I don't think people are understanding the reasons as to why to hire someone to do this kinda stuff.

Big businesses have entire teams of people to focus on booking flights/accommodation/amenities for their top guns for the simple reason that it's more cost effective to have someone earning $15/hr booking a flight, than their top thinker who is costing them $5k/hr spend an hour of his time book a flight/hotel etc.

I am pretty sure that if Pads spent those two hours a week studying a specific spot in his game, or doing whatever other studying he is doing it is going to be worth way more than $30 in the long run...

Think booking a flight is so fast that paying ppl for it seems meh. The food thing is personally sth i rly enjoy doing myself so might be from a non relatable standpoint that I say this but: try cooking with your main ingredients being chicken and rice, add a bunch of variable salad options to that. I could tell you three dishes all done in literally 20 min that are heathy af and taste like heaven. Pm, it really is simple and maybe u get to enjoy cooking too

There was an interesting article in the Guardian/Times or some paper that stated how even very high earners often did their own chores despite their time being far more valuable. There was a clear correlation between the people that spent money on their own time saving, even if they just relaxed or slept more with the extra time, and overall happiness. This article kind of summarises: https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0724161258.htm

That same point is made in the book "The Power of Focus" - why spend your time booking a flight when your time is worth $200/hr, why book the flight yourself when you can pay someone $20 an hour to do it.

But in reality as mentioned above you'd spend a fair bit of your time communicating everything to a PA and making sure they get it right etc. Plus you prob aren't spending a lot of time doing that sorta stuff anyway.

That all depends on how good your PA is... Anyone can be a personal assistant and just do jobs you ask them to do. A great PA will do the jobs without you even knowing there was a job to be done.

Have you ever made a long post about those times when you worked for PokerStrategy (I think?) and how you managed to break into poker professionalism? It would be super interesting to read, I'm not sure about your background but if you were working standard 40-hour weeks and managed to become a poker boss on the side it's really impressive. If you haven't written about it I'm sure a lot of people would love to read, there are thousands of people working on poker sites who still secretly dream of poker professionalism and only very, very, very few are able to pull it off.

Gl!

IN

in

Probably bits and bobs. A lot of it is a blur, but I'll try my best.

I was very, very, very into poker when I was 21, there was nobody I was more envious in the world from than people who were staked (will make another post about story here, remind me if I don't please! I was posting a lot on forums, watching all poker content, my life was poker for sure at this point. I had just graduated from Uni in Journalism, I was a pretty good writer at the time (better than now for sure!) and a guy who worked for PokerStrategy.com messaged me saying there was a job for the poker ecology team that he thought I would be good for because it was about understanding poker and making companies understand poker through presenting to them, writing papers for them etc.

Anyway, this was really exciting for me because it would 1) Appease friends+family 2) It would allow me to get a good salary that I intended to use on poker 3) It would be a job in something that I loved.

So I went for the interview and they were like why aren't you applying for a role as a poker writer for us, and I explained to them I wanted to do a bit more etc, anyway got the job somewhat easily and moved there the next month to Gibraltar.

The company was really, really, really great. I would say that 95% of the normal employees would never work for a better company again. Almost all the management are at big senior positions in companies like google. I learned so much in those 4-5 years about business and when I go into proper business with an office set up etc I think it is going to help me tremendously. The core of the company were Germans and well... Germans gonna German.

Anyway, I started in the poker ecology team for the first few years, basically trying to explain to people to wake up and think about the amateur/recreational players and that if we don't poker is going to die quickly!

When I went there I was playing HU cash games staked, I was also watching my house mate play Rush 400. I went there as a 20 year old kid who was used to making jokes with his friends and acting the idiot, I was always the idiot at school. I would always get good grades but teachers would sigh at me for messing about, in England if you're good at football you basically have the freedom to be as big a dick as you want because people will just suck up to you bit. Anyway, one day (around 2 weeks after moving there) my Czech flatmate and I went to pick up a poker set, I picked up the set which was really heavy and pretended to tie my lace so he could take the set and then was like "haaaaaa" you gotta carry it, he didn't say anything and I kept on acting like an inbetweener.

