is it poker that causes these issues or do people already have underlying problems and just happen to magnify them through poker....cant drive drunk then blame your car when you get into an accident

**** man, tomorrow's Sunday and I don't know where I see myself. Life is wide open right now. I think five year plans are kind of silly anyway. Do you remember what you wanted and what you thought was important five years ago? How much of it aligns with your values now?

Poker I think is very likely to end up solved or near-solved, and everyone who hasn't solved it stops playing for any serious money. I don't know if five years is the correct time horizon for that, but it seems plausible.

Pokerwise I can't think of one in particular. I remember good pieces of stuff I read but not really any advice that stuck with me. Lifewise I'd guess it's probably "If you lend a friend $20 and lose both, it was worth it." Poker players tend to scale this one up a bit.

I guess curry. I like a lot of different foods when the mood strikes me right, but I love North African and South Asian spices, so curry covers both. Starting hands? Come onnnnnnnnnnnn

Best was definitely winning the EPT. Worst was probably being eliminated from contention by the third heat of the Premier League. They did my bust-out interview with me right then, even though I had another heat to play.

I think I've told this one before, but one year coming back from Europe I ran out of cash and was pretty busto in general. I ended up staying at the airport overnight because I couldn't afford a hotel. I was in the lobby of the Citizen M at Schipol, they had a cafe open all night so I bought tea and cookies and mooched internet all night. At like midnight I two-tabling some absurd HUPLO fish. Like really really ridiculous, guy was open-sitting and probably 3-betting 25% and checking every card he didn't like. I just kind of zoned and played all night and won 6K or something. Then at 6 am he quit me and I wandered into the lobby bathroom and took off my shirt and started shaving. Two minutes in the guy walked in to clean it and just sort of looked at me and shrugged and went about his day. The whole thing just seemed absurd and surreal.

Degen stories are better told in person, ask Anton about the pick-up with him and Carter Phillips in Berlin, that was a pretty fun one :P

I would try to learn another game or another skill. I think there is still quite a bit of upside to MTTs, but you're in a situation with a lot of uncertainty, in that you have an unclear ceiling for poker, you are unclear about a long term plan, and it's unclear what sort of long-term plans will be viable because the long-term health of poker itself is unclear. I think having a wider decision tree to choose from is better than a deeper one. But I could just be biased because I'm getting out of the game and thinking about alternatives a lot.

$250/hour. I am still deciding whether or not I will take new students as I try to distance myself from poker. That seems an awful lot like hanging around the pub after quitting drinking.

If I do, I will probably have to cap myself to a certain number of hours per week to make sure I am giving myself plenty of time to spread my butterfly wings.

I think poker is in the top echelon of jobs that would cause these issues. The act of playing poker is so intensive in terms of using willpower to keep yourself from doing things your monkey brain wants you to do. I know for me and almost every student I've ever coached that the biggest marker between playing good and playing bad is how often we call on the river, for instance. And so by using up all your willpower points on poker, you're left with way fewer to use on the other aspects of your life like making sure you sleep enough or not drinking all the time or whatever. It's not that I necessarily blame poker, it's just that playing a lot of it is going to correlate with a person not doing the things they know are good for them.

I guess the overly simplistic way to put it is that if you took the two people who scored the same on scales of emotional/mental/physical health and made one of them get a job as a whitewater rafting guide and one of them became a poker player and then tested them again three years later, I would bet every cent I own that the poker player would score significantly lower in all three categories.

Also, very nice job on the thread title by the way.

solid post hobo

What is the worst downswing you had?

To what extent do you feel your poker results were related to your physical/mental health?

In the latter half of your career how many study hours did you put in compared to the former half? What is your favourite/most effective way to study?

What percentage of players would you guess are better off as a whole by playing poker?

