My best friend is a dj in las vegas. Last night we were talking and he was telling me how he's mastered crowd energy. He said when he's on stage he has a heightened peripheral sense of what the crowd is feeling, and he lets that direct his playlist. I thought, "I know that feeling, i have it at the table".

He felt strongly that this was a sensitivity which had to be earned through experience. He said it was the hard way, but the only way. The only way to be sure that you had achieved balance through contrast. Then you can allow yourself to know. Doubtlessness. An absurdly arrogantly/humble doubtlessness.

Imo, it's this trending toward doubtlessness that is the single most important factor in a player's evolution. It drives everything. It is an inclusive catalyst to his growth and understanding. Let's face it, poker is personal as fuck. It forces you face to face with your own insecurities. You either energize that insecurity by remaining overly-insistent and protective of your paradigm, or you surrender into more balanced lines of sight. Option 1 commences futility, option 2 ignites a vertical acceleration in your consciousness.

We're afraid of doubtlessness b/c we believe it to be reckless and arrogant. This is distorted. When doubtlessness is not being used to compensate for fear, it's a recipe for accuracy and total humility. Justifying the fear in your heart requires nothing of you. To become truly doubtless risks everything. Everything you thought you knew about yourself is surrendered, daily, for the chance to explore the possibility of something more real, more true, more balanced. Arrogance is stagnant, contracted. Doubtlessness is super-accelerated living.

The future breed is intuitive, and therefore doubtless. They're doubtless because intuition exists before the distortion of fear. Intuition is not always objectively accurate -- not even close in the linear sense. But it governs a process of vertically accelerated re-balancing in the subjectivity that is unrivaled by the linear mind. It expands through multi-dimensional avenues faster than linearity can.

Intuition is not in opposition to analysis, It is inclusive of analysis. It is the subconscious integration of understanding how to detect avenues of maximal benefit, using an internal balance point as its light-house. This balance exists inside each of us, and can only be blocked by arrogance. The future breed is among us. Choose your paradigms wisely, and make sure you're doing it for yourself.

<3

If you want to make your hand history reviews more efficient, start analyzing them from your peak emotional states. Peak states occur when you relax into a subtler frequency domain. When you are less contracted, you can naturally expose more distortion in your thought processes.

Make it a conscious choice that the next time you stumble yourself into a great mood, you're going to review your last 3000 hands. Do a >25bb pot filter and mark all hands that you're not positive you played correctly. Dont bitch out. Every hand that you're not positive on, mark it. Get really honest. If it hurts a little, it's good. Know that it's good b/c you're busting through the thresholds of your old paradigm. You're expanding. You're challenging bias head on. Get used to that feeling, reassociate it and invite it. Leave with refined perspectives on hands that previously hurt to look at. Your game will thank you.

Volume is really overrated. This isn't excuse not to play hands, it's an invitation to hold yourself to a more inclusive standard of balance. When things are left unhandled in your personal life, they filter into your game. You become inaccurate, bias, distorted. Hands played from here will offer diminished returns.

Give attention to the circumstances and relationships in your life that are demanding balance. Make them a priority and don't rescind. Know that you're increasing your winrate by handling your stress, and know that you can handle your stress just by responding to life from your integrity. Play half the volume with double the winrate, and close the books every month with results that you're proud of, on and off the tables. Study more when you're running bad. Help your girlfriend handle shit when she's overwhelmed. Refuse to engage in negativity. Steady yourself in an inner balance that is unchallenged by the winds of life.

Then sit down and play your fucking heart out.

Are u still playing poker? Plans to make vids again?

Nice thread

i currently play 2knl on soft sites. i have no contract with rio for future videos at the moment.

Nick you say you play 2knl on soft sites...Can you tell us how is it possible to put in decent volume at 2knl if you don t play on stars. Even if you combine 888,Tilt and Party( if you consider these soft) it is very hard to get enough action, so which other sites can you get action at 2knl?

You'll basically trade volume for winrate. Winrates of over 10bb/100 at 2knl are currently achievable. I am not interested in revealing the sites that this holds true for, for obvious reasons.

25k hands a month is more than enough volume at >10bb/100. The variance is substantially less over small sample sizes with a winrate that high.. it's very hard to have a losing month.

I respect your answer Nick, and I also respect your skills to get more than 25k hands in without playing on any of the 4 mentioned sites at 2knl and having a wr more than 10bb. Most people have problems putting in 30k hands a month at 1k and 600 without those 4 platforms... Keep crushing and gl.

It's common to find someone who's interested in personal development. It's rare to find someone that leverages from the level of his own predefinitions.

Predefinitions are the subtlest assumptions that spin the web of a person's reality. They are responsible for the contextual bias of the subjectivity. We all predefine our realities before we even engage with life experientially. The distortional biases become so subtle at the level of predefinitions that they go almost completely undetected, even in people who are more or less "booked up" on self development. Naturally, that which remains undetected cannot be properly challenged for its credibility. In my experience this results in a deluded sense of contextual progress for the self-developer. It's like wiggling around in a paradigm, with a keen insight here or there, only to end up with the same obstacles and unbalanced paradoxes year after year. The poorly investigated self is the cause of all redundancy. You can think you're the most devoted explorer ever, and get virtually nowhere, b/c you're actually just caught in arrogant, narrow-minded distortion. Spinning wheels in your own little corner of existence. Call it horizontal futility.

Going vertical is a whole new ball game. Vertical guy doesn't play within a paradigm for longer than it takes him to expose the paradigm for it's imbalance. He seeks out the thresholds and busts through..simply by silencing distortion of his own bias contextual assumption. He's not efforting his way through resistance. He's simply clarifying, and emerging, into subtler paradigms where rules change. He's amassing free will. Self development is a weak-ass hobby compared to this. Vertical acceleration will push you to the limits of your current capacity. Black hole shit. You will be forced to surrender all footing and all sense of management. Truly balanced expansion demands higher levels of humility, and less insistence on the real definition of "control". The concept of personal control you've built an allegiance to is no longer compatible at this level of inner flexibility. I have no good ending for this, bc i intuit the process to be infinite. You just find yourself emerging, then stabilizing for as long as you prefer in your new paradigm, and when enough incentive builds, you decisively ascend to the next relevant balance point. Going vertical doesn't make you cool or brave. It makes you honest and real. Cool and brave are like an aftershock. k i dont have an ending.

Nice ending

When you allow yourself to see relevance where you used to see randomness, you're aligning yourself with higher balance. Simply b/c you're open and non-insistent. Most people think that it's intelligent to conclude that life is just random. It's actually highly assumptive. To strip life of the possibility of intelligently orchestrated randomness is probably man's greatest arrogance. In the words of Terrence Mckenna, "if you can believe that, you can believe anything!"

Great work Nick, I really appreciated reading you again.

It's common to find someone who's interested in personal development. It's rare to find someone that leverages from the level of his own predefinitions.
Predefinitions are the subtlest assumptions that spin the web of a person's reality. They are responsible for the contextual bias of the subjectivity. We all predefine our realities before we even engage with life experientially. The distortional biases become so subtle at the level of predefinitions that they go almost completely undetected, even in people who are more or less "booked up" on self development.

This is incredibly powerful and true. We are structured, conditionned, and perpetually re-structured and re-conditionned by our actions, or rather our re-actions, which are dependent upon this bias, or veil, of subjectivity. Admitting that we are made by, and for, the circumstances, is a source of incredible development and potential restructuration. Yet, it's difficult to accept for the human brain, because it also means embracing the perpetual transformation of things, including 'us'. We basically don't own ourselves, but are really convinced we do.
To illustrate this reality, one just has to see how most humans tend to see death as an accident, something that cuts life so to speak, when clearly death is the only non-accidental event in our life, that's the only certainty following birth. Maybe we could say that life is the accident of death, rather? Or, we can also contemplate the perpetual movement of birth and death, in everything, see its continuity despite time. We, also, can be born again every instant, but def means letting death makes its cleansing. For things to be born again, some things have to die. Dead plants feed the soil.

We think we are something, we define ourselves, we tell stories. Everybody has stories to tell. But the story of 'us', this is something that doesn't exist, or only exist in the horizontal realm you evoked. Just the same way we represent time as an horizontal, historical line, usually. What would be then the verticality of time? The density of time? Its depth?
=> We are not the stories we tell ourselves ; they are probably necessary as a structure of being, merely to avoid dissolution of the psyche, have some confidence to rely on ; but that's not what we are. The stories we're so keen on telling, the stories of our achievements or sufferings, they are like marks in the sand easily covered by the sea.

So, instead of clinging to the story of the self, focus on training the witnessing consciousness, an awareness that observes body, mind, soul, as not ours. We observe ourselves as we would observe a stranger, except for ourselves we do have all the data available. BUT, can we go with this data without judging? Without being attached to what hurts?
'Free from oneself, free from everything' (Shunryu Suzuki)

IMHO, being able to evolve from 'states' of being, paradigms as you call, or biases of subjectivity, really comes from letting go of the trauma, stop including it as a part of the self ; indeed that is a process of un-identification. I'm merely saying that based on my observation of humans, including myself, in the sense that traumatic experiences, suffering, are usually harder to let go, we cling to them so much because they give meaning in the horizontal realm of existence. Truly, it seems that humans are stuck in an infinite variety of paradigms because there is a need of identification. It's pretty tough to accept to be a ball of energy in motion in the universe, and only one among many. Few people can live without meaning, and that is what creates new paradigms again and again.

And there, as the yin and yang, all new paradigm offer the possibility of its overtaking. We climb on our own head!

There is indeed, as you mention, a sense of abandon. Surrending your footing, let go of controlling one's life, let go of concepts. And an ever-going process for sure.

Keep it up!

imo new years resolutions are usually overrated. mostly because they dont end up being executed with integrity. if you make integrity your only resolution, your actions will align in a maximally beneficial upward spiral of clarity, productivity, and freedom.
ive mentioned before that my chosen definiton of intelligence is the ability to perceive the single most beneficial avenue at any given time.
Now here is, imo, the most concise and balanced definition of integrity. You wont find it in the dictionary:

Integrity - the understanding that you do not need to deprive or manipulate anyone else in order to get what you want.

simple, balanced, true.
GL in 2016

Hey Nick,

We used to play together a little on Carbon poker(I was hate2cugo) a few years back. When you first where signed by RIO, I was excited to see someone from my small corner of the poker world be recognized and was hoping to be able to learn to beat you by watching your videos. After watching a few, I began to really enjoy them for their overall educational value. Over the last several months, I've occasionally wondered what happened to your videos as I really enjoyed them. I finally searched you here hoping for news of new videos and found this thread which I also enjoyed. GL in 2016 and keep posting.

Cheers,

Sam

When you engage the belief that you are on the receiving end of existence, you are entering distortion. This is not the natural, balanced state of consciousness. You are a generator.

Mainstream self development is decelerated and redundant because it seeks answers from a position of unchallenged bias. If we could simply shake the habit of generating the victimized state of receptivity, we wouldnt need self development, or religion.

The key is exposing the receptive habit as a deep-rooted assumption. When properly exposed for its bias, the victimized experience fades into a freshly balanced, more inclusive paradigm. This is the vertical, efficient path. It trades over-analysis for vigilance and honesty regarding the nature of one's direct experience.

We may never be able to reach perfect levels of clarity due to the limitations of the mind, but we can certainly traverse the infinite gradient of subjectivity toward higher and higher balance.

'You're not a victim' => path to freedom.

i own a 30 lb dog named Tom. i wanted a lab, but i travel too much for a large dog to be a reasonable option. He's extremely playful and eager to learn, but on account of his breed's imbalances, he'll never have that icy pimp demeanor. He's constantly getting distracted by strangers who want to meet him, and sometimes it's hard to peel him away without a pretty harsh "COME". This usually makes me look and feel like an asshole, and ruins the vibe of his interaction.

This month i'm working on my whistle. i never really learned. in fact i'm awful. but i believe a man should be able to whistle for his dog to come, so i'm committed to this shit.

Why the whistle? because it feels too insistent to take an overly playful dog's demeanor away, just bc it'd make my life easier. It also sucks when i have to break up the party with a tone that scares little children. The whistle is the higher balance. I'm workin on a real nice one. A crowd pleaser. i look cool, kids stay happy, dog can wander. Balance is always in the best interest of all.

on another level Nick, enjoyed reading, Thank you

ive met very few players that come from as over-analytical a makeup as i did. most of them probably burn out before i get a chance to meet them. Its a stubbornness unlike anything else. Experientially, Its like chinese water torture with a sped-up drip. But theres a certain earnestness about it thats actually useful, if only as a catylyst to personal growth. Its high fidelity, filtered through conditioned arrogance.

