gl Dude

so f this, ppl are absurd lol

gl in april boss

Good work Donald! Great to see you're still crushing it, keep it up!

I sold all my crypto in january after getting in sept. Sort of looking at getting back in now myself.

Lol, a large part of me hopes that day will never come

Thanks brother!

Thanks man, need to channel some of that Jdawg grind ethic hah!

Cheers Rich! I will keep on keeping on

Yah, I've been continuing to learn more about it in the last few weeks. Actually went to a conference called 'Beyond Blocks' while I was in Tokyo, it's strange how much of a mixed bag it is - the first day was really good, lots of conceptually interesting stuff from people who knew their ****, second day was absolute garbage, basically the whole day was people up on stage shilling their businesses that have no need of a blockchain or a token at all. Wild west out there.

Also been learning a bit about futures, had one morning where I spent ages trying to work out why the market thought a fair price for ADA today was 2000 sats, but the fair price for ADA at the end of June was 2200... asked around a bunch of people including my cousin who trades futures in London lol, didn't get home from Japan quickly enough to take the position I wanted but it's good to keep developing my understanding of the markets/instruments out there. Not going to make any effort towards studying it formally, just gonna follow my interest and continue to be very skeptical about my ability to outpredict the market.

=====================

Soooooooooooooooooooooooo,

As I mentioned briefly there, just back from a 12 day holiday in Japan! Had a sick time, honestly I'd half prepared myself for a disappointment given how hard most people have hyped it up, but it exceeded expectations - it's an awesome place, really different from basically anywhere I've been before in a great way, highly recommend taking the plunge if you've been thinking about it. Had been top of my list of places to go for years, glad we got it sorted.

A few photos:

Philosopher's Walk, Kyoto







Nara Deer Park



Osaka Castle

Kinda hard to do this place justice in photos - it's a double moated castle in central Osaka that's been there (in it's current form) since the mid 1600s, I absolutely loved it. Was interesting to compare it with Edinburgh castle, which was finished maybe 80 years previous, even though they're thousands of miles away from each other, they're both on islands a little seperate from the mainland where there was massive wars over who ran ****. Pretty interesting.







Other highlights were the bullet train, have wanted to experience that since reading about it as a kid, the food (conveyor-belt sushi, Korean BBQ) and V2 nightclub in Tokyo (not the best flip to lose, I think the 2nd or 3rd biggest I've ever lost, but a siiiick night out ).

Took off at 00:10 on Friday the 13th, touched down in Edinburgh at midday UK time (9 hours behind) and had like an hour or two in my apartment before heading straight up the road for a wedding, one of my best/oldest friends. Wasn't too jetlagged and had a great time, ended up speaking to some boys I used to play football with who I literally haven't spoken in 12 years or something, was pretty funny.

Had to force myself slightly back into the grind, and I've been taking stock of my habits and what I need to improve moving forward. I've always been a night person, and I struggle to get myself going in the mornings. It's pretty much standard for me to wake up and spend half an hour on my phone before doing anything at all, then sometimes I'll go have a shower and spend another 20-30m just doing nothing. It's a pretty ridiculous state of affairs and it's not the way you want to start your day. So, starting this morning I'm making a change:

- No phone for the first hour I'm awake
- 20m light workout each morning (3-5 songs worth of skipping, some stretching and a few pullups), started within 10m of waking up

I don't like making changes I can't sustain, so I'm gonna leave it there for now. I'm sure I'll **** up plenty of times with this, but it's by far the easiest/cheapest gains I could make in terms of my effectiveness at this time. I can probably unlock an extra 40m-1h of useful time per day on average, plus put myself in a better mood and improve my health, all that's required is a little discipline first thing in the morning.

That's about it for now, I'm leaning towards bailing out of Amsterdam at the end of the month, bit much travelling going on just now and there's very little accommodation available, so I've probably got a good few weeks of solid grind ahead of me with minimal distractions. Will update results and stuff at the end of the month.

GL out there!

Japan definitely on the bucket list for places I want to travel, glad to hear that it was everything you hoped it could be! Interested to know whether you told your old football mates what you're up to these days, or do you go for the 'data analytics' lie?

