You can use basic swim shoes to dont look like a lunatic to your fellow human beings while youre just trying it out.

In case you like it, there is already a fast growing market for barefoot shoes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSIDRHUWlVo

Videos like this got me hooked to at least give it a try, since it made sense to me and i had never thought about it before.


Your knee seems to be in a bit better condidtion than mine, since ure able to go on short runs without any issues. Good to hear and i hope you can improve further

Quick update - moved to Vienna for a month in a small flat in 7th district with makeboifin.

Loving it here so far, have a big crew for climbing and going often (shout out grafftekel, arboaraer, llinusllove, 464, cupsofthexo for anyone on screename watch).

I've also been hard on the grind, played 50 hours/ 25k hands already this month at quite high average stake for me personally and studying a lot too, hoping to more or less double this to the end of the month.

Recently at bitB we've ran a small beginning of the year challenge with cash prizes for students (and pride prizes for coaches).

You get points for playing sessions, posting exercise selfies, posting breakdowns of interesting spots etc etc. It's been really fun and some students have absolutely destroyed me in the leaderboard too, which is good for motivation going forward

Anyway - as part of the challenge we got points for writing a book review. The book I read I thought was quite an important one so thought I'd share it in here too:

Lost Connections - Johann Hari

I put off reading this book for a long time despite being reccomended it by numerous people - mostly due to the subtitle 'why you're depressed and how to find hope'. To me it just sounded too selfhelpy and gimmicky, which is a shame because it's probably one of the most important books I've ever read.

TLDR - my own history with mental health


The Book

In this book the author, who has struggled with depression himself, basically sets out to understand why depression and anxiety are hitting epidemic levels, what causes it, and how we can treat it.

The first big take-away is an all out attack on anti depressants as a treatment. Multiple studies are cited showing antidpressants barely having more effect than placebo.

From a first principles approach this makes sense too, big pharma profit from anti depressants, can't profit from almost every alternative approach, so anti depressants continue being proscribed/ used despite fairly convincing scientific evidence against them.

It then lists 7 causes - I've highlighted the ones that really stood out to me below and tried to relate them to poker too:

- Disconnection from meaningful work: Division of labour means that most people don't see fruits of their effort/ more and more jobs feel pointless in the modern world. It's tough to make poker 'meaningful' I guess but I think occasional charity drives and helping others on their journey where you can, as well as hopefully eventually using the resources you gain from the game in a somewhat meaningful way could be good here. For me personally this stable and hopefully making a small difference to some people has somewhat helped with this.

- Disconnection from other people: Self explanatory and fairly intuitive to most. Social media, disconnected world etc etc, we just don't have the real relationships our monkey minds want. This chapter gave me some food for thought personally, I think I've had quite shallow relationships these past couple of years so would like to work on this going forward. With poker in general this can be a big issue, again I think the community we have within bitB is so huge for this aspect.

- Disconnection from meaningful values : WHY you do what you do is normally for the wrong reasons these days, money, status, pride - not what we've been primed to feel good about evolutionary. We have intrinsic motives - we do things purely because we enjoy doing them, and extrinsic motives- we do things because we get something out of them.

EG football = intrinsic, investement banking job = extrinsic I guess. This one felt kind of obvious to me when I read this, it feels so much purer/cleaner to do something you genuinely get joy out of participating in that doing something to get something.
Tough to gel this one with poker if you don't enjoy playing, I mostly do, but I think looking at the rest of your life and making sure you are doing other things because you want to do them is important too.

- Disconnection from the Natural World: Human brains prefer looking at pictures of african plains than cities. Fairly simple and fairly intuitive to me, I've always been happier when I've spent a lot of time outside and amongst nature, and it's something I want to continue to prioritise going forward.

- Disconnection from a Hopeful or Secure Future:

I think this one is the hardest to gel with poker, and the modern world in general. We are bombarded with doomsday prophecies etc within poker, and then also within the wider world. A good friend of mine just avoids all news at this point because he feels he doesn't gain anything from it, and I'm inclined to adopt this approach.
With poker, I think the key thing is you can't really affect when it's going to be over. It is something I worry about, but accepting it's outside my control has helped me a lot. Getting a degree, being somewhat responsible with money, and working to ensure I improve quicker than the human players I guess is all that can be done on this front

This is already ridiculously long so I'll wrap up - but would fully recommend the book, lots of enlightening anecdotes and I really wish I read it sooner - much much more in there than what I highlighted above.

Would love to hear others opinions on anything above too.

Thanks mate - will definitely try this out in the summer - can do 5ks fairly well but any longer distance isn't great.

