What's the best poker book you have ever read? And best non-poker book?

Tough choice. I'm thinking it might be Phil Gordon's Little Green Book: Lessons and Teachings in No Limit Texas Hold'em because it really hit home I remember, but as I said earlier in this thread, books aren't that helpful anymore, though I did get a lot of benefit out of Jared Tender's The Mental Game of Poker: Proven Strategies for Improving Tilt Control, Confidence, Motivation, Coping with Variance, and More.

Non-poker book is either The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, or some book by Mark Twain.

Your top 5 TV shows and movies?
How/where did you get your cats?
Any quick thoughts about online poker session length and breaks, based on your/your students experience?
Thanks!

It's hard to think about my top 5 of all time so the best I can do is some of the 5 I can remember or best 5 I've seen lately.

TV shows:
1) Mr. Robot. Hacktivism, computer and tech stuff, coolness. Love it.
2) House, MD. The coolest doctor there is. Good stuff.
3) The Wire. I think I've watched all episodes 4 or 5 times by now, great stuf.
4) 24. There's a few ways to make fun of this show, but I enjoy it.
5) True Detective. Season 1 was a lot better than season 2. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as detectives over crazy murders happening is an enjoyable watch.

Movies:
1) The Big Short. Not so much my favorite movie ever, but one I've watched and really enjoy. It's about the housing market/subprime mortgage crisis we faced a few years back and shows how some super smart people figured it was going to happen and bet against the markets to win a ton.
2) Primer or Timecrimes. I just love of the idea of time travel in general, which I kinda think will be possible in the distant future, and these are two great movies about time travel. Primer was made on like a $7500 budget, which is amazing, so if you like low budget films it's a very good one.
3) The Man From the Earth. Awesome movie about the story of a man who lets his fellow professor friends know he's actually 15,000 years old and just doesn't die.
4) Sicko. I don't think this is one of my favorite 5 movies ever, but I just saw it again recently and it's interesting how the American health care system is just fundamentally screwed compared to some other nations.
5) Die Hard 1-5. Fun to watch.
5b) Any Kevin Smith movie gets a special nod, must be added to any list of my favorites since I've always loved Kevin Smith movies. The first three (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy) are better than most of the recent ones.

I was living in Vegas and I saw this post in OOT about his bengal cat and I really liked the breed and wanted my own. They're a cool breed. Bengal means they are actually only 4 generations from their ancestors who are wild cats, the Asian leopard cat. His bengal seemed cool and I was just interested so I went and bought one. When picking which cat, the woman said "just get two!" and in like 2 seconds I said "lol ok 2 plz."

In hindsight it's more normal and typical to just go to the local cat place and get normal cats (plus bengals for me cost $500 for each, yikes! but I had the grind money to spend on it then so I did, heh), and I'll probably get normal ones next time when mine go to Kitty Heaven, but for now, I'm loving mine. :-)


I wouldn't call myself a true expert in this matter, but I do have a pretty extensive history in doing database reviews, and most players were notorious for having their longest and biggest losing sessions just being sessions where they played too long and couldn't leave the tables because they were running bad.

My preference, and in my best days of grinding, was to max out every session at 2 hours. Wake up at 10am, get ready for the day and play from 11am-1pm, then take a break and play from 3pm-5pm, then get dinner and before you get too tired end your night from 9pm-11pm or so.

I generally didn't take very many breaks during a session but I don't see any problems doing so, could be a good thing, it's just not something I really did. I tend to reach an odd state of hyper focus when I'm near a computer (thanks to tech obsession I guess) where I just can't lose my focus if I'm interested. Malefiicus can share that one from when we lived on the boat. When we were grinding he would be stumbling around and trying (but failing obv) to dance, while signing songs and shaking around, while I'm sitting there locked, staring at my screen and only thinking poker.

heh, I'm watching this again right now. This part seemed relevant.

One actor said:

"I just had to wire Bear and Deutsche seventy thousands dollars. It’s like two plus two equals….