Catalysts usually accelerate things, which is why i hesitate to use that word. Because in a way i can look back on my 20s and see epic stagnation -- i wasn't inactive, i was always just spinning wheels in rabbit holes that offered very little benefit. But from a more inclusive angle, it was this hyperactive adventure in futility that balanced me very quickly once i finally saw through it.

I had a dmt trip about a year ago where at some point i spontaneously posed the the Q: "Why did i choose to suffer thru such manic futility?" Then Einstein's face appeared and said "A self-learned lesson is the smartest!". It stuck with me bc dmt is usually a very intuitive drug, but this was a direct drop. It also made me feel cool to know that Einstein cared about me.

So this is my advantage: epic amounts of clarity (through contrast) on the nature of futility as it applies to the human condition. If i had to summarize what ive gleaned from my journey, id say this:

The happiness or improvement you're looking for cannot be found objectively. It can only be subjectively authorized.

Answers wont ever satisfy you. All the trappings of success wont ever stop the nagging plea of the heart. These days i just find answers in what feels balanced and resonant. I know the ache of futility too well to go back. So in a way, im not thorough. I leave problems "unsolved", understanding that the answer isnt what i want. The experiential balance point is what i want. I pick the answer that offers the highest degree of experiential balance, bc ive come to see subjective balance as the only thing of any real value. True incentive is very direct and simple when its not being filtered through a distorted sense of benefit. Im less concerned with being objectively accurate, bc i understand that a decisively balanced subjectivity emerges exponentially faster into desirous zones than the alternate methods of self doubt. You dont need analysis when you can trust yourself to know, and you dont need to resist trusting yourself once you stop caring if youre initially "right". You're right when your inner kingdom is balanced, instead a fucking nightmare. Miraculously, solutions emerge quickly (though non-linearly) from this approach. you stop rabbit holing and reassess your perspective only when you detect an experiential imbalance from holding onto an insistient line of sight. Vertical acceleration is maximally productive, maximally logical, and maximally incentivized by the emotional gradient, which is all you ever actually experience. Since our experience is the only thing we ever experience, we may as well start honoring it. Or be my guest, and run the futile quest for something else. You'll know when you've had enough, and it will be worth the struggle. Just remember on your journey that we're all knights, and a knight is a king in training.

bless up

Running backwards is one of the best exercises you can do to expose assumptive bias. If you're suffering from run-bad distortions, it will help your game. Go outside and find an unpopulated area where there's a straight 50 foot strech. Make sure your mind has time to process that there's no obstacles along that stretch that you could potentially crash into. Now turn around and back-pedal it at top speed.

The first thing you'll probably notice is the assumption that you're about to crash into something. You'll probably start pussy-footing it halfway through to oblige that assumption. This is the same thing that happens when you're missing +EV barrels. You know it's a good bluff, but you're flinching at the assumption that there's a wall you're about to run into.

By training yourself to override the assumption that there is an actual wall, you're aligning yourself with a fundamentally more balanced perspective of existence:

reality cannot impose on your subjectively generated experience without your permission.

The credibility you give to the existence of a wall miraculously appearing as an obstacle where you confirmed 5 seconds ago that there was none is nothing short of compulsive paranoia. That being said, if you were to actually run into something, you still have complete subjective authority over how you experience that. It doesn't have to be experienced as victimization -- that is an optionally generated experience.

Commit to the back-pedal at top speed and you'll increase your ability to detect distorted assumption and override it. Pulling triggers in high pressure situations will become more effortless, simply because you balanced distortion. You'll go back to thinking logically.

Very nice read!

If you are a pro who has attained a substantial long-term winrate, your ability to remain accurate through downswings will become the most +EV investment of your time. Reason coming:

Inaccuracy during a downswing is the only distortion that will continue to occur in your subjectivity no matter what level of technical ability you achieve

A 4bb/100 winner will lose 39% of the time over 5,000 hands. If you are a player that is vulnerable to distortional imbalances induced from downswings, you're entering dangerous territory after 5,000 hands at an alarming frequency. Say your winrate drops to 3bb over the next 5,000 hand sample. You'll proceed to lose 42% of the time. And your upswings will be less gratifying. Over the next 5,000 hands you play at 2bb/100, losing 45% of the time, and likely still stuck over the 15,000 hand sample even after adding back your average expected win from the last 5k hands.

Do not underestimate this rabbit hole. You do not want to fuck with this type of model by writing it of as a "that's not me" thought experiment. When downswings occur to a player who is not balanced enough to stay centered in his convictions of his own technical ability, he will be flooded with cognitive bias, along with the distortional effects of disempowerment. These two combined are a recipe for disasterous futility. It is disastrous because it is not your preference. It is futile because from the frequency domain generated by this degree of bias/distortion, the subject loses clarity over the avenues of perceptive (true) benefit that exist beyond his insistent allegience to (false) benefit perceived from his distorted bias.

A great player has a sensitivity to bias that allows him to wisely disengage before spinning his own web of distortion. Before he ties his own knot. If someone bet me that the average 4bb/100 pro on a 15 buyin downswing would be playing from a winrate that was now < 2bb/100, i would snapcall the under. Some of them would probably be losing. Those ones are literally depending on variance at that point to boost them back into a frequency domain that gives them enough confidence to start playing at their full capacity again. This is how marginal regs get pushed out of the game. It happens all the time. That dude that used to post who you never hear from anymore. He lost his marbles.

I listened to a Tim Ferris podcast once where he was talking about the most intelligent way to stay on the cutting edge of competitive fields:

"Look for the 'rules' that people are following that they are not required to follow."

There was a guy on jeopardy once who was a 15 time winner or something. They ended up banning him under accusations of angle shooting. Basically he would pepper the board back and forth, while most contestants were only familiar with going down the row of a category once it was open, until it was closed. He believed that if he scrambled his opponents, he would have the edge. He was right. When he encountered daily doubles he would bet ridiculously low $ amounts and write "i dont know" as his answer. He was eliminating variance, and forcing them to play his game.

If you want to reach a higher level of balance with solver work, you have to get more exploitative in your applications. The highest level of balance is not a stagnant Game Theory Optimal, it's a dynamic application of maximal exploits. GTO is simply the effect of opposing maximally exploitative strategies that have been iterated to equilibrium. The community has forgotten this, or just doesnt care.

Getting more exploitative requires you to validate weird lines, even if Solver says they're lower EV. "Solver Says" is for losers. You should be hunting for ways to simplify your strategy while complicating villain's game tree. If you commit to this through node-locker, you'll discover spots where you sacrifice < 2% of the pot on the flop or turn in order to funnel your opponent into unfamiliar lines while massively simplifying your strategy. It's similar to playing an opening gambit in chess. A lot of the edge comes from taking the villain out of his comfort zone. You sacrifice material early to force positional imbalances that can be capitalized on later. Playful exploits require a higher balance of wisdom. Find new and exciting lines. Be different, be you.

I hate ready-made suits, button-down collars, and sports shirts.
-Bobby Fischer

Agree with your post Nick, inspired by latest Zach s video;)

This is my last 3 months of play. The sample is +14bb/100 split evenly between 1knl and 2knl. I've been increasingly experimental and exploitative in my approach since September of last year. I mentioned before that i think players who have been stagnating for >50k hand samples should implement a self correction process at a pace that would make most of them very uncomfortable.

Im interested in coaching students who are committed to fast pace change. If you come dedicated to that, our work will be fruitful.

-I will tear your database apart and expose all your major leaks, from stats to hand histories.
-I will show you how to minimize the distortion in certain thought processes that are causing you to self-sabotage in game.
-I will practicalize your strategy by showing you how to remove strategic options from your game that aren't worth the headache they cause you.
-I will introduce you to what are, in my opinion, some of the most advanced exploitative applications of PIOsolver, after which you can feel comfortable and confident in navigating your own future studies. You will become an independent learner.
-I will do all of this within 5 hours.

The 5-pack option is currently the only 1on1 format of coaching that I'm offering. It represents what I believe to be the minimum investment of time necessary for us to thoroughly handle bizness. Rates are in my profile, PM me to begin. Thanks for continuing to read my blog.

Regression is not always the result of a downswing. In my experience as a player and a coach, it's commonly a side effect of an increase in a player's technical capacity. Regression in winrate occurs when a player is trying to manage higher levels of conceptual balance without integrating the necessary intuitive counterparts that are native to that new paradigm. Integration of greater theoretical understanding demands higher intuitive balance in the form of certain traits:

Versatility/Calibration

Because your life in-game is not a walking theory model. Things are not at perfect equilibrium, not even close. To apply higher levels of technical understanding in a way that keeps you firing on all cylinders, you have to honor and trust your ability to accurately implement exploits on the fly. Without this balance a newly graduated theory boy will become just another frustrated drone on auto-pilot. In fact he'll probably seal himself further into a pit of futility than the standard drone, because theory boy is assumptively patting himself on the back for every well balanced overbet spot he finds. Meanwhile he's greatly exaggerating his ability to execute balanced ranges in real-time. This is the type of insistence that can turn you into a world class dumbass. Dont try to approach perfect balance through perfect application. I know it seems smart, but its actually a very imbalanced paradigm to come from when operating in environments that deal with this degree of complexity.

Self Trust

Overwhelment is the biggest reason for regression. If a player can trust that he is capable of applying high level concepts in-game, it will make his process of integration faster and less painful -- simply by taking him out of redundant negative self-talk. Self trust will raise his vibrational frequency and allow him to perceive angles of benefit that weren't available from the more contracted emotional states of doubt and overwhelment.

These days I don't regress. I integrate. I become aware very quickly in-game of when im in need of integrational balance, because I've trained myself to detect distortional imbalance in my subjectivity through monitoring my emotional gradient. I play long enough to detect where the confusion stems from, then i sit out and handle it. I play very little during these periods, and since i put a single-pointed focus on integration, it usually doesnt take very long for me to return to inner balance -- plus an upgrade. Regression is for players who ignore the signs that point toward necessary integration. They insistently plow through hands with poor winrate during this phase, stunting their growth and risking a downward spiral. Dammit men If you take one thing from this:

No outward progress is made during the integration period. So stop demanding it.

Vertical Acceleration is uncomfortable for the linear thinking mind. The fastest route to expansion is rarely a straight line, but from multidimensional lines of perception, crooked lines bend straight. Integrate, calibrate, trust. You can afford it.

At your service.

Emotional Dissonance: An imbalance or disharmony present in the emotional guidance system.

By 2025 i predict there will be a device that can read the levels and consistencies of a person's emotional dissonance and plot it over large sample gradations. It will also be able to map the subject for contextual associations at the onset of dissonant triggers as he interfaces with reality. High scores will be achieved not by avoiding dissonance, but by transforming it. In this way facing negative emotion becomes the only way to separate oneself from the competition. When the person improves on a contextual association to yield emotional resonance where he previously dissonated, he earns points. Expansion is the name of the game.

In all seriousness i would expect to see this type of model become the standardized test of intelligence for our youth. Fuck the SATs. No one's benefiting from their ability to improve on paragraph construction. The most impactful minds of any generation are visionaries. The most balanced leaders are emotionally equipped. My expectations for the future breed couldn't be higher.

Wow Nick so many golden nuggets of information in here! :D

ive met very few players that come from as over-analytical a makeup as i did. most of them probably burn out before i get a chance to meet them.

What would you say is the best ways to not get burnt out in this area?
Thanks for the great read!!!
:D

@ Dddog -

If i had to pick one thing i did (and still do) to overcome my tendency to over-analyze, it's making the choice to be less insistent. More specifically, to be less insistent on how I "think" i need to go about improving. I've mentioned that my definition of an intelligent person is one who can discern the most beneficial avenue to place his attention at any given time. In my experience, the most beneficial direction is always the one that feels the least stubborn. Basically because it's the fastest route to a more inclusive paradigm, from which you'll always have more balanced vision.

I've done about 30 hours of pretty advanced PIO solver work this month, over a pretty wide spectrum. Needless to say I've found myself in the midst of another integration period. I've mentioned how important of a skill it is for a player to become sensitive to the signs that an integration period is upon him. Ignoring the integration period is a reckless, insistent approach that usually leads to regressions and downswings that can cause long-term damage to a player's inner balance. Honoring the integration period is possibly the single most important mental game skill a pro can develop. In an effort to help you raise awareness around the signs of an integration period, here were my indicators this time around that i needed a few days off from playing:

1) I implemented a LOT of new exploitative strategies from the 30 hours of PIO work this month. My style is noticeably different from last month

2) I started feeling like I'd rather be medding* than playing (*see Tommy Angelos video). Usually my sessions are a playful, active, exciting form of meditation. It's an art to me. I am the artist of my own style and my own portrait every time i play. But when i hit an integration period, i tend to feel overwhelmed with the new and uncalibrated technical aspects of my game. It makes me enjoy playing less, and makes me crave clarity. Eventually this craving is channeled into session reviews, but initially I find the most resonance in doing something completely non-poker related, like spending time outside, dismantling my contextual thresholds, or just being dumb with my gf. I have a wide array of hobbies. Anything that realigns me with freedom really, bc freedom is what i lose sight of when i start over-analyzing new technical theory stuff.

