were about to leave, so I took a picture of him taking a picture of a rainbow. The latter pic is just extremely random Nica landscape, but I love the empty nothingness, so I uploaded it mainly just so I can stare at it and feel some inner harmony.






Here are a few from Granada itself:









On our last day we went into a cloud forest near the Mochambo Volcano. It's basically a rain forest that's so high in elevation that it's inside clouds most of the time. It's moisty, humid, cold and foggy as you'd expect. The day was rain in itself and the pictures turned out horrendous:




We rode some ziplines in the cloud forest that were high above the jungle, it was a lot of fun being 50m above the ground in the treetops. Also stopped by at a coffee farm on the way home. They had amazing coffee, and we got to taste raw coffee beans straight from the bush. They taste like sugar, who would've known?

Anyway, we'll get to the Robinson Crusoe stuff in the next part.

Vamoooooo moarmoarmoar

Went to see an Eagles Of Death Metal / Death From Above 1979 joint gig today - two bands with the word "death" in their name for the price of one!

I only caught the tail end of EODM (was grinding), but it seemed like a fun show. You could tell that Jesse Hughes really just looooves playing rock 'n' roll. He was having a ball, at one point he climbed to the balcony and played a 5-minute guitar solo from there. You can see doing the solo (his guitar is over the edge of the balcony) in this photo:



It was also hard not to think about the madness that went down in Paris six months earlier during this very same band's gig. It's just insanity, and makes me so mad that I'm going to shut up about it before I say things I shouldn't. But I will say that it's pretty amazing they're already back on their feet (I read a bit about Hughes today, he said in a Rolling Stone interview he's suffering from constant nightmares and has to go to therapy on a daily basis to be able to cope.)


The main reason I went was DFA1979 though, I'd never seen them live and I'm very happy that the reunion and Physical World happened. I actually like it better than You're A Woman, I'm A Machine, I suspect I'm roughly the only person in the world who shares this view, but goes without saying I was very pleased when they played basically the entire new album plus half of You're A Woman. It's such a weird/fun arrangement that the vocalist of the band is also the drummer, I don't think I've seen that go down live. I can't comprehend how you can bang drums at insane speeds and sing in a completely different rhythm at the same time. But yeah, was really awesome to just watch these two guys raping the **** out of their instruments for 1,5 hours. Really great energy, I was super tired when I went to the show and now it's 2am and I feel like going to the gym.






27 Canadian play money dollars for both gigs, sick value.


I saw Father John Misty a couple of weeks ago too, great show. He's such a talented lyricist, it almost makes you ignore the melodies because you just keep focusing on his lines. His song "The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt." is my favourite song ever about one-night stands. The song is clearly personal and a true story, and it's both beautiful and hilarious, and made me think about how one-night stands are such an underrated foundation in writing. Every song, novel and poem is always about one's love for a special someone, but little is written about one-night stands, while they offer endless possibilities for comedic moments in writing, may it be fiction or not. I thought about some of my own experiences the other day and there are definitely a couple of very strange/funny ones that would make for a great Father John Misty song. And the temporarity of it all and both of you knowing you only have a limited time to spend with one another creates a sense of urgency, and there can be a lot of beauty in that. Case in point: Before Sunrise, amazing movie (the whole trilogy is excellent).


Well that was really random, I really just came to post a couple of pictures and the line "Went to see an Eagles Of Death Metal / Death From Above 1979 joint gig today", not sure what happened. I guess being unable to sleep at 2am after a crazy energetic show is what happened.

Why poker isn't the endgame

I've known for quite a while that poker is not what I want to do in the long run anymore, but I thought it might be beneficial to write down some of my thoughts in length. The following is a list of some of the reasons why I genuinely wish I won't be playing poker for a living in five years. I'm going to disregard the obvious (poker becoming less profitable every year / Amaya and all the other crap doing their best to destroy it altogether), and write from my own life's perspective.