Anyway, during the next 2-3 weeks every night I would sit behind him when he played Rush400 and i would be this in every single spot "WOW, if we bet this he probably folds his whole range" and he was like "oh yeahhhhh" and we did it basically every pot. One time there was this guy who was a red pro called Mark Karam, he raised, bet, bet and bet something like 72259 and we shoved and he typed "folding aces, so obvious" I basically quit HU cash then and started to play 6m cash games.

We had lived together for 1 month in the company apartment and would move into separate apartments, he had a family etc. He told me one day that his impression of me because of the poker set move was really bad, that I looked really immature (he was 30+ in senior role) and I think from then on it really changed how I act with people I don't know, I am a lot slower to open myself up to them, act a lot more reserved/careful etc, I do as much as possible to be defensive to not be over the top and keep myself to myself a lot more, it was one of the first real life lessons I got from moving away I think. Can't really explain it well.

So I was working this job which was crazy interesting, really loved it and was in an amazing team. I started to make inroads in the company and become more interested in things. Pretty quickly I had a lot of respect from the company I think. People in important positions started trusting me with things that they didn't trust others to do and I really loved that. I quickly realised that something that motivates me is seeing senior people think that I'm competent and doing a really good job professionally gave me more satisfaction than even poker at that point.

Anyway, I would work something like 10-6pm, come home, have dinner and at like 8:30pm I would just load up cash games and start grinding, I started playing on ipoker because I loved watching training videos of regs battling, then moved to microgaming, little bit on stars and then a few other sites after.

Fast forward around 3-4 years I was now making between 10-30k/month playing poker, I was making videos for Pokerstrategy and I was actually now in charge of all poker content the site put out in English, which was basically everything. I decided who we hired, how much we paid them, planned their content, made sure it all went together blah blah, I was helping out in other parts of the company, but at this point I just had to give playing poker full time a try. I had moved a little bit further into helping control other parts of the company including English VIP's for the sites, I spoke to them and I just realised these guys were mostly super flawed in lots of ways, bad mindset, didn't study, lack of imagination etc and one day just said **** it. I knew it was dangerous because the years I had done at PokerStrategy meant I was on a really good track, I had great contacts and the smart people that I knew would go on to huge things liked me and would help me progress too, but at that time I didn't really care, all I wanted to do was be a supernova elite, that was basically my whole goal in life, I wanted to be a supernova elite, as long as I could do that, I didn't care about the rest.

So I moved to Hungary I guess in like April time (too late to start SNE, I wanted to do it properly from the start of the year) I was living in Szeged with my gf, nobody spoke English and it was pretty tough, I definitely didn't do enough to learn the language, immerse myself etc, I was just so dedicated to poker at the time. I literally ate/dreamt/ everything poker. I would be running sims whilst having breakfast (like actually) I had a room that I would lock myself away in and just grind and learn poker super hard.

Anyway, January came around, I found a grind house in Budapest with some really awesome guys and set off on January 1st the SNE grind, I think I started blogging about it in here. I was speaking to European about this yesterday. This was like just as people were trying to play GTO at the very start. I spoke with a lot of good players so would have little thoughts in my mind but they did me more harm than good, when I was focused and trying hard the thoughts would still be there and they would make me play pretty bad, I would become a huge station because of trying to think about pot odds etc and it would make me pretty sad playing like that.

What I would do is drink 2-4 smirnoff ice before a session instead and it make me super relaxed and have that little bit energy and bounce



Obviously sounds stupid but I was really enjoying grinding like this. Everything was going well, I was making good money, on pace for SNE, this is the life that I had strived for for so long, I was finally a PROPER poker pro.

I went away to a live tournament, busted it relatively deep, ITM day 3-4 or something and when I busted I was like ****kkkkkkkk tourneys, cant wait to get back on the grind. Woke up next day to the pokerstars beeping and my room mate on the live trip grinding, tried to turn over but kept hearing it, decided to just sit up and play. I only had my laptop so I opened the 33r, 215 warm up, 250 .fr 6max (<3333333333) and couple others. I played and won those 3 ^^ out of like 7 tournaments I regged, the warm up was bit at the time, like really big compared to now. I was like wtf, I just made basically as much as the SNE payment I was expecting over 1 year, wtf is this.