3). The biggest indicator imo, and this is first time i consciously noticed this before entering an integration period:

My session review revealed trends of both my A+ game and my D game simultaneously

To me this is a tell tale sign of a thresholded consciousness requesting balance. My A+ game showed up in the application of new technical understandings applied with proper calibration. My D game showed up where where I over-analyzed and slipped into uncalibrated, assumptive in-hand thought processes.

An integration phase offers you a blending period. You seal the new technical capacity with the intuitive counterparts that allow it to operate efficiently in practice. A lot of this is just a comfort issue. Comfort comes to those who learn to be become comfortable. So do this:

Drill your hand histories during an integration phase with a partner whose opinion you respect. Announce your play before every action, and when you're taking a pure strategy with a hand, explain why your hand is currently pure and not mixed, based on environmental or specific villain tendencies. Let your partner balance your vision. Watch yourself rise into a higher frequency domain. You're not just more precise, your more decisive. Then turn off. Do whatever you do to feel like a kid. kids are free. They play hard. They don't look back. This is the energy you want to reconnect with.

Drilling and chilling, a complete kit for blasting through plateaus. Welcome to the integration period. it's quite nice here.

just a throw away line im sure but enjoyed the 'being dumb with gf'

Dudes -
For everyone who has contacted me already since my latest video, and for everyone who I directed thru PM to this post, thank you for your support, and thank you for caring about your game enough to ask for coaching.

I'm writing to explain why my 5-pack lesson option is a snapcall. I apologize for not responding to all of your PM's on a more personal level, but you're all pretty much asking the same (good) questions about what the 5pack entails. I will field any further questions through PM or Skype. So here's a thorough explanation of what you can expect:

The first 2 hours of the pack is done in one session. It is a full stats HH review. I will use the Teamviewer remote feature to rip through your last 10,000 hands, filtering won/lost pot >10bb. I will mark all relevant hands and briefly outline leaks i see you trending toward. In hour 2 we'll go deeper into all marked hands. I'll start to understand how you think as a player, and I get an idea of what you'll need from both the mental-game side and technical side in order to further your balance in the areas that are going to accelerate your win-rate the fastest. The 5-pack is all about win-rate prioritization.

From there I tailor the next 3 lessons to your specific leaks. I've worked with enough of you that I now have a very cool collection of pre-planned PIOsolver lessons where the models are specifically designed to expose leaks in specific areas. If one of my pre-planned lessons fits a leak you have, we will use it. If you have a more unique leak that i haven't encountered, i will pre-plan a new PIO lesson specifically for you. The time i spend doing that is included in your price of purchase. All of my PIO lessons begin by introducing a general theory understanding of how things work at equilibrium in the particular model/concept we're exploring, and then i will introduce deviations to the model using the node-locker feature, in order to make it clear why a certain deviation is a leak, and how it's exploited by solver. For instance, if you c-bet too much OOP, i will bring you into a PIO lesson demonstrating (through the use of node-locker) why you're exploitable, and how you should go about exploiting guys who have that leak.

The 5-pack usually turns into about 6 hours of lessons, since generally i run over by about 10-15 minutes in each session. Lessons will run as long as they need to for you understand the concept of the lesson, so don't worry about time. I also ask that you download a recorder like Snagit or Camtasia, so that you can integrate lessons by re-watching them.

After you complete the 5-pack, you'll understand how to use PIO to create and explore optimal models, and you'll understand how to use node-locker to explore deviations from optimal while filtering for exploitative counters. You will have the ability function as an independent learner, and you can begin exploring the program at whatever depth you choose. Basically you won't need me anymore -- at least not for PIO. Students who stay with me after the 5pack are generally interested in hand history review sessions where we continue to balance their in-game assumptions (see my new video "Challenging Assumptions"). I outline how to set up more advanced PIO models that they can use to help them build up more winrate in their specific playing environment, based on the exploitable tendencies that we saw trending in their player pool from their hand histories.

All of my students begin to deviate more exploitatively after the 5-pack, b/c they understand theory and balance at a high enough level to see where it's not maximally benefiting them in practice. This is what you actually want. The community has stagnated over the last year by not understanding how to implement solvers in a way that maximizes growth. Growth = winrate. winrate = exploiting imbalances. Exploitating imbalances is a product of understanding equilibria. We are not bypassing theory here. We are working FROM theory, to apply deviations to theory in ways that are maximally relevant for beating specific player pools. Guys: if we are not using solvers exploitatively, we are being over-insistent of their true capacity and value to us as players.

Ok! I think that covers pretty much everything. The 5-pack is $2000. You can PM me for details, or if i have directed you here via PM in response to your coaching inquiry, you will already have my Skype.

Again thanks to all you guys, the support i get through your PMs has been really authentic. You're all eager to expand and it's awesome to see that hunger. When you demand more of yourself by demanding greater understanding, you support what i stand for.

-- I have both worked and lived with Nick, and I can wholeheartedly vouch for his commitment to the game and his intentions in helping those around him improve. In fact, I would say that he was unreasonably generous in our time working together, and I have no doubt that his coaching package is top-notch and he is truly committed to helping students improve.

Honestly, he'll probably be obsessed with helping you get better to the point where his dedication to improving your game may actually outpace your own.

really enjoyed reading up on this Nick. thanks for sharing and finally I couldnt agree more with you about pio solver and how it should be used. great work

I also wanted to say that I have worked a lot with Nick and I think without doubt, no matter where you are in your poker career that Nick can help you take your game to a higher level and probably faster than you have thought possible.

This weekend I was in Paris for my gf's bday. We ate at a restaurant that completely changed my perspective on food. It's a set menu with 9 courses. The menu changes daily and is inspired but whatever is currently seasonal. There were some seriously next-level dishes at this place. Afterward I was thinking about what made it so great. The approach was very unorthodox, in the sense that the chef was balancing really weird ingredients, but it worked. There was also a wine pairing for each dish that was equally bizarre but somehow worked. When i say it worked i mean it struck an undeniable chord of balance that would be hard to fuck with. I came away with this conclusion, and i think it relates a lot to what I've been advocating as the best approach to poker/solver work:

In any art, understanding the essence of dynamic equilibrium is the highest form of mastery.

Key word is dynamic. I don't think it's intelligent to idolize a perfect equilibrium, b/c it's so fleeting in practice. I think we tend to forget that PIO outputs are the result of 2 opposing forces in motion, pausing for just an instant to pose for the camera, so it can capture that timeless moment when a journey towards balance finds its completion. Just before it gets spit out again into mayhem. It's like the stillness between heartbeats, or breaths, or even universes if you're into that sort of thing. Every pulsation is a new abstraction that pays tribute to the origin of infinite balance from which it arose.

So what does it mean, for us as players, and for the chef who is redefining culinary tradition. What's really going on, and how is he making seemingly imbalanced strategies work? I'll try again:

When an artist validates the existence of surface level imbalances, he can achieve more inclusive levels of balance that are more relevant to his purest expression and expansion.

The chef is mixing ingredients that no one ever thought of using together, and proving that he can achieve higher balance through them. For lack of a better metaphor, he's pulling an exploit on the entire culinary player pool, simply by challenging the assumption that there is only 1 rigid GTO model for achieving high level balance. Pollock did the same thing when he introduced drip painting. Poker visionaries are doing the same thing in their attempts to utilize solvers.

On the surface it's nothing revolutionary. We all know we should be exploiting when we can. But to actually become fluent in counter-balances is a real art, and in my opinion it's what's necessary for world class play. If I point out an imbalance in a player's flop strategy, how many guys could accurately submit the inexploitable counterstrategy to that initial imbalance? How many could conceptualize that counter-strategy in a way that helps them apply it spots where range-vs-range dynamics are similar? How many could gauge how that imbalance can be expected to filter down into villain's future decision points, leaving him even more susceptible to exploits?

How many have the motivation to challenge their opponents repeatedly to that type of exploitative relationship?

We give our environments way too much credit. Until your opponents are willing to learn how to play more well balanced strategies, you should be challenging them with high level exploits, anticipating their counters, and re-balancing higher exploits. Until they give up. Literally. Until they quit your tables, or spend enough time in the lab learning how to get more balanced so they can stop having to play an explo-war vs an explo-warrior like yourself. If you want to close the gap on the inapproachability of the GTO snapshot, you have to validate your ability to find transcendent balance in the form of dynamic exploits. Leave their taste buds shocked and confused. Leave them with an invitation to look deeper into their own imbalances, if they care enough to want to understand them. Leave them with the idea that there might be something more relevant to them than GTO.

sounds like street poker

Dudes - I'm closing coaching for the time being. 12 of you bought the 5-pack and I have my hands full tailoring those lesson plans. In an effort to stay on the forefront of offering the most beneficial PIOsolver training for guys trying to move up the ranks, I'll most likely be putting out some new products by April. With products I can help more of you at more affordable prices, and without the obstacle of schedulings and fillups. The next product will likely be divided into an Essential and Elite format, in honor of RIO hierarchy. Essential will be dense with shortcuts that will help you isolate nodes, understand the driving forces of various equilibria, and filter for hard exploits using node-locker. Elite will be the bad-ass older brother of the pack. Stay tuned for updates on prices and release dates of the next wave. Hope you're all crushing. Thanks for continuing to support.

This is an excerpt from a post that I made recently in the MSNL forum:

If you asked me what percentage of the community moved up more than 1
limit over the last 12 months and stuck the landing, I'd snapcall the
under on 10%. My guess would be less than 3%. Thats a problem. The
first impulse is to point the fingers at the coaches. But I genuinely
believe that the coaches on the whole are polarized toward authentic
service. The problem is that there is not enough information available
on how to become an independent learner. There's not enough equality
in the student teacher relationship, and both parties are equally at
fault for that. Poker players should understand incentive better than
any other professional. As a community, we're ignoring the most major
incentive we have right now: we're being massively incentivized to
change the way we learn.

The GTO bug swept the community from 2013-2014. We suffered from a naivety that caused us to massively overestimate the benefits of attempting to implement GTO strategies. In 2015, the community spun out into a distorted trajectory when the solver bubble burst -- basically we were given fuller vision over the complexity of GTO, and we remained insistent on attempting to implement it.

It's my personal diagnosis that the community should consider itself to be in a stage of recovery until we massively simplify our approach toward integrating well balanced strategies. Imo the most efficient way to begin this recovery is by exposing multiple strategic betting options as a trap. To introduce a level of complexity into our strategy that we are far from being able to implement with accuracy is unintelligent. The belief that we are capable of balancing 2 or more bet sizes is the community's greatest arrogance. The compounding error of losing control of the range on subsequent streets is not being properly acknowledged. My recommendation is as follows:

coaches and students should become dedicated to discrediting information that advocates multiple strategic betting options as intelligent training content or discussion for students beating limits < 2K nl.

The fact that less than 1% of the elite community is beating 2knl+ should make it irrelevant for strategies of this complexity to be emerging on these forums at any sort of regular frequency. Yet they're being advocated by coaches and regurgitated by students basically across the board. We need to wake up to the fact that we're not ready yet, and our insistence is killing our expansion. We need to find greater accuracy in the relevance of simplification.

Nick, thank you for writing this blog it is amazing. I am looking forward for new posts :)

Thought of day:

"It's no mistake that you are where you are right now"
-Big Sean's Dad

So many valuable perspectives ITT, thank you for sharing. Added to favs.

Hey guys, i'm opening up a free dropbox folder that i'll be adding video content to daily. The uploads are shorter in length, basically whatever I'm inspired to put out that day. My goal is to offer an outlet for members to get a healthy shot of daily poker inspiration, with a general emphasis on how to become a more independent thinker/learner in the post-solver era. A lot of tips for how to leverage your PIO exploration in more efficient ways .. some HH reviews from willing member volunteers .. and whatever else I come up with along the way.

To join just PM me your email, and I'll add you to the dropbox. I'm looking forward to coming back to the community!

Yo, if you don't have anything to say on some day it would be cool to hear about how you manage stress and in what ways poker makes you feel fullfilled/proud/happy. Kind of struggling with this at times.