-It doesn't make me happy. This is a misconception I had for the longest time. I've played for a living pretty much throughout my twenties (I went professional when I was 21, I'm turning 30 this year), and it has been an awesome way to experience my twenties. Granted, I've missed out on some stuff (I really do wish I could've experienced, for example, being a university student and that whole lifestyle), but on the whole I feel extremely blessed and I'm so grateful for all the experiences I've had. I have some kickass stories to tell my grandchildren, I've had so many opportunities and I've got to experience a ridiculous amount of stuff I could only have dreamed of without poker. I've lived almost a decade without having to set alarms every morning, working a nine to five, or having typical normal person problems. As a result of all this, I've generally been very happy during most of this decade, certainly about 500x happier than I was during my teens. For the longest time I had all this confused, because I thought that it was poker itself that was making me so happy. I mean, I had (/have) all this, AND I'm genuinely enjoying my job. What percentage of people on this earth enjoy their job so much it'd be one of the top 5 activities they'd actually want to be doing on their days off? Again, I feel very blessed to have a job I enjoy so much. But the truth is, I enjoy it in the same way most of us enjoy playing video games. It's fun and a little bit competitive, you can click buttons all day and try to set new high scores. But it doesn't make me happy, if anything it makes me less happy, because it's a pretty damn introverted job and I'm already a relatively introverted person. I used to not notice this so much, because I was so sucked into the whole poker world/lifestyle, that living inside of the poker bubble made me feel very social since I was hanging out with poker people a lot. But lately I've hung out pretty infrequently with poker players and tried to rekindle old friendships and make new ones with non-poker people, and it's just so ****ing hard especially when you get to this age and many of your old friends have kids and real life restrictions. You can't call people at 5am in the morning to hang out anymore. What poker does to my social life (when I'm in my home country) is that I play from 7pm until 5am, and during the few hours when I'd love to hang out with people (after the games when my veins are too full of adrenaline to sleep), everyone's asleep.

I don't feel like poker in itself brings any sort of happiness to my life apart from the money/flexibility/independence, and those things I can at least try to attain by doing something else (writing). But poker makes it significantly more difficult to enjoy many meaningful things and relationships in life, especially when you play mtts with their time constraints. If I could somehow earn enough doing some other independent job where I could choose my hours, I'm almost certain I'd be happier than playing poker.


-Direct negative factors. I'm starting to notice these more and more the older I become. I sleep so much worse than I used to. It didn't use to matter at all that I had no sleeping pattern, often played around the clock and stayed up 24+ hours straight at least once a week. But now it makes all the difference, I need just one night where I go deep in something that messes up my pattern, and then I'm screwed for days to come and feel tired all the time. And I stress, I stress so much more than I used to. When you're 21, who gives a **** about anything. I played 50/100 with 1BI bankroll management more times than I can count. Worst care scenario, go back to working at McDonald's. But now there's the whole big picture where you're supposed to be responsible, and there's so many new stress factors that didn't use to be there, and the stress is getting into me in ways that it didn't use to. I constantly feel under pressure to perform, to make steady money, to be responsible, to make good decisions, etc etc. Note that this is coming from someone who rarely has losing weeks, I can't even imagine what a wreck I'd be playing a Stars schedule.

