Hi Everyone:

Here's a link to an Upswing Poker article about the effects of coffee that I strongly disagree with:

https://upswingpoker.com/coffee-poke...e5af7fe8eaf878

Here are some other coffee articles from the Life Extension Foundation:

https://www.lifeextension.com/magazi...ealth-benefits

https://www.lifeextension.com/magazi...ects-of-coffee

https://www.lifeextension.com/magazi...cular-benefits

https://www.lifeextension.com/magazi...m-daily-coffee

All comments welcome.

Best wishes,
Mason

PS: While I think highly of Upswing Poker, I think they made an error with this article.

Check Here for results related to Coffee and anxiety. Even if coffee is associated with longer life (assuming that it isn't simply a correlation without causation), coffee definitely has an adverse effect on poker.

Anecdotally I quit poker 2 months ago and the anxiety I would get from my 3-4 daily cups of coffee has been erased. I don't feel lethargic later in the evening, nor do I feel groggy "until I've had my first coffee."

Caffeine's perceived performance increase could also be due to a reversal of withdrawal

The article talking about 5+ cups of coffee a day having less chance of strokes fails to mention whether those same coffee consumers suffer from other health problems. And again, we don't know whether there are other causes (eg. perhaps anyone who can afford to drink 5+ cups of coffee a day has a higher income).

Can the coffee be decaf and still have the health benefits? I drink 3-4 cups a day of that plus 1-2 cups of green tea.

Mason, after a quick google of the Life Extension Foundation, I found this article

From the New York Times article (referring to The Life Extension Foundations selling of these so-called anti aging pills:
So, I wouldn't necessarily trust this source if it's going to be the only website that you cite on the matter.

Hi Venice:

Well, I don't think much of the New York Times, plus these type of articles are usually written by someone with little expertise in the field.

However, that doesn't really matter. If you go to the end of each article that I linked to, you'll see a reference list. Here's the start of one ofthese lists:

References

Patil H, Lavie CJ, O’Keefe JH. Cuppa joe: friend or foe? Effects of chronic coffee consumption on cardiovascular and brain health. Mo Med. 2011 Nov-Dec;108(6):431-8.

Siasos G, Oikonomou E, Chrysohoou C, et al. Consumption of a boiled Greek type of coffee is associated with improved endothelial function: The Ikaria Study. Vasc Med. 2013 Mar 18.

Kokubo Y, Iso H, Saito I, et al. The impact of green tea and coffee consumption on the reduced risk of stroke incidence in Japanese population: The Japan Public Health Center-Based Study Cohort. Stroke. 2013 Mar 14.

So, if you really wanted to find out something as to where the recommendations and conclusions come from, you can start here. It should keep you busy. For example, the list that that I started above actually has 87 references.

Best wishes,
Mason

From the Patil H, Lavie CJ, O'Keefe JH study:

Am I missing something?

I don't see why studies are needed if we all use it and know many others who do too.

I can focus on the details of how my thought processes decay in poker as I get tired. Slower reaction time is like a keynote to the instability, I also use fewer cases when taking measure during hands. So I'll be prone to not explore different bet sizes and such, and so on....

Coffee pushes my psyche in the opposite direction when facing a state of being tired. It doesn't always work, and I'm aware people feel a drag as it wears off, I really don't so much.

Based on everything I've stated, do you feel compelled to dive into the hypothesis that coffee is extremely bad for poker?

i'm a big fan of nyt but agree that journalists are almost never experts and highly dependent upon who they deem an expert and since they aren't experts themselves they are poor judges of qualifications

read the upswing thing, seems not to be based in anything, like it's just a clickbaity opinion piece meant to drive sales for his coaching and topic seems on point since his specific niche appears to be dealing with stress

i think stress is a huge factor in poker, i've definitely played my worst when i was taking shots and terrified of putting money in unless it was the nuts but don't think coffee has ever hurt my game

or better stated, if my game had ever suffered as a result of coffee, then I'd clearly had many other issues going on such as playing tired, in a poor mental state, setting a bad table image (beer drinking bro gets more 4bet calls with JTo than young man coffee), etc etc

author also acknowledges caffeine withdrawal, so this isn't really about poker at all, it's just a lazily written and unsubstantiated article based on his unqualified opinion advocating everyone stop drinking coffee entirely, it's not about not drinking while playing but not drinking full stop

if a scientist or research institution says that and shows why i'll begin to take it seriously, but i'm still not going to stop drinking coffee or tea, something humanity has been doing for millenia without much issue

Hi Venice:

I think you are. I suspect that the study. or other studies referenced, showed that drinking two or fewer cups of coffee per day, a moderate amount, compared to drinking no coffee was good for you. But drinking three or more cups of coffee per day, more than a mosderate amount, didn't make much difference relative to drinking a moderate amount.