Looking forward to the pio stuff because it's often hard to see the forest from the trees!

@Anomic
I've accelerated and expanded a lot in the past year. If I had to give the most succinct explanation of what I did (yea right, the magic pill). but ok here goes:

I made a (real) decision to take responsibility for literally every part of my life.

I made that decision by clarifying over time that it was being incentivized by my direct experience. That was the same clarification that eventually filtered down into my adventures in independent learning with PIO. It basically became painfully clear that responding to stress by trying to manage it was entirely futile, b/c I'd literally tried everything. And maybe I just had dramatically high expectations, but a lot of my 20s just felt like I could be growing way faster than I was. Ultimately it was my fault, because I wasn't making effective use of catalyst. I wasn't responding to life in a way that responded to incentive (shitty feelings) in an intelligent way. My advice to guys would be not to over-complicate this guidance system:

If a belief or perspective doesn't feel balanced, true, supported,
inspired, and generous, CHANGE IT.

Like, immediately. I argued with myself for way too long before I finally got on the train. Once you clarify that the nature of experience is completely 100% subjective, you don't need to look anywhere but inside of yourself for incentives to validate change. Bc anywhere you would be looking would ultimately just be a permission slip to correct a subjectively generated incentive. It's just not an intelligent approach to do it that way. When you clarify stuff like this, and you get some good emotional feedback, you glimpse real freedom. Then stress starts to fall away naturally because you start to invite challenge. From "100% subjective" understanding, challenges are the thresholds to greater freedom, and the thresholds rise and fall in your consciousness. I mentioned that I started making effective use of catalyst. Basically it means I respond to emotional incentive more quickly. I don't judge myself as much for fucking up or being flawed, b/c it's not incentivized by my emotions. It's the freedom from my own judgement that i really value, b/c that's the only thing that really fucks with my experience. Amassing inward freedom gets shit done. I've moved toward happiness more in the last 6 months than i had in the last 6 years. Looking back on my 20's it was just one big invitation to stop being such an insistent bastard. In a way the realest value i see when i look back on those years is that they helped me to come to full clarity on the nature of futility. That's where i get most of my conviction from. I can spot futility from a mile away, and I trained myself to swap out perspectives really quickly toward highest benefit. Basically I got smoked for playing explo vs my emotions. So i started playing balanced. Turns out it's actually way easier than GTO too!

Poker is my exploitative outlet. I had a bunch of really quick success at 10/20 in the last few months after running a lot of database review on my environments and flooding in with hard exploits. My crew started playing more like me and winning a lot, which further confirmed that my sample wasn't variance. In January i had a 50k month without even playing much. At that time i felt a pretty big incentive to clarify my direction. I was confident that I could be playing in the toughest games in the world within a year if I wanted to. My perspectives had become too balanced and my growth pattern was too accelerated for it to not be an inevitability. It took a lot of self inquiry but I actually came to the conclusion that going down that road, at least at this time would be more imbalanced than moving toward service as a coach. I couldn't justify playing really high stakes as a genuinely inspired path, and i had to be honest enough to admit that i couldn't control my inspiration. If I went down that road right now, it would be to prove something, and I know that energy as futile. The more balanced path for me right now is what's staring me in the face. I'm inspired to help people find greater happiness and benefit through simplification. I have this skill right now in poker. I currently use PIOsolver more efficiently than anyone I've seen, and I'm getting better every day. I have training models that get results, fast. I'm inspired to serve guys that are seeking the same direction that I wasn't able to find earlier on. They pay me well for my work, and because of that I can give away free shit and feel good about it, and help more people. I'm on board with a bigger picture of service, because it's incentivized for me, and I'm done fighting against that just to protect a version of myself that I never even valued. Poker is a platform for me. I'm out by the time I'm 30 as far as i see it. On to bigger projects where I can be of service with the models that I train with now. Independent learning and empowered living. Exposing bias. Logic. Global enlightenment. When i hold that bigger picture, stress is a memory.

Hope this helps you clarify your own journey -

Had to read most of it more than once to really get it and "feel it" but damn, some parts are better than therapy to me.

I guess my biggest motivation for playing poker is independence and freedom from much of society's demands/standards/nonsense and a chance to live an authentic life (even if it's only for a while) and to be able to have faith in myself without needing confirmation by others. Thanks for helping me realize that.

Recently I was asked:

You said that PIO is one of the only tools you should be using. What
are your thoughts on this answer Doug Polk gave on his hand analysis
thread to a question about PIO: "I think PioSolver is basically
terrible. I don't know what the high stakes six max players are using,
and I'm not claiming to be one of the top players in those games. But
what I can say is that the players in HU that use this type of
software to play, end up playing horrific post flop."

To understand my response, you have to start by relaxing the assumption that concepts like right and wrong are still useful after you pass a certain threshold of balance. There are perspectives that you could classify as more "accurate" because they come from more inclusive lines of sight. And there are perspectives that are more short-sighted, but equally valid in the sense that they serve to reinforce a certain paradigm. There is "accurate/inclusive/balanced", and there is "distorted/narrow/self-confirming". Labels like right and wrong are only useful within paradigms that are still imbalanced/insecure enough to need to invalidate other paradigms out of the need to be "right", which from more inclusive paradigms is worth nothing. In a balanced consciousness, all paradigms are seen as equally valid, because all paradigms are seen to be serving a desired purpose to those who choose them.

When Doug Polk said that PIO-happy players actually end up playing way worse, I'm assuming he meant that the guys who try to play solver-esque strategies just butcher the implementation of it. This is consistent with both my own experience, my experience with students, and my experience with opponents who poorly implement balance when it's very clear they're trying to.

Regardless, he's being narrow-minded in his general conclusion that solvers cannot be used as a tool to dramatically improve a player's understanding of the game. I'll introduce a new term: "loose" equilibria. It's basically an oxymoron, which sucks for it's credibility. But to me, "loose" is anything that's simplified after the point of a well supported assumption. Lets assume we could know more or less what an opponent's range looks like at a certain node. Lets also simplify our strategic options. We could then lock our range vs his range and explore that loose equilibrium. The point:

When a player begins to use mass database filters from his environment to create an alias opponent, and then applies those alias trends to his explorations in PIO, he's entering a very accelerated learning pattern.

The mark of an intelligent learner:

1) An intelligent learner has released the insistent assumption that a human can only achieve greater levels of accuracy through higher levels of complexity. This is counterintuitive, which is why it's been overlooked. With a landscape as complex as NLHE, human players should expect to achieve greater accuracy through simplification, mainly in the form of reducing their strategic options. A dog who obeys 3 commands every time is smarter than a dog who knows 10 commands but fucks them up constantly.

2) An intelligent learner directs his attention into areas that are maximally relevant for getting results in his specific environment. What is of highest relevance is not different from what is of highest benefit. When you use node-locker to mimic environmental responses, you can simultaneously learn a lot about the driving forces of loose equilibria, while strengthening your exploitative versatility in ways that are maximally efficient for your winrate. Prioritize lines, run mass database filters to gain vision over the alias, and explore the resulting balances and counterbalances in models that pertain to your environment. Relevance is the heart of intelligent exploration.

It's important to become an independent learner so you can begin to think for yourself. One part of Doug's statement comes from a high level of understanding. Another part comes from a high degree of insistence and shortsightedness. None of it is wrong, b/c his statement is highly relevant to reinforce his paradigm, and it's clearly serving him well. Your goal as a reader is to determine which parts of his statement are not currently relevant for your paradigm. Also keep in mind that Doug runs a training site founded on classifying hands into 1 of 4 groups at any given time. Advocating PIO is not necessarily conducive to his marketing scheme. Just be careful about what conclusions you arrive at from limited perspectives, and never be so arrogant to think that your perspectives aren't limited.

The most balanced person in the room is always the one who is coming to the least conclusions, and for that reason he can make decisions that are in the best interest of everyone involved.

if theres some sort of vote for poster of the year, you got mine. awesome entry :D

You really need a bigger platform, one doesn't need to be a poker player to learn a ton from this blog.

I'm in the process of writing a few research papers at the moment and his posts pertaining to learning efficiently and managing expectations and when you're constantly bombarded with information has put into context how useful his posts are inside and outside of poker.

"It basically became painfully clear that responding to stress by trying to manage it was entirely futile"

This resonates on so many levels - obviously being unable to influence how cards fall exacerbates this problem in poker but I think many of us are guilty of being persistent (perhaps something to do with ego) that if we don't take conscious steps to dealing with stress that we are weak/failing ourselves. Our emotions are taking a turn left sometimes and we're insisting on turning right, what is wrong with embracing our true feelings?

I think there's a more general societal problem that we lack genuine role models and bad practices and attitudes are being reinforced and sustained. It's no coincidence that we as a whole have more mental health issues, loneliness, anxiety despite living in a more 'connected' world than ever before.

The utmost respect my friend.

1) An intelligent learner has released the insistent assumption that a human can only achieve greater levels of accuracy through higher levels of complexity.

The trap that you're talking about goes like this --

Your brain thinks a system scales by addition, so that if you add one component to a system with ten components, it's the same as adding 1 subject to 3 subjects. Or it's like adding one new tool to a collection of 99 new tools.

It's Not.

The complexity of your system always scales at least by combinatorics, and often exponentially.

For example:

You start off learning one thing about a subject, for example, and you know that everything else that you try to learn will interact with all of the others.

If you study one thing, you have one thing to worry about.

If you study *ten things, and EACH COLLECTION of those things has to be balanced, you have 2^10 = 1,024 new sets of material to be accurate with!"

If only two of the things need to be balanced with each other and you've got 10 of them, you've still got a 45-fold increase in complexity (take 10 choose 2.)

That's the demand that introducing all kinds of tools and contexts puts on your cognition.

Moreover, this has a huge snowball effect because the gap widens as the numbers get larger:

For example, if you take all the subsets in a collection of 2 things , it's 4 (including the empty set), and if you take all the subsets in a collection of 4 things, it's 16. That's a difference of 12.

If you take all the subsets in a collection of 5 things, it's 32, and if you take all the subsets in a collection of 6 things, it's 64.

Etc....

...

To Nick -- Thanks for writing this, because since I've basically retired from poker to start a few businesses, I've fallen victim to this trap, and seeing this actually snapped me back in to reality.

Thought of day:

it is unlikely that a human consciousness will iterate itself to
equilibrium within a lifetime. But it is ever possible.

^when you know you've been chilling with PIO a little too hard

Matt Janda was my first coach ever, I think i was 22. He was the definition of a theory boy. One time before a lesson he gave me a thought experiment that i still remember. I'm pretty sure this was his original idea, and he liked to use it on religious people to expose bias. The kid had theory balls. Anyway It goes like this:

Ask a person to assign a probability to the possibility that they are existing in one of infinite multiverses, as opposed to 1 single universe.

The lowest answer I've ever heard anyone give is 1%.

The problem is that as soon as you assign even a 0.0000000000000000000001% probability to the infinite multiverse theory, it's already INFINITELY more likely that you're inhabiting one of those multiverses, than that you're in the single universe.

Behold the power of infinity!

Hello Nick, u have a PM!

Understanding how to negotiate from integrity is one of the most important skills you can develop, business and personal. The mainstream approach is to play the high-ball/low-ball game, in the hopes that the other party miscalculates their incentives and agrees to an imbalance in your favor. I'm sure there are people who are very good at this game and win often. It's unintelligent to win at this game. Paradigm buster coming:

Once you achieve a high enough level of balance, you lose all
incentive to manipulate another party in negotiation, because
it would disturb your balance to do so. At high levels
of integrity, you win when interests are balanced. You operate from an
understanding (not a belief) that you do not need to infringe upon
another to satisfy your desires.

When there's an offer pending, I balance my end of the incentives to the best of my ability. I know I'm balanced when I end up with numbers that make me indifferent between the current agreement and my next best option. This guarantees that I don't disturb my balance, b/c I'm not infringing on an equilibrium in my end of the offer -- I just have real alternatives. So under this model, my first offer is my final offer. If you counter me without presenting me an angle that I overlooked when weighing the incentives, cya and GL no harm done.

If I don't have real alternatives, I haven't been creative enough in identifying my options. Or I have certain limiting beliefs around other desirable options that make them appear undesirable. I've yet to encounter a relevant paradox that I wasn't able to balance. It just required me to validate an initially unseen or overlooked option. Moreover, I'm not concerned with any paradox that isn't relevant to my direct expansion, b/c it's overly insistent to demand the capacity to balance all paradox from a single limited individuation of consciousness. This type of insistence will stunt your growth. Honoring relevance is a prerequisite for intelligent expansion. Essentially any paradox that doesn't strike ME as relevant is no paradox to me at all, b/c it doesn't pack enough punch to register in my consciousness as paradoxical for longer than it takes me to dismiss it as irrelevant. I'd rather focus back onto incentive points that are of higher relevance to my freedom and expansion -- those are my paradoxes b/c they contain the symbols that are demanding balance in my direct experience, and THAT is relevant.