The subject is very interesting, even though personally I think Johann Hari is the biggest tool ever and I hope there will me book similair to this one written by someone else. He have done some very questionable things including plagiarism and attacking other journalists that he dislike anonymously, the irony. Still enjoyed the book despite this though. He was also on JRE 2-3 times if anyone is too lazy to read the book.

Mainly wanted to comment the "Disconnection from meaningful work". I always questioned this, i had this discussion with a few poker players over the years and I think it's very overlooked. I think its purpose is overrated, but also even if you think it's very important I think there is plenty of perspectives to look at that you actually do have a meaningful work. Especially you who are part of a stable/cfp program, you are helping people to make new friends and live changing money they potentially could never even make close to.

I can only speak for myself, but I think poker, the friends I met through it and the ability to travel and do whatever I want and so on influenced me a lot as a person. There's so many things I got interested in thanks to poker indirectly that I never would have thought about. Could rant about this for ages, but yeah think if people zoom out and think a bit there is defenitely a bigger picture.

I didn't do my due diligence on the author - quick google reveals he is a truly unideal bloke The book is still good though.

Yeah I agree with you though, I think at one point I stopped and made a list of all the things poker has allowed me to do that I might not have done otherwise and it was fairly obvious then. I guess meaningful in terms of enabling - self is kind of easy to argue, more in terms of enabling others I think it's harder - but as you mention you definitely can gain the resources to have a positive impact on other people.

Hey guys - poker is going well this month, I think up ~21k over 50k hands. Will make a proper update tomorrow after I close out the month, but played a lot at higher than usual average stake, and had some heat.

Tomorrow the bitB podcast will be returning with Sam Vousden aka European. We stopped doing these for a while, feels like everyone has a podcast now and the market is kind of saturated, but they are fun to do and seems like some people enjoy it at least, so going to get a few done next few months - alternating hosts a bit too.

Anyway, Sam is a sick sick guy, still only 26 (I think), cofounder of bitB tournament, and just all round nice guy to be around. Also might be quite good at these tournaments:



If anyone has any questions they want us to ask feel free to fire them in here or via PM, we'll be going live circa 5 CET.

February Update

Overall happy with how it went, increased my average stake a lot, 560nl this month which I guess is the highest it's ever been.

Felt a lot more comfortable playing 1k mostly probably due to having some heat there, almost all the way back to even lifetime which is nice. Hopefully can keep doing okay there, still trying to be very smart with when/ who I'm battling but there are a few regs I think I'm doing okay against now.

Volume is probably the thing I'm most happy with, according to HEM I played 114 hours this month. Once I add in study time/ coaching/ bitb stuff I think this is around the max I can do and felt some burn out at the end. I marked 250 hands this month and genuinely think I simmed/ reviewed every single one, and combined with living with one of the top 5 NL regs in the world guess I improved more than in any other month in a long time.

I think the key thing for me now is if I can avg 40k hands at 500nl, 3bb/100 it's always going to be a reasonable monthly EV. I haven't really done this so far in my career, playing a lot at lower tables and kinda making up for it with a higher winrate, which I don't think is really a good idea to rely upon long term - so keeping up this work ethic going forward will be the key aim.

Next month moving back to UK and have around 2.5 weeks off, so realistically only going to play around 20k hands - hopefully can keep the momentum going through the year now and maintain the good habits, and maybe even play some 2k before the end of 2020





missing ~2k from my other sites, so think probably about my best ever month, and only slightly heatering w/r :smile:

also just realised this was only 28 days so doubly happily with the volume actually, normally I guess we have an extra 3.

Glgl in March.

insane. gg

holy smokes you murdered this month good job man

very sick month mate wpwp

Outstanding results, jelous af. I see living with this mysterious nosebleeds crusher is already bearing fruit hope this
really happens. Gl with the rest of the year

super sick results george, really well deserved. keep it up and looking forward to the pod! <3

Thanks guys - also forgot to post that Darrell and I did a podcast with European yesterday too, on youtube - made the thumbnail myself so no hate plz :

This was a cracking read - your doing what a lot of us want to achieve in Poker, PlasticElephant.

Grats and gl.

CyM.

Nice month bud, well deserved. Hope the heat continues!

Impressive stuff

Wow. Very well done.

Bonkers progress lately! Vwp!

Thanks guys! I'll maybe write a proper update over next few days as world is crumbling around me.

But for now just a couple of hands where my opponent was like Darth Vader in the Phantom menace:

lmao some guy on party did this to me aswell, dunno what goes through these kids skulls sometimes

I hez nuts

Protection needed

so tilt lmao

gotta buff dat redline

and this is teh reason people who think like that will never progress as fast as others