Mason

This point alone basically invalidates your point. If you're going to do it regardless if any future evidence shows it to be detrimental, you clearly have a bias.

no dude, this isn't how it works

there's a difference between denying smoking is harmful vs agreeing smoking is harmful and continuing to smoke

people do lots of things knowing it's bad for you, in this case it would be coffee for me - but if there was enough compelling evidence of something tangible I would certainly quit much as I quit smoking and binge drinking

what i said is that I'm not going to just cease a part of my life because some rando without any scientific background who markets himself as an anti-stress guru has a gut feeling that it's bad for you

Do you really think your logic is consistent with these two statements?

yes venice, the world is not binary, everything is a spectrum

i smoked for years knowing it was bad for me because i enjoyed smoking and found it a maneagable risk

later on i changed my mind and decided the cons outweighed the pros and went through hell quitting

it really seems like you're inventing a binary world view just to fight with total strangers

if you're going to do that, at least pick a better topic other than whether or not they'd quit coffee if they discovered drinking it downgraded your chance of getting a heart attack by 50 to 100 in a 100k, that's a pretty scary "it doubles the chance" type of number that in reality only sounds a lot worse than it really is

now if i didn't like coffee that could be enough information or if it were bumped up to 2k out of 100k then i may consider dropping coffee altogether - before you attack these numbers, i wish to assure you they are fabricated out of thin air for rhetorical purposes only so i'll save you a response with the true heart attack chances

be better

they just ran out of clickbaity stuff to post

Exactly.

---

I find it slightly inappropriate that Upswing publishes such a piece without having any real expertise on the topic. It's on the level of rainbow press.

I don't really have a clue, either. But I think it has different effects on different people. Think about stronger stimulants such as methylphenidate. The results are very mixed on "normal" people. Some students swear by it for exams and such without having been diagnosed with ADD. For others without ADD, it just doesn't work. However, for people with ADD, methylphenidate overwhelmingly increases attention span and a variety of other measures of cognitive performance.

Don't get me wrong, I fully realize caffeine and Ritalin are very different. Just trying to drive home the point that psychoactive drugs have different effects on different people, especially pychologically but to a lesser degree physically as well.

I just found this thread, which is ironic because I'm enduring a brutal caffeine-withdrawal headache right now after embarking on day 1 of quitting coffee.

I usually abstain from regular caffeine drinking, but I started drinking daily this winter. I was up to 3 cups/day and I know for me the short term result of using that much was: stained teeth, worse sleep, and increased irritability.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the info in Mason's links is 100% accurate, for me I'm better off without coffee.

Hi Money:

Or you can drink decaf.

Best wishes,
Mason

Levels of addiction are lower than one would think. Basically as soon as you have the notion that you are moody or not productive if you don't get a cup of coffee in the morning then this already means your body has developed a dependency.

I'd also be very wary of articles that say "x amount of coffe/water/wine/... is good for you".
This is highly individual and long term (negative) effects can take quite some time before they become obvious - but the negative effects start way earlier than that. (Everybody has that friend who smoked as a teen and looked fine the first decade...but who now looks like he's 30 years older than you. It's not the tobacco/tar of the today that did it to him. It's the compund effects that set in starting on day one).

Personally I've seen both: negative/dependency effects of long-term, low-level caffeine intake and effects of short-term caffein 'abuse'.

For the first: as a kid we lived 2 years in the US. Back then caffeinated sodas were cheap and the only other options were (expensive) fruit juices and flat water. After those 2 years I went back to drinking 'regular' fare in germany (carbonated water, fruit juices, non-coffeinated lemonade,...) and developed withdrawal symptoms. At first I thought it was just jet-lag, but this persisted for weeks on end until I just happened to pick up a coke at some party and the headaches were instantly gone. (Pretty convinced that every kind in the US today is a caffeine junkie without knowing it)

For the second: I was at the end of my PhD thesis and had already started working a full time job in parallel.
I was chugging energy drinks and inhaling candy bars non-stop to get the 16-18 hours of output every day. My health was not a pretty sight after 6 months of this and I needed a full 2 months to recover afterwards.