Hey Keyser good to hear you're back grinding and getting healthy in life =)

It's cool to open up ssnl and see something familiar, 2p2 has changed when you gotta explain the well lol. Reading posts like yours and others you mentioned really help d me keep up with the guys that were actually studying and working on their game. Really do appreciate that, and not in a cynical or selfish way

How has your coaching approach changed on the technical side through the years? Never gotten coaching before, but from watching videos it seems like the way coaches talk has evolved from explaining concepts and hand reading towards more in depth theory and work away from the tables. Do you feel like that translates for your students effectively?
-I guess that leads into how the student and overall poker knowledge has evolved

What do you see yourself doing in a few years? Both poker and life; what have you learned from volunteering?

Boats and water are awesome, have you considered traveling and playing poker outside USA?

How much did you bet on livb fight?

Who The f is Rick?

tyvm!!!

yeah 2p2 just isn’t like it used to be. When I was watching The Big Short and saw that great description of current 2p2 I had to make it a video. This’ll probably be removed from youtube at some point, heh, but it’s worth a watch:



My poker coaching is about the same as it usually was. I mostly work with beginners and low stakes players so I’m not after 200nl+ crushers who need to know the super advanced stuff. The poker world is just drastically different these days and like you said far too many of the training sites and coaches are just focused on targets that aren’t good at all for a lot of new poker players. I guess they’re just for people who have been playing the game already for 10+ years and people trying to learn a way to still win at games that are a lot more difficult now.

I haven’t really been a member of any sites for a while though, so I don’t know much about how they are. That’s just the feeling I get. As for how this translate to my students directly, it is common I find people far too concerned with exploitation and balance stuff at 25nl, so I think the poker development industry isn't established for early level poker improvement anymore, and that's an error. Someone will probably change that eventually.


I don’t really know that much about how overall poker knowledge has evolved since I still play on weak American sites and don’t follow much about the tough Euro sites except for knowing they’re a lot harder now.

I do think videos and training sites and 2p2 in general are just not the same as they used to be. A lot of people looking for coaching and training sites just aren't looking for the right thing. When we all watched videos we were still learning the fundamentals and learning how to improve at the game. Now people just want to hear about game theory optimal bull**** and exploitation and balance crap that doesn’t even apply at uNL or SSNL yet.

A tangent, but poker coaching also seems like the most corrupt market there is. So corrupt I don’t even want to be a part of it anymore and after the month is up I won’t have a thread up anymore. It just feels like coaching is largely coming from people adopting the “if you can’t do, teach” mentality and can’t win at poker anymore so they try to coach instead.

I think poker will always be a part of my life, just not the biggest part anymore. This is good and important for me to actually be a (mostly) normal person who socializes like normal people do and have a regular normal job in which I contribute to the world. On a lot of nights I’ll still probably come home and grind since it’s hard to give away the profits (especially since I plan to take only the job I love and not the one that pays the most like most people do), so I’ll still be in poker, just not basing my living off it. In this way I think my injury was probably actually a good thing for my life.

As for what I see myself doing exactly, I just don’t know. I still love literature and writing so I'll probably just try but fail at that. :-) I also love libraries so I would love to work in one. But it’s hard getting jobs at libraries so I don’t know if that will be an option. We’ll see. I’ll keep my eyes open.

I haven’t learned much from my volunteer work really. I guess it’s just learning a little about this real world place that I’ve never been a part of, and how to try to work with people directly. I prefer my old world, it was better, but I guess I’ll get used to the real one.

Strangely I’ve never really been into traveling that much. The boat was great, going to Ireland and Italy was great. But tbh I prefer just being at home and hanging out with my cats, lol. I’m not very cool IRL. :-)

Haha I didn’t actually bet on him but I was obviously rooting for him hard. Elliot Roe had a podcast with livb recently and I was talked about!!!! Apparently since I had worked with Elliot before and helped get his therapy mental game improvement work into poker, he was a reason why Elliot, who is also great with MMA fighters, played a big part in helping livb win, and since I knew livb he was a big part of why they worked together. When I was told I had an influence on his win I mostly just assumed it was a joke meant to make me feel good and happy, but they’re mostly serious, lol. Here’s the part of the podcast about me:



And the whole podcast: http://www.pokermindcoach.com/episod...s-jc-alvarado/

Lol I’m surprised you know that. It was just a random gimmick account I made to make stupid jokes I didn’t want to make under Keyser. No trolling or anything dumb, mostly just a lot of dumb jokes. :-) And I don’t even know why I chose Rick. It had to do with something I can’t remember, heh.