Morning productivity is a big issue for me too, I try and get up at 8am every day, but probably spend 2-2.5hrs after that checking my phone/doing literally nothing.

what is a 8am?

your semi infrequent updates are always good d7. much better than the garbage the kid churns out every day.

Japan looked fun! One of my fav places to be in the world
You got the sakura season too, so jel, was supposed to go this year but cancelled.
Did you meet up with Ryan when he was there or conflicting schedules?

Mate, book a ticket right now. Transportation is so easy around Japan that you can just plan a cross-country trip within a few days

Japan looks sick, maybe you should go back for longer and stay off the tables some more?

Why would you lie? I've told every person it's ever came up in conversation with for 10 years and only ever had one negative reaction. Most people are really interested and think it's super cool, especially younger people. You gotta own it man!

Need to do a bit of work for a couple months before I can justify more travelling! Mind if I hit you up in a bit for some recommendations, though?

Not really concerned about positive/negative reactions; sometimes I just don't wanna try and explain it to people, so it's easier to just spin something else. I'm sure it's not just me who feels this way!

Sorry for derailing your thread a bit D7

dunno how I missed this, awesome thread, gl!

This! My favorite pgc out there right now.

You are pretty douchy if you lie to people you go way back with. A football team is sort off like a family, they should be interested to some extent what you are doing and other way around. Its fine to lie imo when you run into super distant friends in a bar or something (Like old class mates from highschool which u never even liked). Lying works better the less famous you are as well, asfaik D7 is the most well known poker player in Scottland, would be super strange to lie lol.

Oh ffs man, get a grip. I'm not saying that I'd lie to friends, I'd just rather not get into it at certain points in my life, and it tends to be a career choice that upon mention leads to more questions. Also, having lived in Scotland most of my life, and played poker for many years in many live venues with other Scottish poker players, I'd be confident in saying that less than 1% of even the Scottish poker playing community would know who Donald is.

Last post on the matter, but do find it unreal the things people manage to take offence at sometimes.

I'm not even sure there's such a thing as the Scottish poker playing community

Subbed for the biggest player in Scotland. Japan looks sick, pretty much the top place I wanna visit.

GL @ tables

and there was me going to suggest that he get it printed on a t-shirt.

I told my uber driver I m a programmer now.

He went

“Oh really? Me too, what are you into, java or C++?”

Rip my sorry ass

Update looks sick dods please for the love of baby Jesus post more often

Coming from my #1 sub/fan <3 always checking for update

Awesome update, feels like a lifetime ago that I was in Japan. I imagine it would be a totally different experience to go again

lmao

I'm still basically always using the I'm a student phrase to all new people i meet. It's not that ppl dont react well to poker, but it gets really annoying having to explain some stuff. Also some ppl just think ur a fkn degen (which might be accurate in my case tho).

I started saying i'm a professional thrice player. the chicks love it

leave another nintendo in the hotel??

why dont u just tell them ur a fat piece of dogsh!!t???

Lol, weird you mention this, we discussed it a little in Japan as I'm about the only person in the squad who just tells basically everyone. The exception being mainly taxi drivers, but largely just people who i randomly deem to have high probability of giving it a shot lol.

As for my old football mates, word of what I do has only recently got around to them and one of them in particular who I was speaking to just decided I was Dan Bilzarian. This guy got 9 caps for Scotland U-19 before getting heavily into drink/drugs, still plays semi-pro level but yea - I was (more) garbage back then, comfortably the weakest link on a very strong team and got a bit of a hard time for it - definitely didn't love football tbh. But anyway, this guy has me cornered at the bar (we are both super wrecked) and he keeps on telling me and telling me how awesome he thinks it all is and how I was a bit of a nerd in school but now I'm this and that and whatever , all pretty cringe, at some point he says to me: 'd'you know what I respect most about you?.. you've done MOUNTAINS of blow..' He literally didn't believe me when I said I'd never done any party drugs. People will believe what they wanna believe I guess.

Loving the defiant ones btw, thanks for the recommendation!

Haha thanks, I'll try to bring the average post quality down a bit I guess

Didn't know Ryan was there! ****, haven't seen that young champion in years. We were pretty lucky to catch the season tbh - we didn't really plan anything in advance and booked 3 weeks before we left, then couldn't understand why 99% of airbnb's in Tokyo were booked and there was literally no available hotel rooms on the internet lol. We probably overpaid a decent bit but we made it work.