In other news my new RIO vid drops tomorrow!

Listening to Tommy Angelo's new video today I found myself reminiscing when he started talking about whether or not he could remember being on the really bad end of a bet. I moved out to vegas when I was 21 with roommates who redefined degen. We all had solid 6 figure bankrolls at the time which made it way worse. I literally could not chill with these 2 kids without getting sucked into putting money up on ridiculous shit. One time I bet one of them 2k that I could eat 2 loaded Giant subs from Jersey Mike's in under 30 minutes. I crushed the first one in 6 minutes, but I already knew I was fucked. Insistently, I plodded on and capped out at like 1.5sub, puking everywhere. After the bet my friend told me that he would've bought out for $1,500 if I'd offered it at minute 7. It wasn't even something that crossed my mind at the time.

I'm sipping on a chianti somewhere in italy with my bitch. Here's to seeing all the angles.

Hi,

My english is limited, I can read but writting is a lot more difficult, so sorry in advance for all mistakes and inapropriate words I will use.

You speak a lot about learning, and about what many people see as personal developement.
It's of course extremely important but if in reality most people don't change the way they are in poker and in most aspect of theyre life , don't you think it's not only a problem of how they have learn, or learn to learn, but of how they are built ?
And when I say built I don't speak about experience but how they are made geneticaly.
Recently I tend to look at a lot more things using this perspective of natural selection.
And it's in fact extremly efficient.
Just as an example than I found funny of how use the evolutioning theory theyre is this type of things :
https://edwarddutton.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/intell-928.pdf

You probably know many more poker pro player than me (I personaly know 0), do you think than they have one natural ability. It could be anything but do you think they have something different than most common player ?
Is it IQ, balls, anything, or a combination of multiple quality ?

Because I could have train all my life at running since I'm born I would never have beat Ussain Bolt. In french we say : "Quand on veut on peut" - When you want you can.
I prefer the phrase of the great french thinker Frédéric Delavier "Quand on veut on peut, sauf quand on peut pas" - When you want you can, except when you can not.

With your experience as a poker coach you should have seen what type of guys was moving up and who don't.
If you had to mesure the natural ability of a poker player on what part of a player personality you would take a look ?

@ Mercurious, with regard to the idea that genetic presets may be a substantial factor in the capacity of a learner -

I think it's generally a huge cop-out. Without even complicating it, all someone with limited genetics would have to ask themselves is:

How does it benefit me to hold the perspective that I'm limited?

It doesn't. Understanding relevance is a big factor in realizing that. It wouldn't be intelligent for a happy person to conclude that they're genetically limited b/c they'll never be an olympic athlete, or an astronaut -- b/c they've clarified that it's not fundamentally relevant for their happiness. To hold insistent perspectives regarding one's limitation is, counterintuitively, extremely arrogant, but unfortunately our society has chosen to classify it as humble. True humility is not that. It's when you balance the insistence of perspectives rooted in limitation, by exposing how irrelevant they are for you to increase your capacity. You can't become humble by contracting yourself into something small and limited, you have to literally sacrifice everything, including your personal image, to follow desirious zones of perspectives that are unbounded by concepts of limitation. Only by expanding into everything can you become truly humble, bc this is what's required to dissolve the insistence of ego. It's counter-intuitive to the mainstream no-ego culty-ness all around us, which is why spiritual people give spirituality a bad rap. You can't minimize the ego. You can only allow it to diffuse into more expanded states of consciousness by becoming unbiased that you were ever limited by the concept of limitation.

On the flipside of what's relevant, a fucking double amputee climbed Mt. Everest.

@ Mercurius,

I think in the PIO era we've entered a stage where the guys who will move to the leading edge are the ones who approach the solver with humility and guide their process through relevance. Once tools of PIO's capacity are utilized efficiently, it's inevitable that the gap will quickly close on the naturals. In a way, the naturals were just the most intelligent at "learning in the dark", b/c they understood intuitively that self trust was the most efficient form of guidance they had at their disposal. The rest of us just stood around waiting for the lights to come on.

What book is that?

Yo from Rome! Got my first sunburn of the year yesterday. Finishing up 3 months in Europe and then jumping puddles for a few days on my way back to the states, where i'll be bunkered down for a week to record pack 1 of "PIO Unlocked", my new private coaching course set to drop on April 12. I'm pleased to announce it will include a 2 week money back guarantee (yes, really). I'll follow up with a more detailed post on the course sometime later this week. In the meantime, my advice to all you guys is to take it real easy. Relief is coming. Your ambition is honorable and it's the reason I do what I do what for the community. You should have highly simplified, highly accurate tools that allow you to emerge as the independent beasts that you all desire to become.

Much love and support -

A true warrior surrenders long before the battle

"PIO Unlocked" is my new private coaching course, available April 12. It builds cumulatively through two packs, with accurate strategy simplifications stemming from hundreds of hours of my own PIO solver exploration. I built the course with the intention of offering students a training model that blends intelligent strategy simplification with an approach to PIO that allows for a smooth upward spiral into higher levels of contextual integration. It is designed to transform you into an independent thinker and equip you with the tools necessary to relevantly guide your own learning process with PIO as your servant.

Pack 1:
-Releases April 12
-$1200. FULL REFUND available for 2 weeks after purchase

Pack 2:
-Releases May 5.
-$1600. No refund on this pack. To be eligible for pack 2, you must have bought pack 1 and not refunded

The total course will be 8-10 hours of densely edited content. Access will be granted through dropbox invite, and students will receive unlimited free Q&A sessions through dropbox comments.

My goal is to provide a positive ecosystem for players who have completely clarified that they want to handle their career. I am guaranteeing group placement to the first 40 guys who grab pack 2. Teams will be grouped in fours by relevance - same sites and stakes. Pack 2 buyers after #40 will be put on an alternate list.

Groups will receive my discounted rate of $750/hr. I only charge for scheduled lesson time. I will be available daily on skype to guide your group's direction towards the highest perceivable benefit.

Poker shouldn't take over your life, it should enrich your life. I've included the refund to make the initial commitment as easy as possible for you. I only want your money if you love what my product does for your life. For guys who go the distance with pack 2, prepare for a very cool experience as you head into teams.

For more info and updates, check out my free content dropbox. If you're not in it yet, PM me your email address for a direct invite. Thanks for continuing to read my blog!

"PIO Unlocked" pack 1 is dropping on Tuesday (April 12). 100% refund available for 2 weeks post-purchase. Your guys' PM questions regarding the product have been great and allowed me to clarify a lot of relevant stuff through my dropbox uploads. Thank you for helping me with the process. For those of you preparing for purchase, here are the payment options available for pack 1.

Bitcoin - PM me for wallet
Skrill - niddybeat@gmail.com
Paypal - nextsteppoker@gmail.com
Chase Quickpay - niddybeat@gmail.com

Prepayment is now available. $1200 is the cost for this pack. Please allow me 24 hours to process your payment and invite you to the dropbox.

Bitcoin: PM me the wallet # or wallet name you sent from, and the email you want added for dropbox course access.

Skrill: Please PM me with the email associated with your Skrill purchase. If you want a different email added to the dropbox, please specify through PM.

Paypal/Chase QP: PM me upon purchase to notify me. If you want a different email added to the dropbox, please specify through PM.

All pre-payments will receive course access by the end of the day on April 12, EST. Your refund option will remain available for 2 weeks after the date of your purchase.

non-RIO members can notify me of purchase at piounlocked@gmail.com

Thank you guys for making this a very easy launch for me.

-Sneak peek footage of Pack 1 is now up in the Free Content dropbox
-My new RIO vid drops tomorrow

Enjoy the rest of your vacation ;)

Just a small thought/question. I should also mention that I'm not a potential customer, so this doesn't impact me. And the opinion of your customers are of course the only thing that matters. I'm just curious. You say:

"Teams will be grouped in fours by relevance - same sites and stakes."

Does it make sense to group same stake and (more importantly) same site guys in the same group? In terms of finding population exploits and such it definitely does. But if these fellas play vs each other on a regular basis, couldn't that end up stifling the discussion a bit?

Peace!

@Friendly
Good Q. As I see it, environmental trends are paramount for a team to find relevant direction at high levels of modeling work. So they need to be in the same environment, and it helps a lot to merge databases. The risk of winrate lost vs. your 3 other teammates is negligable. Environments are not that small.

There's only one way to truly give less fucks. You have to care. A lot. About the perspectives you engage with on a moment to moment basis, and the emotional responses at the other end of them. If you truly want freedom, you have to become humble enough to challenge the credibility of your own thoughts. You have to allow yourself to be swallowed into the black hole of humility. Imagine surrendering your mental model once a minute, back into the abyss, for iteration -- representing the complete admission that you failed at balancing your own experience. Nothing left but to give up the act. Sense into the the acceleration that's possible at this level of deep acceptance and availability. To truth. To that which exists before you try to define it with labels and assessments. Leading only to more labels and more assessments. Leaving you tired and suffering. Full to the brim with neglected incentive.

Eventually you will be forced into surrender. It's the only inevitability. The only choice you have in that matter is whether or not you decide to beat life to the punch. This is the constant invitation. Until it's accepted, there is very little you can do to gain experiential control. This is the nature of subjectivity. The experiencer is pinned under his own imbalances. What a bitch you are, life! What a perfect game you play! How thorough and efficient you are! And how badly we want to beat you into submission! And how futile our attempt is. Until we give up.

To truly become available to solutions requires that we stop attempting to make them understandable from imbalanced perception. Surrender your models. Solutions at the highest level of balance are unreasonable. But to see from that place is all the reason one would ever need. To never go back. To never conclude. To truly give less fucks. You have to care.

HOW TO TEACH:

step 1: get to advanced level context
step 2: distill advanced level context
step 3: lace noob context with distilled themes
step 4: light that shit
step 5: smoke that shit

get rowdy

Any reviews from people who have purchased the pack?

smoke that shit

dem thug, cal teh poleece!

in terms of knowledge, the simplest understanding is always the most intelligent. It takes the highest wisdom to be able to speak and be heard by all.

i started an instagram account recently as an extension to this blog. follow me there at "nickwillmadeit" if you'd like more of my perspectives on your daily life feed.

#berlin

Ahh too bad my bankroll can barely support 25NL, need to pad my bankroll is get in on this!

Pre-payment for Pack 2 opens on May 5th, and the box will open on May 8th. The price is $1600 and payment details are the same as usual. Pack 1 is still available for purchase, you must have bought Pack 1 to be eligible for Pack 2. I am still guaranteeing 40 group coaching slots for Pack 2 buyers, in order of purchase. If I reach 40, I will make an announcement. Until then, check out my Free Content dropbox for the upcoming course syllabus and sneak peaks for Pack 2. Thanks to all -

Nick

The reason the community developed a GTO neurosis was 2-fold:

1) There was not enough emphasis put on how exploitable the environments were. The pools were (and remain) very exploitable.

2) The community suffers from a lack of self trust, which causes a general aversion to a more care-free, exploitative approach to the game.
-They don't trust themselves to deviate accurately from the idea of GTO
-They don't trust themselves to be able to detect when they're being re-exploited for their chosen exploits.

If you thoroughly investigate your environment, put in the necessary modeling work, and trust yourself to apply exploits decisively, your win-rate will go up. If someone is exploiting you, exploit them back. Don't go into a GTO shell, that's a mind-trap. You can't play GTO. And that's ok, b/c it's not relevant for you to crush.

"But I'll still get exploited by someone whose playing GTO vs me, if I'm not playing GTO!".

No one's playing GTO. Someone might be playing more balanced than you, but in that sense, they're still fairly exploitable. At the end of the day, save your best attempts at balance for early street stragetic option simplifications, and for later streets vs the best regs. The most intelligent strategies are the ones that make the most money vs the pool, because that's actually the common goal. Before forums, before GTO, before training content, the goal was to win the most money. This is highly relevant. This is a clarification that can direct us towards highest benefit when assessing how we want to train.

Pio Unlocked Pack 2 dropped today. Pack 1 is still available. Sneak Peeks and all that good shit are up in the Free Content dropbox. Here's to the new breed of independent minds.

Did anyone else have this weird, unordered excel output, when you tried to aggregate? Do you know how to fix it?

Pack 2 of my course for private students became available about a week ago. I've been able to place those guys into groups and finally have some free time to do some inventory. In an effort to remain transparent, I'm just going to list the membership numbers since Pack 1 released on April 10th.