Hi antialias:

I read your post and it sounds to me that your issue may be sugar and not caffeine. But suppose I'm wrong and it is caffeine. Then why don't you drink decaffenated coffee. Now you can have the health benefits of coffee without the caffeine.

Best wishes,
Mason

Probably not as sugar levels didn't change - only coffeine levels. (Fruit juices don't have noticeably less sugar than carbonated sodas)
In my case it's not really an issue as I don't even like coffee. So "quitting" after these episodes was easy as anything. In the first one I just needed to identify that it was withdrawal symptoms and then I just decided to wait it out. In the second instance after the deadline was achieved there was no reason to keep on chugging that crap.

In hindsight using coffeine at all to get stuff done was not a smart move as this could have easily ended up much worse than 'merely' having arrythmias for a while.

So nowadays coffe is like alcohol to me - a social drink I might have after going to dinner with some friends, but it would never occur to me to brew up any at home.

I agree with the original article that there's no reason you can't have enough energy for your day without resorting to artificial uppers. Excercise. A reasonable diet. It actually works.
If you do need chemicals just to get you going on a daily basis then that probably means your "work-life-balance" (or whatever the buzz-term for that is this year) is on a level beyond what your body can sustain on its own. And that can't be healthy in the long run.

I think you’re missing the whole point. If you don’t want to drink coffee that’s fine. No one says you have to. If the caffeine bothers you then if you want to drink decaf that’s also fine. But to just make a blanket statement that coffee is terrible, as the author of the article did, is wrong when there are now lots of scientific studies showing its benefls. Also notice that at the end of the article the author is trying to hustle students which helps to explain why he finds coffee, and probably lots of other things, so terrible.

Best wishes,
Mason

Coffeine isn't terrible - if not abused or used to the point where you continually have a level of coffeine in your blood.
I.e. the point at which your body will start to adapt to, what in effect is a nervous system stimulant (or "poison", dependent on your definition of the word and how much you want to put it in the corner of hyperbole)

That level is easily reached by a daily morning cuppa Joe. The time until the body gets 100% rid of any ingested substance is on the order of 2-3 days. So 2 cups a week is probably not going to affect you long term.
Any more and you're risking effects (whether these manifest or not may differ from person to person - just like with alcohol).

So, no. I'm not for banning coffeine or somesuch. But the article in the OP does get some of the effects it has on the system right (even though it does so in a totally over-the-top black/white way)...and I feel it is worth pointing out that long term effects will manifest at levels that are way below what the average person would consider 'high caffein consumption'.

As you get older your heart doesn't process substances as well. Coffee never bothered me as a kid but now I drink about 3 ounces only in the morning with boiling water. Helps first thing and no negative impact for sleep. Like many of you I enjoyed it during poker and ruined a many a night's sleep.

Coffee article is garbage. The author has taken two topics they clearly know little to nothing about and probably spliced them together during a coffee break.

For example:

Most people should rightly screw their faces up at claims like this.

Can only speak from personal experience.

Had to quit my beloved espresso and green tea because it was messing up my stomach and giving me GERD. The GI doc said caffeine is a major, major cause.

But I was already beginning to suspect that caffeine was causing energy level fluctuations throughout the day. I'd randomly start yawning, feeling really sluggish, getting headaches. Basically needing to redose on caffeine--I was having withdrawals. It was messing up my mood too. Is it really ideal to feel shitty until you've had your caffeine fix?

Haven't had a drop of caffeine in 3+ months now and all those things went away and I routinely go 18+ hrs straight being awake with nary a yawn or feeling tired and I don't have too much idle time in between. I often get up at 4am, sometimes even earlier, and withing 15 mins I'm ready to work. Don't even really feel sleep intertia anymore.

I really really miss having a cup of good green tea or a homemade iced latte but I am 100% convinced I'm better off without caffeine. I will trade consistent energy levels with spiky ones and the concomitant effects on mood any day.