-I don't want it to be my life's work. Now this is going to sound hypocritical, and I will preface this by saying that I have no problem taking other people's money, I fully acknowledge that some percent of my winnings comes straight from gambling addicts, and I will still keep taking their money. So I'm not trying to pretend that I have some moral higher ground here. But still - again, this is something I gave 0 thought to when I was 21-26 - I don't want my biggest achievement to be taking other people's money in a card game. I don't want to be remembered as a great gambler. I don't want to be lying on my deathbed thinking "man, I just owned everyone in the games for 80 years, what a great life". I'm definitely not a particularly great person, I'd say I'm pretty damn average when it comes to morals/compassion/empathy, in other words a typical privileged pos. I don't mean to make this sound like I have some plan of what it is that I want to achieve instead. My mom's worked in health care all her life, and she's one of those people who just have a desire from deep within to help others, but I haven't inherited that. I'm pretty cynical, don't have much faith in human kind, and as much as I'd love to say that I want to quit poker so I could cure AIDS or something that would be a lie. But at the same time, gaining capital just for myself/my family doesn't feel like a means to an end either. I'm still working on figuring out what exactly it is that I want to achieve before I turn, say, 50, but it's definitely on the creative side. Money just doesn't mean so much to me, it never has (I guess that's why I've always been terrible at holding onto it). I see it so much better now with the book and dealing with feedback. Some guy who had a similar messed up (in the exact same ways) childhood messaged me a while back and said it made him feel better about himself. I felt so good about that, like genuinely that felt 100 times better than my biggest tournament win did. It's was such a weird rewarding feeling and something I had never experienced. Obviously there have been spots where I've helped out friends and I've felt good about myself for being a good friend. Or you know, I've noticed someone drop their phone and returned it to them saving their day, that kind of thing makes you happy for a second when you see how happy they are. But to be able to help some complete random understand a little more about themselves, or to help them deal with some chldhood traumas or whatever, I mean holy shiiiit? Obviously that was compltely inadvertent, it's not like I was writing the thing specifically with helping others in mind, but learning about and having received more similar feedback has just been so eye-opening. I want to create things that mean something to people, that move people, that affect other people. It'd be so amazing to write a movie or a screenplay, and move people through that, have people go see it on their first date, have some guy watch it following over a break-up, etc, have it as a temporary visual soundtrack to specific moments in their lives. That's about the best I can put it right now. I guess that analogy actually describes my persona pretty well; I have a desire to affect people, but I'm so introverted that I only want to make it happen through ways where I don't have to deal with people directly.

-Not much left to achieve. Yeah, I know, it's not like I never achieved a whole lot in this game in the first place. But it's fairly clear that I've more or less reached my ceiling already. It's just flat out impossible for me to become much more successful at poker than I've been so far because of simple math - there are more and more regs every year, and less and less fish. And poker doesn't work like some sport where you can just practice and practice until you're number one. Your ROI is dictated more by the pool of people you play against than anything else. If you have certain limitations, then you do, and the best you can do is to learn to cope with them and make the best living you can, which can thankfully still be HUGE. It took me a long time, and cost a lot of money to come to terms with the fact that I just never will be number one, or even top ten or top 100 in this game. I'm fine with it now in the sense that I can live with myself and somewhat enjoy the steady, stress-free printing, but it's killing me inside every day not to be able to compete. No matter how hard I try, I'm just too competitive to accept being a second class citizen at my job all my life. If I play for another couple of years, make some good money, and then leave the game so rolled that I can spend my early thirties on figuring out what I really want to be in life, I'd consider that the biggest possible success I could reach at this point. This could've been a different story if I found poker earlier, or if I had acted professionally earlier, or if I had ever cared about actually banking money and if it hadn't taken me 5 years to start making grown-up decisions. Maybe if I had held onto money back when the games were ridiculously soft and I was actually ahead of the curve, I would've actually won something big. But trying to pursue goals like that at this point isn't much different from a competitive amateur golfer putting his whole life aside trying to win the US Open. It's just not smart, and I don't have enough game left in me to even try.

-Future considerations. Coming from a broken family and with only one living relative left, I've never thought about getting married or having kids as obligatory. Family's just never been an institution to me, as I've never been on a family dinner with more than two people sitting down, and I've never had that big safety network of parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters and cousins. It's kinda funny, getting married and having kids are meant to be among the biggest milestones of your life, and I don't have a particularly strong opinion on either. I think it's very close to a coinflip if I end up getting married/having kids before I'm 40, and I wouldn't expect either outcome to change my life quality dramatically. Obviously things will be very different if I end up single and 40 or married with 3 kids and a golden retriever, but I don't see ending up either way meaning that I couldn't be just as happy as if things went the other way. But only one of those options can accommodate playing poker for a living. I know there are grinders out there with families, and I really don't mean to hate or anything - this is just my personal view. But at least to me, there's just no way I'd do this job that's tearing my heart out every single day if I had a family. I don't see how I could be there, both mentally and physically, and play poker at the same time. It affects my mood, makes me lose sleep, and makes it very difficult to relate to other people with normal jobs and their everyday problems. I've been in some relationships that were eaten inside by my poker-playing, and at least one that was completely destroyed by it. I've lit $60k on fire once just because I was sad over a break-up. I'm too emotional to make it work either way, family and poker would just get blended in and I'd fail at both. I think someone with a different personality could pull poker+family off, but I wouldn't trust myself enough with it. So while this isn't particularly urgent, it's still one more (tiny) reason to not pursue poker long-term anymore.