Pack 1:

Total Members: 37
Total Refunds: 4
Refund rate: 11%

Considering there was some Pack 1 pirating that occurred, I am very happy with only 11% refunds on a $1200 course.

I had 15-20 current students at the time that I launched pack 1. They all received a free pack 1 and are not included in the above member totals. They are however included in the pack 2 totals:

Pack 2:
Total Members: 34
Pack 1 holders who have already purchased pack 2: 64%

I really have no basis for what good conversion rates are. But to me 64% makes me happy, knowing that there are more pack 1 guys who have emailed me saying they plan to eventually upgrade to pack 2.

This has been a great experience for me so far. The sales are encouraging, but overall it's been most rewarding to see my vision turning out the way I imagined it. I began this with the intention to offer up a really positive ecosystem to network guys who wanted to study alongside partners with great work ethic and a common, simplified contextual foundation. Pack 2 skype groups just got underway and I can tell just by scrolling through the chats that these guys are hungry! It's fun to be among that level of enthusiasm with burnout being so common in this industry. I feel honored to have been able to do this, genuinely I want to thank everyone who's been a part of it, including the haters. And also thanks to the guys who stole the product to torrent it. You've inspired me to start buying CD's again. A true full circle moment for me!

Both packs are still available for purchase. Once I fill the last group slots available from this wave of Pack 2 members, future group placement will probably be done on a monthly basis. The Free Content folder will likely be moving over to a new domain where I'll have more ability to upload new content without space restrictions. Thanks to everyone.

This blog is just so amazing, thank you!

What are in your opinion top 5 books(non poker related) that you would recommend?

Thanks :)

I dont read much, so i only have 2:

"The Art of Learning" - Josh Waitzkin
"Peak" - Anders Ericcson

I love material that attempts to connect intuition and logic, as opposed to separating them. Both of those books hit on that level.

Today I posted on hands in the forums for about an hour and I have this takeaway:

If the attention was directed toward WHY the question is being asked in the first place, it would allow the questioner to self-correct much faster. Basically because it would remind him to clarify what he actually cares so much about. Most guys just assume that they should be approaching hand histories in a way that seeks to confirm that they played their hand in a well balanced way. If that's your goal, you're already setting your sights really low. Without looking at your hand I'll guess it's a mixed strategy. And I'll be right the vast majority of the time. Most of you guys are not making a lot of gaping pure strategy mistakes. You're not calling with the nuts to close the action otr (PENALTY). Where you're struggling is in your application of mixed strategies, and this at the effect of an initial oversight. I'm talking about the one where you concluded it was incentivized to play highly mixed strategies in the first place. At balance, yes. In real life, no. The environments are begging you to simplify your mixed strategies in the direction that exploits the pool. Get on the offensive and start gaining vision over your environment, so that you can start taking the space your opponents are leaving behind. Instead of going into your balance-shell and acting like it's helping you. It's not helping you grow. It's only helping you avoid the truth of the matter, which is that it makes sense to change how you're doing things.

If I can change
and you can change
then everybody can change

-Rocky

I want to intellectualize the meaning of self love so that it becomes understandable for guys who tend to think more with their mind and not with their heart. I really believe I could have benefited a ton in my 20s if someone took the time to explain this to me logically. So here goes:

Self love is nothing more than the decision to direct your focus into the single most beneficial thought frequency that you have access to at any given time. By beneficial I mean the thought pattern that offers the most mental/emotional relief, and feels the most holistically balanced. To do this with a single-pointed focus requires a great deal of devotion and surrender (of assumption). As a culture we've learned to coin the subjectively generated experience of this balance as "love", which doesn't help people who have not experientially validated the frequency of consciousness evoked by that balance. Ultimately it can only be validated through direct experience, but I do think you can build context toward it by understanding the logic behind it.

Haters are a good example of poor logic. To avoid the pain of their own imbalance, they conclude that the most intelligent (or beneficial) thing for them to do is attempt to invalidate the paradigms of others. This is fear based and compensatory. They project their own guilt onto their environment in a way that offers a momentary deflection from their core feelings of unworthiness. It's a very poor use of thought, simply because it's redundant. It offers no benefit. It's stupid.

Cliffs:

-Thought frequencies are structurally real, and domains of well-balanced thought evoke warm happy feelings and accelerated growth.

-haters are confused people who are perpetuating their own mental/emotional futility. Show them love. It's the only way to respond from wisdom.

@ Gandalf

I agree with that a lot. I also think that action is largely at the effect of well balanced thought. Unless youre one of those people who can just barrel thru your limiting beliefs with right action, but thats a rare breed.

Thought:

Your inspirations are directly connected to your rawest talents and purest potential. Honor them by going all-in.

What do you think are common ways of not acting in a self loving way?

When you allow yourself to see the implieds in strengthing your foundation, you can begin to approach the learning process with an energy that maximizes your ability to leverage growth. This is a major key to accelerating without burnout.

Thought:

If you're beyond level 2, you're leveling yourself.

My new site is going up tonight! This is a soft launch to make sure that everything is working the way it should be. Thanks to all of you who supported my content, you made it possible for me to move my stuff to a larger platform. I'm going to be uploading a new free audio every day, based on questions that have been submitted through the site. My goal is to offer some daily advice to help you guys accelerate your growth in areas that are frustrating you.

Also, I'll be hosting a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" Event tomorrow from 9AM-7PM PST. If you're interested in stopping by, please do me a favor and RSVP to the event, and post your questions on the event page ahead of time:
https://www.facebook.com/events/807571592678001/

It'll make it easier for us to get the AMA started!

site: www.pokerdetox.com

Grateful

I still play, but I spend most of my time studying databases, and using PIOsolver to create better general strategies for specific environments.

Hey Nick, have you made available graphs and feedbacks of your students before and after they have taken the program?

Hey Cloud. I'm working on compiling all that stuff from guys who are willing to send me their results. Should have some graphs added to the pack details page of the new site within the week.

I'm doing this "Ask Me Anything" event right now on Reddit .. had some good discussion so far, and some good trolls :) . Feel free to jump in through the link below, i'll be on until 6pm EST.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4x2sdv/iamaprofessionalpokerplayerandcoachhere/

The biggest thing thats holds the poker community back:

We are dependent on arriving at certain solutions in the way that we
THINK that we need to, in order for those solutions to be worth something.

This happens because of the belief we've built up around the implication of dropping an insistent pattern of thought:

"If i admit I'm wrong, it lessens me".

I want you to understand that this is the furthest from the truth, so you can stop hurting yourself in the same way I hurt myself. I talk to you as a brother who has suffered along side you and who remains in tune with your darkness, because I know it as my own. Now understand me: If i was forced to choose between 10 minutes of the worst torture, or the decade of mental/emotional pain I endured from THIS one belief^, i would laugh and take the knife with grace. I would take it, with love in my heart and the most eager anticipation. There is no pain like the one that is self inflicted and relentless.

Someone asked me recently how to cut through insistent thought patterns. Start by realizing that they cause you pain. That they only lead to more insistence and more assessments. That they can't correct their initial imbalance. That they reinforce their own distortions. Then realize that you are NOT that thought pattern. You just believe the voice in your head, because it's subtler than you've trained yourself to detect. When you assume your biases, that is true arrogance. The arrogance is what is painful.

I don't do the bible, but I can't do better than it today:

"That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults,
in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak,
then I am strong."

Understand this.

"We are dependent on arriving at certain solutions in the way that we
THINK that we need to, in order for those solutions to be worth something."

That's interesting -- so you're saying that you think it's common to confuse the familiarity of the method for it's efficiency​?

Here is a different way of expressing what I meant in the beginning of the last post:

The solutions to most problems reveal that the problem was not
actually relevant to solve in the first place.

And by the problem not being relevant, I just mean that there was an alternate way around the perceived obstacle that was much more efficient than the way I was attempting to do it initially (in my own experience).

Any study that attempts to invalidate the power of intuition is a massive waste of time. The very nature of intuition is such that you are required to trust in yourself beyond a certain threshold of reasonable doubt, before you can develop consistent and refined access to intuition.

When studies are performed on groups of people who don't actually trust themselves, those studies are redundant and inconclusive. We don't have a chance at revealing the true power of intuition if we insist on basing our studies on a civilization that is so notoriously imbalanced, and then making the mistake of calling that "objective" research.

Today I launched the Skype group networking page as part of the membership option on my new site. Basically it's something I wanted to put together for a long time so that guys can get connected with relevant partners who play similar sites/stakes. I can say from the first wave of the Pio Unlocked buyers that the Skype groups really activated them. For some reason it gives a sense of accountability that just isn't there when you're studying on your own, and it's great for divying up modeling work between partners to speed up the process. Below is a picture so you can see what the page looks like. Everyone is able to fill out their profile stating what they're looking for, and you can message each other from there to link up. Since the site is just getting going, I'm going to give anyone who joins a free second month. By then we should have a decently library of skype friends. If not, I'll just keep granting free months until we do :)

The idea that NL Holdem has dried up is as assumptive as the idea that there are no other intelligent life forms in the universe. In fact the NL argument is way more assumptive, b/c we have way more vision over what's going on in that environment than we do over the universe:

-99% of pros are unable to consistently study in ways that are relevant for their growth. To argue that this is because they're in the proximity of their full potential is wildly assumptive. It's way more likely that they lack direction and motivation.

-The majority of winning players have poor mental game posture during downswings. Win-rate regression is going on all over the place.

-Diversification of the bankroll across multiple sites is hugely under-utilized, especially as you approach high stakes.

And there's definitely more great reasons that I'm not seeing while I write this. A major key to balancing your perspectives is to just gain more vision over what's actually going on in the environment. Or you can just play PLO :)

Nick just wanted to say this thread has been awesome to read through as well as your recent AMA on Reddit. Thanks and keep up the good work!

As a learner, the smartest thing you can do is simplify your responsibility to yourself. The most effective simplification I've found is this:

"I have a duty to ask an efficient question".

An efficient question is one that states its reasoning to the best of its ability, and then asks for feedback on which parts of that reasoning are over-assumptive.

Here's a poorly devised question:

I play micros. How do I combat the fact that people seem to 3-bet me
more aggressively when I take shots at 100nl?

-Before you worry about countering them, you can do database research to see if it's even relevant to, based on their frequencies. You're probably just bias b/c you come from micros where you're not used to getting 3bet much at all. SSNL environments are still universally passive; with a few exceptions they still don't 3bet enough. If you ask a question that directs the attention beyond the point of assumption, you're more likely to get an imbalanced answer. Like "Just 4-bet more then". <-- it's an answer that skims over the initial assumption, which was that the pool was even 3betting a lot to begin with.

Help yourself when you ask questions by using a simple formula:

1) State your reasoning (don't be afraid of being wrong, it's cool).
2) OPENLY ask for feedback on where you're being assumptive in particular parts of your reasoning.

It can do wonders for the quality of the answers you get!

With love as always

I don't really have a home. One of my friends told me recently "the world is your home". He meant it literally and I think it's more funny like that. Since January 2016 my home looked like this:

France
Scotland
Ireland
Netherlands
Italy
New York
Miami
Orlando
Vegas
Cancun

All of those rentals were through AirBnB. The service is horrendously overpriced, but dependable. My same friend (who never travels) asked me for advice on how to go about planning a move to Atlantic City for 2 months with the intention of playing on Pokerstars.nj and also at the casinos. Here's my 5 step process for how to do it for as cheap as possible, without sacrificing too much quality of life:

Step 1:
Decide whether or not you are capable of living in a hotel room. If you haven't ever done this before, imagine it for about an hour with your eyes closed and dedication. At the end of that hour, strip about 80% of the novelty and glamor out of it and you'll typically have a good idea of what life will be like after week 2. The point is, in my experience it's been worth having an apartment if you can afford it. Especially when there's virtually nothing pretty about affordable hotel living in Atlantic City for an up and coming grinder.

Let's assume that you've validated the possibility of hotel life.

Step 2:
Make a list of at least 10 different hotels that don't look gross. Don't limit yourself to just the ones in the casinos. Call all of them and ask if they do monthly rates. If they say no, ask them to ask their manager if they would make an exception for 2 months. Sometimes it makes a difference. The point is don't be afraid to ask.

Step 3:
Once you get all the prices on your hotel options, head over AirBnB.com. Type in "Atlantic City, NJ". It will ask you for dates, and then send you to a screen where you can specify your requests. Just make sure you tick "Entire Home", unless you're cool with sharing your place with strangers. Also tick "Wireless Internet". It's all verified and guaranteed, which is nice. if you get there and it doesn't work, the host will either fix it promptly or AirBnB will refund you. Lastly, select your price range for your rent budget. Hit search.