Also big +1 to how awesome/easy public transport is there, just need google maps and you're off. Actually mentioning that, one of our last days in Osaka we decided to have a phone-free day - we'd be chatting a bit about how reliant everyone is on their phone and how difficult it must've been to have an adventure in a foreign country without one. So we got out pen and paper and wrote down the information we needed to get where we wanted to go - a hike along an abandoned railway 1 hour (3 trains) north of Osaka. It was actually a sick trip - the walk goes through something like 6 tunnels that are long af, to the extent that it's literally pitch black in the middle, you can't do the hike without torches. It all followed along this river and yeah, was just nice nature day with no phones, and ****ing zuck has no idea what we got up to

Missed you too bae

Agree that you should basically avoid telling lies whenever possible, I do worry that in some rare spots it encourages gambling in people who blatantly shouldn't gamble, but idk.

I had a few negative reactions when I was starting out and I was telling old dudes on the golf course up north. Obv they're gonna be a fairly traditional/skeptical crowd. But you're right, the vast majority of people think it's awesome even if they don't understand it at all. And think they do. Which can be annoying lol.

Ty dude!

Lmao, excuse me while I update my CV

Cheers bro!



Lmfaooooooo #rekt

Should've said you work exclusively with solidity and ****ed him right up

Idk if it would be tbh - while everything there was super electronic and awesome, kinda felt like it might've all been there since the 80s. But either way, definitely one of those places I felt like I just skimmed the surface of one bit, I'll definitely be back at some point.

FFS these guys. Can't wait to feel my brain slowly rotting in the acid in Cyprus

=============================

Little update - bailed on King's day this weekend, but I'm going to Cyprus from the 9th till the 21st of May for a SCOOP grindhouse with the boys, followed by 2 weeks of island hopping in Greece with a friend from Mexico. Then will have 1/2 nights at home, before the yearly golf holiday up in Brora for a week, ending in the wedding of two of my best pals in Inverness. Will be almost a month completely off poker (end of May and start of June) which isn't great, but clearly gonna be a sick time and life's for living, so what can you do. Already getting demands to go to Vegas for the main in July aswel but we'll have to see.

The changes to my morning are going fairly well - I've done my mini workout pretty much every day, and though it's not always instant I've only looked at my phone in bed once in that time so it's definitely an improvement. Also been reasonably good at keeping to 2x cold showers/week on Tuesdays and Fridays, definitely lifts my mood a chunk and even opened up the headspace app for the first time in months yesterday.

Crypto-wise - I was home a little too late to the position I wanted to take on ADA (long the underlying and hedge the future), but luckily moved 30% into ETH and 10% into ADA about a week ago (was previously allin BTC). Really don't like the whole Roger Ver thing going on just now with bitcoin.com now saying Bitcoin = BCH, will confuse a lot of newbs and probably hurt BTC more than any other coin (as well as the space overall). I think that while having a central figurehead is bad for centralisation, it's very good for publicity as people love to have someone to interview, so I'm probably going to move another chunk of BTC into ETH and possibly a little more ADA. Still too skeptical to pick coins I don't feel I have a reasonable understanding of, can't see me picking up any proper ****coins anytime soon.

Pokerwise things are going fine, results were very poor when I started back but have had some heat last few days, at 18.8k hands so will easily hit the 25k target.. infact I'm going to up that to 30k minimum since I'm here this weekend.

Post is probably way too long but no apologies - you're the one reading this ****! Will update results and stuff at the end of the month

Gl out there

Awesome update

I mean, everybody knows it, but as poker players, we have this luxury to travel a lot and live experiences during the best years of our lives.

We don't have to wait until we're retired to go somewhere, or like plan/save for a trip 12 months in advance, etc.

So yeah, lately I've been more grateful about that.

Like how sick is your life; you were in Japan, now you'll go to Cyprus w a bunch of grinders, then you might wing Vegas w friends. All this in a lapse of 3months or so lol.

Anyhow, gl on the grind, cya at the tables

Great update!!!!

Cold shower ftw.
I tried cryotherapy over here in Belgium, but over here there not that strong.
Definitely gonna look for one when I'm in Vegas.