I went back and just grinded SNE though, like 2 weeks later it was anniversary million so I think I grinded this alongside like 7 tables of zoom or whatever and came 9th for 100k and was like jeeeeesssssssusssss. I would play more tournaments over the next couple of weeks and just kept binking huge stuff, I was a huge, huge luckbox but people were really terrible. It was very easy to chip up, everybody folded their whole range on the river and nobody knew who I was so I just played every pot for 1 month bluffing all in on basically every river. Was pretty fun People soon realised what was happening though and had to adjust.

Anyway, at this point I sacked off cash games and went on full MTT route with goal of number 1 in world on pocket fives by the end of the year. I can't remember exactly how long it took, I think within 6 months.

This says August https://uk.pokernews.com/news/2014/0...king-14781.htm and I guess anniversary was in like March? So from starting MTT's it took me 6 months or so. I absolutely loved it, I played every day and just ****ing loved it, it was a new challenge, super exciting.

Anyway, regarding PokerStrategy story I remember..

I was playing a session with now CEO (the guy who I made carry the poker set) and stayed out at his house, he qualified overnight to WSOP through full tilt (this was big thing at the time) I woke up in the morning and read it was black friday. ****!!!! I woke him up like "errrrrrrrrmmmm you gotta wake up" he replies "pads I won wsop seat on full tilt last night" really excitedly, I replied "yeahhhhhh we gotta talk about that" he got up, everybody was summoned to the office and **** went down!

Wrote all above very randomly and we went off at lot of tangents, but yeah basically cliffs from Pstrat

- went in very immature, no real business acumen
- learned a lot about self, went from being very loud and immature to pretty reserved and very careful around new people
-learned a lot from very very smart people there about critical thinking + how businesses should actually operate
- no matter how much I enjoyed it and how good I was doing, poker would always be the thing I REALLY loved and couldn't allow myself to go up the career path without trying to be a poker pro, I didn't want to look back when I was 50 and ask what if


If any other questions about it ask away, as I said, I went off on bit of a tangent.

Cool story for sure, thanks for taking the time to write it! I didn't know you advanced so much at Pokerstrategy as well, I just vaguely remember how you came out of nowhere and won the Big 162 like 3 times in 3 weeks on Sunday or something ridiculous like that and someone told me that it's some Pokerstrategy employee, haha.

I might have visited the Gibraltar HQ around the you worked there, I think it was around December 2010. We played a heads-up match with Johan Storåkers (a bit older Swedish pro) and were shown around for a few days. I just made videos for the Finnish site at the time, for maybe like 2 years before moving on to Cardrunners, but I always had a really good impression of the company as well.

Anyway, despite all the PartyPoker ranting it's always a pleasure to read your blogs!

#DREAMTEAM

strong first post

Melvin <3

For any non gib people, can anybody name one of the very most famous 2p2ers in the picture?

I've got Boris Johnson for the far right

Far right could also be Brendon Hartley's (Formula one driver) long lost twin

Looks from sweden

1/3rd of the way there!

Hey Bing!

Patrick Leonard


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hahahaahahahahhaha <3

Στάλθηκε από το SM-J500FN μου χρησιμοποιώντας Tapatalk

fukkin manlets when will they learn

If you have any recipes for me, that would be awesome !
Sorry for the derail pads, really enjoying your threads

Might as well post them here, dont think pads will mind a tiny derail.. :-)

Was in partypoker offices all day yesterday, lots of really exciting stuff going on, some really good ecology things but as usual can't really say anything just yet.

Next week going to Budapest to sign a deal on exciting new project, will post about it in here once all confirmed. Should be pretty good!

This weekend consists of coaching, meeting, dinner, movie, lunch, meeting, grind. Nothing really exciting.

Next week have to start pushing all the goals I wanted to be prepared for.