Here's an example of a potential option:

$1174/mo:
https://www.airbnb.com/s/Atlantic-City--NJ--United-States?checkin=01%2F01%2F2017&checkout=02%2F01%2F2017&roomtypes%5B%5D=Entire+home%2Fapt&pricemax=2343&ssid=jr845omb&page=1&source=filters&airbnbplusonly=false&stag=ci6oV3RS

Step 4:
Lowball the host via the private message option. Most places are usually marked up 40% of the normal rental price, because AirBnB pretty much has a monopoly for short term rentals. Just be respectful and play the incentive game, like anything else. Tell them you're interested in booking immediately if they will do 2 months at 60% price (use a real dollar amount). They'll usually counter. You can either hold or re-counter. I don't like this game, but it's necessary to play it when hosts are abusing the market. A lot of these renters are struggling financially and will cave on a decent 2 month offer. A bird in hand is worth 2 in the bush, etc. Keep in mind you don't have to pay the full amount up front for monthly bookings. Usually it's just half, and the other half mid-way through your stay.

This process will probably take a few days, but by the end of it you'll have final offers on the places you're considering. Weigh them against your hotel rates. Figure out how many days a week you want to play in casinos, and factor transport costs into your AirBnB options. Keep in mind there might be really cheap public transport options to the casinos.

Step 5:
Lastly, factor in the intangibles. If you book the option I linked above, think about how cool it will feel to look out your window every morning at all the Jersey Shore bros tanning and dripping with hair gel. Or to be able to see your taxi pull up from your balcony and announce "cabs are here", just because it's awesome and just because you can. Little stuff like this can make the difference. I know it's not objective, but your happiness is ultimately subjective, so use your imagination.

Hopefully this helps you guys get past the starting friction of booking a trip you've been thinking about taking for a while. If anyone is interested in more travel advice, feel free to post here or PM me, I'd be happy to help.

Performance is ultimately the only thing that matters. If your theory studies are consistently causing confusion and frustration in-game, you have every incentive to simplify the theoretical concepts that you're working with at that stage in your evolution. It's assumptive to think simplification comes at the expense of accuracy, especially when you are in something for the long-run. You always have enough time to build a stronger foundation, the implieds are massive.

If you saw an opening to become a version of yourself that you never imagined was possible, what would the odds of success need to be before you could go all-in? Would you need it to be a lock? A coinflip? Could you find conviction as an underdog? What if our greatest explorers passed on the long shots and played it safe? Columbus could've easily bitched out in the face of social pressure. How many like him were never known because they folded prematurely? How much do you value legacy and contribution, over what you perceive as safety and control? Imagine the momentum we would gain as a civilization if we each gave ourselves fully to a dream, instead of justifying all the reasons we can't.

Beautiful day in Cancun

@Sneeze

I think it's a valid point that it's risky to inspire an imbalanced individual to "follow his dream", since that dream will usually be corrupted by fear, and cause him to perceive benefit in manipulating others against their will.

That being said, there's a certain futility in our current model of disempowerment, and it still causes war. There's only the illusion of control b/c it's not crumbling at a manic rate (yet). My vote is for risking our potential.

@ Sneeze
Basically just that as a society we put more value on not being judged than following our inspiration, and it's proven itself to be redundant and unfulfilling for long enough to sack the model (imo). The problem like you said, is that not enough people are capable of identifying "pure" inspiration. But at least it's a model with potential, albeit risky.

The more I learn about myself through poker, the more I consistently see learning inefficiencies in environments that I know much less about.

I pulled up to the gym today and saw this (it's sideways):

This lady is attempting to balance on one leg while standing on a half-shell, while simultaneously shaking the double ropes to make them do the cool wavy thing.

Can we take a moment and honor the complexity of the exercise. And another moment to point out that this lady is far outside of her performance capacity. Not because she's overweight. I was there .. she was wildly imbalanced.

This is what most theory oriented players look like to me when they talk poker. They attempt to justify super complex strategies that are outside of their ability to implement. And they insist that they're being objective. It's a futile arrogance, disguised as intelligence.

I dont advocate simplified post-flop strategy because i think it's the pinnacle. I do it because im aware that it's the most efficient model for the current capacity of 95% of the community, and because it still contains the potential to steer itself into greater accuracy as it interfaces with the dynamics of each player's unique journey toward highest relevance.

Back to the gym. Next thing I know, this lady dismounts off her shell to tell the guy next to her that his dead-lift form is off. From what I could tell, it actually was, but that's not the point. Turns out she's a trainer.

As a student of life, I see a lot of "mentors" out there who try to coach others into a level of performance outside of their OWN capacity. It's important to me that you know that this is something which remains at the forefront of my awareness with everything I share. It's at the forefront because it has not always been, and upon recognizing it in myself, my deepest ambition has been to stop compensating for that which I don't understand. My hope is that when you read me, you either see someone who is transparent about his own journey through ignorance, or someone who is sharing from a place of true wisdom in an area he has explored and balanced thoroughly. My job, as I see it, is to make it clear which of those two aspects of my truth I'm relating from at any given time. There is equally as much to learn from both.

You can't trust someone's judgement until they trust themselves. At the same time (paradoxically), if you don't believe someone has the decisive potential to trust themselves, through no process at all, that is a projection of your own inability to decisively trust yourself.

The degree to which you can give people the benefit of the doubt over
and over again is the degree to which you are actually intelligent.
-BM

Your job is not to worry about upsetting people. Your job is to ground yourself in a presence that suggests through action that to do the right thing is the intelligent thing, regardless of the price. Integrity is the only lasting currency, and its margins happen to be favorable.

It's kind of ironic that I have to make this post right after my last one, but here goes. I got a PM from an honorable member of the community today, showing me this screenshot of a message he received on Skype:

I'm well aware of the risks in selling a packaged course, and I've assumed them so that I have the potential to reach a wider audience. I've lost over $50,000 in sales from torrent theft since June, and that doesn't bother me as much as someone pretending to be affiliated with me, and repackaging my shit to distribute it for less. If you get any sort of message from someone trying to push you my products, it's not anyone on my team. Thanks to all of you who continue to support me from integrity.

Any craft you embark on will eventually become a pure reflection of your level of honesty with yourself. If you insist on giving less than what's required, your craft will perpetually expose your unwillingness to balance the very biases that are obstacling you. It will do that in the form of poor results and pain. To give yourself fully to a craft is to understand yourself on the most essential level, and that type of understanding has the ability to serve as a premium building block for your next adventure. Quit or commit, because they're both more intelligent than kidding yourself.

New RIO vid up today :)

I've had several near death experiences in the last 2 years.

In the moment where you firmly believe you are about to die, the mind has a choice to struggle or surrender. I've tried both, and here's what I found the most interesting:

At the point of a full surrender (to what you're convinced is impending doom), the sense of identity diffuses beyond the normal thresholds of the body and mind.

I'm not interested in arguing for or against an afterlife. A simple observation is much more relevant to me:

Surrender brought great relief, while struggle prolonged suffering.

For this reason, surrender seemed to be holistically incentivized. It achieved what struggle set out to but couldn't secure. And it did so in no time at all. The sense of freedom was immense and infinite. The clarity and vibrancy was paradoxical. In comparison to struggling, surrender was so clearly the solution to the existential paradox.

I came away with this idea, and I have tried to apply it vigorously to my every day life:

The nature of control is counterintuitive. In order to gain control,
you have to sacrifice control, so you can become more
available to the true meaning of control.

I invite you to play at this level.

If time didn't exist, experience would be infinite. Poker players would likely default toward the polarities:

-There would be guys who took wild shots in hopes of sticking the landing (there's infinite time to rebuild after all)

-There would be guys who relaxed completely, and began rebuilding their foundation.

Consider that both of these polarities are actually more intelligent than the community norm, which is to half-step in futility.

The biggest leak I see in players across the board:

They lose too much at non-showdown.

There have been arguments made in the past that non-showdown winnings serve no purpose as a metric for analyzing win-rate efficiency. That argument is the results of 2 main biases:

-A lack of vision over the overarching passivity-imbalance of the pools

-A general complacency with a style that has already obtained good results, while still losing a lot at non-showdown.

Never settle!

Choparno

The pools don't use enough aggression, and they fold too much.

An interview on success and personal fulfillment with a really insightful guy who you might not expect:

http://lewishowes.com/podcast/rob-dyrdek/

The most balanced action is always the one that drives the model closer to equilibrium by maximally exploiting the last iteration. If you can see that this is all the solvers have ever done, you can break out of the GTO spell. "Optimal" is a rigid interpretation of balance.

What I enjoy most about coaching is a particular flavor of student. The one who comes with a sense of urgency usually has my full attention. For the very reason that when urgency is real in a person, there is a higher than normal availability for truth, and that is a coach's delight.

Usually these are the guys with families, or major debt. It's rare to find a young 20-something with a real sense of urgency. I know life is unfolding at it's own pace for all of us, but I can't help but feel that it's highly relevant for most people to reach that point of urgency sooner rather than later, with whatever they're battling with. And then you have my full attention. You have my infinite patience, as a coach and as a person. Because in your urgency, you're matching my ambition for deeper truth. And there is great connection to be found there. There is great relief and healing to be found there. Those moments are rare and often the fullest. Those moments need to be honored, not feared. Those moments are ones of deep, deep rememberence.

Thanks to all of you who play your hearts out.

Everything of value is beyond the threshold of your current paradigm. Iterate your mind by pressing "solve" from your heart.

Einstein and Jesus decide to play each other every day for two hours during one year. Einstein loses a lot and just cant seem to beat Jesus. He decides to increase his balance, Jesus is always one step ahead in their exploiting war and it is driving him crazy. Over time he is forced to play the perfect equilibrium. This Jesus guy seems to always know what he has and this way he figures he will not be exploited again. Even though he knows that this will lead Jesus to play in the same way as him, the perfect equilibrium and this will lead both to play break even vs each other, he actually rejoices that idea and imagines both of them in the near future having a conversation over a glass of wine about how in perfect conditions two truth seekers and finders will inevitably adapt their play to the perfect equilibrium leaving the winner to the one who has won the most in that process. But.. this is not what happens, Jesus continues to crush him. Einstein figures he is missing something really big. He starts to think day and night untill one morning he wakes up and he realises what it is. It had little to do with poker and thats why it was so hard for him to find out that the key was that his main assumption about the reality in which he lives was completely off. In theory Jesus cant see Einstein's whole cards but what if there is more than the five senses?

@ Jesus

With great power comes great responsibility..

The key to becoming a better problem solver lies in training yourself to expand your vision into territory that wasn't previously being seen as a relevant consideration for the problem at hand. You see this a lot with poker. When you try to force a solution to a "close" spot based on 1 street of information, you're straying from relevance. Many times, you can expand your vision to multiple streets, and the solution becomes clear. Finding ways to get around impossibly mixed strategies while retaining accuracy is one of the most important parts of the journey. You can do it if you gain more vision over your environment.

Accuracy is found in the willingness to shift your focus to the most incentivized point of view at any given time. Happiness is the effect of doing that over, and over, and over again.

@Sneeze

I think it's actually both, and I think its very natural, because the unchallenged assumption is that you're fundamentally separate from the environment. That becomes less and less true as you go closer to the quantum level.

What's not natural is how we've conditioned ourselves to perceive benefit in exploring from heavy resistance. There's intense distortion and redundancy that comes from resistant exploration, because it's not genuinely available to alternate perspectives. It's afraid of them for whatever reason, and that's the basis of the personal journey: to minimize the distortion between the personally asserted biases and "reality".

My new coaching rate is < $100 hr. The catch is, you have to work your ass off for a month straight to get that rate. Below is an outline of a new coaching model that I've used with a couple guys over the summer, and am ready to make it available on a larger scale.

Unlimited coaching for 30 days

Here's the format:

The week before we begin, you provide me with..
-A short background, and the sites/stakes you currently play
-stats (i'll tell you exactly which ones to send)
-a 45 minute video of a recent pre-recorded session, or a hand history review, where you voice over with your thought process during the hands. This gets me familiar with where your mental game is currently at.

From there I will start tailoring a lesson plan specifically for you, to optimize your growth over the first week or so. The initial stages of the course will be centered around bringing awareness to the most relevant aspects of your game that you need to adjust for immediate win-rate improvements in your environment, and providing you with the exercises necessary for you to integrate those changes as quickly as possible. You will need PioSolver. You don't need to be great with it, but you do need to have a basic sense of how to use it.