Congratulations for a great career in poker and best of luck in whichever path you choose!

congrats on a good run at the pokers. i think you will find a lot of success in whatever you choose next.

you've posted a ton of good threads that got people thinking and i think it's this cerebral (i dont want to say unorthodox) process of learning where you consider things other people don't or won't that will make you kick butt at whatever gets you happy.

also, i always hated having you at my table cuz you had this crazyman image but seemed to be more solid in my presence and nothing in poker makes me more upset than facing a decision to bluffcatch such a player.

speaking as a recreational poker player who is probably washed up, i think you will be very happy on the other side. a clean break will do you good but 5 years from now when you're bossing it up somewhere else you will find new fun things about poker when seeing it through another lens.

gg

Good luck Ben - always enjoyed your contributions to the forum(s).

OT

Thanks Clayton. You're one of the OGs from MTTc that has made this transition successfully, so it's nice to hear that you think I'll make it to the other side!

I never kept great records, I would guess ~100K including live stuff.

A huge amount of feedback both ways. The worst downswing of my life came after a break-up that ****ed me up for a while. And when poker is going poorly I start to question myself a lot and it's easy to spiral downward.

I studied a lot more in my early days than my later days. I liked to do deep dive stuff by hand mostly, I feel like I retained a lot better when I hammered out the math myself vs running stuff through a calculator.

If you count people who spend lots of time in the casino playing low stakes, then it's a very small %. If you're talking about people for whom poker is their primary means of survival, I'd guess it's probably very high. Part of the problem with this sort of question is that while there are probably a lot of people who grind out, say, 35-50K/year in EV for whom moving into another field would be extremely costly (having to take a big paycut and freedom cut), that doesn't necessarily mean poker was the best use of their time, it just means they've invested lots of time and now the opportunity cost of switching is higher. I'd guess there are a lot of people from about the mid-point of the profitable grinders on up who could have a happier life doing something else, but they'd have to wade through uncertainty and take a short term happiness hit, and lots of people can't or won't make the leap.

Cheers man. Those are great answers. Best of luck!!

gg man, one of the true heroes of the game. loved your podcast w joey, you looked happy with your life, you deserve it.

good moment to quit the game if you have the means to stay above until you find something else to fill your time with.

hope you find what you`re looking for (yn)

Thanks for answering my drunken post!

Good luck. Ive been lurking since 2007 and have read many of your strategy posts. Thanks.

RIP

good night sweet prince

etc

Top 3 restaurants in vancouver?

My favourites, not necessarily the top fine dining spots or whatever

1) Vij's and it's not close
2) Irori. Quiet little sushi place, fairly basic as far as variety goes, but prepared with skill and fresh delicious ingredients and they play classical music. Very relaxing.
3) East is East. They have great food and excellent chai and a reasonably priced all you can eat option that lets you taste a bunch of awesome dishes. They use organic and ethically sourced meat as well, which is pretty important to me.

I just listened to a podcast of you discussing your first blog post on mental illness:

http://www.thinkingpoker.net/2012/11...en-wilinofsky/

Thank you for bringing some light to the struggles (often silent due to prejudices) that face the many individuals effected by mental illness. If you do not know someone directly afflicted by mental illness, you're assuredly within one more degree of separation from someone who is. The more we discuss it, the better the public perception becomes.

Judging from some of the responses from 2p2ers here (I don't post/lurk often), you have also made a heck of a positive difference for a lot of people.

All the best in the future.

Will this hero make a cameo at WCOOP?

Hey buddy! I been trough the exactly the same as you
Good luck on moving on with your life, its quite hard to be honest if you ask me.. First of all its hard finding a job that pays out the same as poker with professional poker player on your cv
But it has it joys, first of all you can enjoy weekends, and also not think about beeing down bunchs in makeup or so
I remember you from the tables from years ago
What you plan on doing now? If you feel like talking, hit me on skype !
good luck fella!

Looks like Ben has been playing WCOOPS. Retired but not retired.

I hear being retired is the best way to make millions in this game so congrats in advance