There are some lesser reasons, but these were the main ones I wanted to write down.

dfa79 <3

didn't check out the new album, thanks for reminding


about poker and family. If you got kids, that means you are basically never alone. You will grind and they will pop in with some odd story and whatever kids tell. You can be amused, you can be annoyed but something's happen. You don't grind 10 hours into a quiet room anymore.
After your session, which you might end earlier because the weather is just perfect and stuff, you can pack em up and go straight to the park and **** like that. Try that with a real job; "yeah daddy can't come home before 9pm because he has to work overtime and has a hour route from work"

anyway, that way live works you may meet a chick at the next starbucks that may be already pregnant (in a future telling way). It's just **** variance.


The way I see it, if you want to become a writer for movies etc, would you want to write because you like to put out stories, or do you want to write so you have some weekly output that finances your life without fixation that it's really good work, because that what it might become if you go full time. It seems you are writing because you like it and play poker for money. Like a plumber would install bathsinks for money and play poker because he likes it. I never said you're a bad writer, but consider if you are made for it pushing through creative work in a moment where you rather take a ~50 day break. Obv poker is not gonna cut it long term but I would want to keep a safety net if I'd want to go "creative pro". Maybe you get to that point where you get money in advance for a **** year jus to deliver x amounts of work, but I guess that's a route ahead. GL to you

Gl for the huge scoop funday!

Retirement fund week 2

Monday -
Tuesday -
Wednesday 6h +412
Thursday 6h -130
Friday 2,5h +120 (1-tabled cash while watching hockey)
Saturday 6h -6
Sunday-
=20,5h +396

Retirement fund deposit: 79,20€
Deposits total since 1.5.2016: 254,40€


Had to move houses twice which resulted in two forced days off (moves were both 11am-3pm or so, games run from 9am-6pm basically). Then Finnish mid-week bank holidays and having my cc skimmed ****ed me up royally and couldn't get money online for the weekend. Played a Saturday on half my normal sites as the other half were busto, busted some more rolls and didn't see the point playing just 2 sites today. It was Bond's last day here and given it's first day of SCOOP and every reg's playing anyway I saw no point participating today, especially having the chance to hang out with the legend once more before he left. I should get money stuff sorted tomorrow when the banks open in Finland again, and now also have a great 11th floor apartment with good internet, so gonna aim to hit it hard next week. Been pretty much cursed with force majeure bs ever since I started this project, pretty incredible.

Was really productive today after Bond left tho, I've now grinded through every Eurovision song 3 times, watched all rehearsal videos, read pretty much all threads from every forum, so I'm finally up to date. Next week is going to be a super epic degen week, one of my favourite weeks of the year with the two biggest value sports betting events (Eurovision and WHC) on, plus the NHL playoffs are on tv every night, and I'm gonna grind every day. The WHC starts at 8am every day, NHL lasts until midnight, so I pretty much only have those exact 8 hours to sleep per day and I'm gonna have to play less tables so I can F5 Eurovision betting lines mid-session after rehearsals. The semis are usually best betting-wise, and it definitely looks like that this year, so Mon-Wed are gonna be insane busy. Looking forward so much to the one week a year I go full degen

Was considering putting up some Eurovision tips, don't think I've lost once since I discovered what a great betting event it is, last year I sent a bunch of tips to all my friends who were interested and we won heaps. This year just seems kinda dry, I can't find anything halfway reasonable in the winner market which is the most fun to sweat. Most of the best Eurovision bettors seem to advocate betting on Ukraine, and it has climbed up all the way to second favourite in the last few days, but I just can't see that winning. Odds have gone down from 30:1 to 5:1 in a few days, but it seems like an overrated stock to me now. They'll get sympathy votes from the public and they'll almost certainly top3 with the jury but imo the song is too dark and boring to win. Almost a lock for top3, at least top5 tho. So if anything I feel like that's actually overrated now, but all the best bettors who have done significantly more background work than I have seem to disagree, and I hate betting against them. On the flipside most specialists see France (current 3rd favourite) as overrated, I think the song's great but they got a bad performing spot and they will suffer a lot from early position in the final + not having to go through semis as they are a part of the big 5. They'll only get to perform the song once, and in a bad spot, I don't think it'll stand out enough. So that pretty much leaves only Russia, but their odds are already down to 2,5:1 to win the whole thing which just isn't lucrative enough... although I do think they will win quite likely. Not much point betting on big surprises, these days you have to get the money in months in advance when all countries haven't announced their performances yet, like you could get 250:1 on Conchita Wurst the other year and it went down all the way to 1,6:1 during the final in the end. So I think I'm going to skip the winner market entirely this year and focus entirely on head to head / to make top10 / to qualify from semis / best of group bets. Those are generally the best value anyway, but I don't feel comfortable sending out tips this year so I'm just gonna do it, I'd feel too bad if we missed as this seems like the first year ever when I don't actually feel confident about handily beating the market. Will def blog how it goes though.

Also Betfair is banned in Canada which makes getting bets in significantly harder, my Pinnacle account is banned for some bs reason as well so I'll have to go through Bet365 mostly which sucks. If I had to grab something from the winner market right now I'd probably take either Serbia or Netherlands, I think odds for both will likely go down before the finals, but I'd only buy with the intention of selling the stocks before the finals for a profit and that's near impossible (/too hard for me to organize) without Betfair.

WHC this year is interesting, I've followed hockey more than ever this season but I'm having a really hard time finding good bets. Usually betting vs Finland against Finnish people on our national bookmaker works well but the team is actually doing great this year so haven't done that. Have had some ideas but for some reason I haven't followed through, would've binked the Czechs beating the Russians and Finland o4,5 vs Germany today but decided against betting in the end. The Finland one would have been sick, the 5th goal came 3 seconds before the end. I think I'll actually skip most of WHC bets mainly due to lack of time and just focus entirely on Eurovision.

Just realized now that the Eurovision final is lolearly on Saturday, during peak poker time basically. I guess I will have to at least take that day off because of live betting. For some reason the time zones confused me and for a second I thought I could've just watched it after pokers which would have been optimal.

poker + family is great. got two daughters under the age of three and a wife that works three days a week, I work from home doing the online thing and am quite grateful for it everyday. it's all good, there are too many variables in life to determine exactly what is making you happy, fulfilled, or unfulfilled. I try to focus on the conclusive ones though, nutrition, exercise, love, if u can keep up with those three things, getting through a day of work at McDonald's may not be so bad . obv money is quite a big issue though in today's world, well, in my life atleast, so McDs pry wouldn't cut it. I don't need the most luxurious things but I do need comfort and with the fam, u need a little more.

u r at a cross roads again it seems. writing and thinking about what it is u need to do, yada, yada. we collectively just have to take it one day at a time and hope we are moving in the right direction and do what we can to move toward that "desired" direction.

saw some horrendous play today in a short session, made a few bucks, and I'm excited to wake up tomorrow and own some more degens if that's all I accomplish monetary wise prior to my death bed when I'm an elder, I guess so be it. this does come and go though, sometimes it's more like **** poker. but in the end, just stay balanced, it's probobaly easier to do as a poker pro than many other jobs, some jobs don't grant near the free time.

and so life continues....