We will communicate over e-mail. I've found it to be a better way to organize thoughts for both parties, and it actually benefits the student, since he's not paying for the time it takes him to express his own thoughts over a timed call session. It also gets around time-zone issues. I recommend 1 organized email a day from you. It can be as long as you want, and it basically describes your daily exploration in the direction I sent you the day before, and the new questions that have come up for you in the process. You don't have to email me every day, this training model is completely dependent on your level of ambition. The challenge is for you to leverage me through your own ambition. You're held accountable only by your initial purchase.

I have a lot of stock lesson videos from my private coaching products. If any of them are highly relevant to one of your major leaks, or your current stage of exploration in PioSolver or mental game stuff, I will upload it to you in a private dropbox folder. My goal is to come at you at all angles with relevant training, without having to hold your hand. It's a chance to explore and improve relevantly at a hyper-accelerated rate.

I'm doing this for two reasons:

1) I really enjoy coaching guys who are all-in.

2) I want guys with real ambition to be rewarded. You can very realistically leverage me for 30-50 hours of my time if you just commit yourself to the learning process, without having to worry about direction (that's my job). And I would love that for you. Genuinely.

I'm trying this with 3 spaces open for the month of October. After that I will wait-list. If you want to book for November, that's fine too.

Total Course Price: $3600 (due week 1)
Registration Deposit: $1000

I offer payment plans if I see a promising reason, so feel free to communicate with me on that.

PM me to register, and if you have any other questions just post here. I've got some other new coaching projects in the mix for later this year that I'm excited to share and try out. You guys have my continued support, and I really love this job :)

Nick

No offense, but I really just don't get it. You are pushing your products as hell, and I understand since now you have a business. I like your posts in general, very insightful, and that's why it's even difficult to grasp why you are give away coaching instead of sitting at HS. In another post I asked whether you are playing anymore and you replied with a yes, so another question. If you are putting enough volume, are you sure the EV you are given away with coaching is compensating the EV loss at the tables?

@ 4-star

The assumption there is that my happiness EV is primarily based on money. I also think the formula to business success is really simple: give more than you take. That only becomes a burden when you're not inspired by your job to begin with.

I went to your profile and hit PM button and got dattboi0 - is this you or a glitch on RIO?

@mike
Yea, it's my old Carbon Poker name that I registered RIO with

Direct honesty is always the most accurate. Most people avoid it because they havent felt the safety of speaking their truth. In the week before pokerdetox.com launched, my site developer ran into a few unexpected glitches that ended up delaying the launch by over a week. Since I had rescheduled my reddit AMA once already to make sure the site would be active for it, I told him that there was a new mandatory deadline. His response was this:

"I'm doing my best."

Anyone worth associating with will understand that sentence on a deep level, and regardless of the difficulty or frustration created by the circumstance, there will be respect and an increase in empathy. If they don't understand, that's on them. It reflects their inability to handle problems intelligently. Your character is defined most by these spots. Don't make excuses, don't sugar coat it with shaky optimism, just take full responsibility without judgement. Doing that puts you back in control of the quality of your thoughts and actions, which is most efficient track to reach your desired outcome.

October coaching slots are full, November is still open. Respect!

A sutra is an eastern word that can loosely be translated as "life manual". You can use it as a fun way to create relevance where there seemingly is none.

I took a ferry to one of the islands off of PDC and paid for a scooter when I got there. The guy walked me to a garage full of bikes, turned one on, and gave me instructions in broken English with the motor running. When he was done he leaned the bike at me and I caught it on the front right handle. The bike jumped forward, and in my confusion I started to run with it before I realized what was going on: the front right handle was the gas. Later on I was in the ocean playing with the sutra in my head:

the very thing that makes the most sense to hold on to is actually the one thing that
needs to be released

Humbled every God damn day

I learn more from my students than from any other source. The amount of Pio grids and database numbers I see on any given day is more than most guys see in a month. There's a running joke that I have more Skype groups than friends in real life. My point is this: I built my ecosystem to work for me by using a model that encourages independence and authentic exploration, rather than disempowerment disguised as "research". The difference is real. I wake up to 100 pending insights every morning, instead of 100 pings of neediness.

Your network is your paperboy. Your paperboy is as valuable as the intel he's pushing. Get networked and watch the momentum of your new ecosystem work for you.

The Skype group area of my site is now completely free until November. Just register a name and create a profile. May the wind always be at your back.

The more time you spend in an inspirational state, the better the quality of your experience (and results) will be. Audit everything in your life and find out what passionately compels you. Then pay tibute to those things by building an easy-to-access ecosystem around them. Turn songs into playlists. Make your entire schedule one big game. Use point systems to keep score of how hard you're pushing it in each area of your life. Do random shit just for fun. I've got a Skype group called "Fantasy Factory" for business imagination only. No idea is too ridiculous. Find safe places to be yourself, and start sharing the potential that is truly you. There is great support for those who commit to a life of inspiration.

Neglecting the mental game is like going to the gym and then binge eating. As a coach I see different availabilities to mental game improvement. Certain guys are willing to look deeper than others to find out what really controls the quality of their decisions on and off the table. Ultimately, your journey is headed to the core. To me it's always seemed logical to face it head on, so you can start living a life of increased freedom and clarity.

My new pack "Poker Detox Mental Game" (PDMG) will be released in late October. It will be roughly 4 hours of densely edited footage, priced at around $600 depending on the final length. I fully expect it to be the most transformative mental game coaching on the market.

On October 1st I'm going to start streaming on Twitch. We will be mixing it up in the pokerstars zoom games, talking strategy, and giving away a bunch of free stuff in the spirit of PDMG.

I'll release a full syllabus in early October. I hope this pack will let you guys close out 2016 on a high note and head into 2017 with serious mental momentum!

By the time you turn 20 your paradigm is pretty much on autopilot. It's also your first shot at independence. The irony is, very few of your choices at that stage are actually your own. You're basically just the sum of your conditionings. My 20s were about failing in application. I was eventually forced to admit that I didn't actually know how to get what I wanted. Then I was forced to admit that what I thought I wanted actually had no real value. Those are hard blows.

To the young guys: your results will come primarily from your willingness to surrender your insistence, not from your work ethic. That being said, your work ethic will accelerate your journey in a way that can allow you to conclude that there is very little value to be gained from "dumb hustle". Work hard in a certain direction for long enough to expose that something is most likely wrong with your approach. Then allow yourself to see the logic in trying a new way, before any proof exists. Skip levels when you sense the opportunity.

You will almost inevitably amass guilt through failure. Be humble and intelligent enough to make peace with your tendency toward self judgement. Your evolution is largely dependent on the rate at which you can shift from guilt to forgiveness. You will never be able to clean your slate, but you can purify it. The ability to transmute pain into love is the mark of the alchemist. All they ever taught us was how to dig for gold. Your 20s, when done right, can teach you how to make your own. The future runs on internal currency.

Shout out to Vedran Premuzic for drawing this caricature of me. He's designed a lot of the top layouts on Twitch and recently set mine up for October. You can hire him through Skype @ "sylarvp". Getting kind of pumped to stream!

You can follow my channel here

@Thebing

Yea, I'm going to be in Prague for it, and I'll be streaming 3 to 4 times a week in 2.5 hour slots. I'll post a schedule closer to October.

A lot of guys are spending too much time in areas where the returns are too marginal. Look at your time as a factor in your winrate. If you spend 10 hours studying for a .01 bb/100 winrate improvement, that's a problem two ways: one because you barely accomplished anything, two because thats 10 hours you couldve spent playing, earning. It's not uncommon for guys to actually lose winrate from working with solvers. Either from misapplication or straight up burnout.

Relevant learning patterns maximize the efficiency of winrate gains. Prioritization is the first key to establishing direction. Here are two of the most relevant formations to study if you're trying to move up the ranks:

BTN v BB srp
SB v BB srp

Frequency of occurrence combined with wider than usual starting ranges make these formations hot spots for quick winrate improvements.

Stay simple, stay relevant, and keep stepping!

I do enjoy reading this thread. Find something's insightful and its always interesting hearing/reading about personal evolution and what new paths open up to you because of this. Im curious, do you just sit down at your computer when you feel in the right frame of mind (Present, insightful almost spiritual thinking) when making a post or do you feel pressured to make a new posts and work hard drafting out copies and copies to get the wording and tone right?

@Sozick

When I write I'm usually trying to get something across in a "no bullshit" type way. Basically because I think we all bullshit ourselves enough already. I try to make it an expression of distilled thought. That's why my writing voice is usually choppy and grammatically incorrect. I'm just going for simple sentences that feel like they carry a low enough bias to pack a punch. My average entry probably takes 5-10 minutes from the moment I get an idea. There's nothing pretty about it unless I get lucky with the wordplay. Then again I think directness is often pretty because it has a tendency to be more real.

Conveying a thought, an idea or a concept, as though it seems simple and easily understood is what takes skill and is the hallmark of mastery imo

Recently I was in a situation where the air conditioning broke in my apartment rental in Cancun. If you haven't been to Cancun, the humidity is unbearable and you need air. Long story short the host was was unresponsive most of the day and finally assured us someone would arrive at 9pm. I agreed to wait but made it clear I would need a hotel for the night if the air could not be fixed.

Some brief context:
I'm staying 1 block off the main tourist street paying $2200/month for a premium unit. I dont have a car.

By 1030pm no one had shown up, and no one had texted. I walked down the main street with my girlfriend and dog and booked a room at the only nice hotel I knew of in the area (I don't know the area). It cost $267.

It's 2 weeks later and I'm checking out in 3 days time. The host replies to the copy of the hotel bill I sent and tells me that they will only be refunding $70, since that is the breakdown of what my unit is worth nightly.

It's a poor metric for a refund amount in the first place, because there are no nice hotels in the area for anywhere near that price. But here's the bigger point that only really made sense to me once I started a business:

When dealing with people, the idea that the net (implied) EV of a situation directly correlates to the immediate $EV of the situation is foolish.

If you're running a good business you should be fucking up rarely enough that you can use those opportunites to define the integrity of your company. You do that by going completely out of your way to satisfy the customer regardless of the $ amount. You're not just doing this for the customer, you're doing it for your bottom line. It just takes more trust and vision than most business people are comfortable with to see how that equation works.

Check out this short 3 minute clip that will make what I'm saying more clear and give you happy goosebumps if you have a pulse:
Pure Gold

A recent mass database study of Pokerstars 200nl showed a number of major statistical leaks in the pool since summer of 2016. When compared to analysis done 18 months prior, those numbers were almost exactly the same.

The games aren't getting tougher. It's just the most popular excuse.

@ Juan
It was analysis done by some of my students, not publicized.

Someone sent me this, it's a recent post that someone made in the official Piosolver Skype group, population 600 last time I checked.

..."but more to the point: you aren't ever going to learn a thing
about poker if you're too lazy to study multiple bet sizes. the number
one thing in poker is that you must believe in your own ability. if
you believe you will win less by using multiple bet sizes, it means
your opponents are somehow exploiting you more when more bet sizes are
available to you. It's not logical."

This group is one that I exited from my network a long time ago, mainly because of all the bullshit artists. Multiple bet sizings are a perfect way to convince yourself that you're doing more for your game than you actually are. I'm not saying they don't have value, I'm saying they have very little value until you're already very, very good. Guys that try to commit to the nosebleed path head on are usually the most deluded. Way too much of their time is spent discussing ideas and defending to other people why "their way" is worth exploring, or more valid. Meanwhile these guys are usually struggling to beat MSNL. If your way is so great, then just explore it yourself and shut the fuck up until you arrive somewhere. It's like the person that reads the new-age self development book and starts telling all their friends that they have to read it too, so that they can feel better about their insecurities now that other people agree with their new ideas. And then they never do shit. They just talk about it, instead of implementing and coming to their own conclusions. Lecturing others is a great way to avoid your core fear of failure by hiding behind your thoughts instead of actually owning up to them through action. I've made all these mistakes.

Funny thing about believing in your own ability is that it's only half the pill. You're required to balance that belief with an honest assessment of your current level of ability, so you can pick the most streamline path for your growth. There's never been a "right way". There's only ever been the constant invitation to explore your way, so that you can come to a personal decision as to whether or not that way works for YOU. I preach relevance because it contains every way. From there, the "right way" ends up being whatever way the person sees most benefit in. For the community, I'm confident that simplifying would be one of the most incentivized shifts. But even if that's true for you, it still may not be of highest relevance for you, especially if you don't believe it. My point is that no one is asking you to take anything on faith. Especially not me. It was extremely valuable for me to find out that I actually couldn't make it work in the way that I was so set on. The GTO way, the multiple bet-size way, the overwhelming, over-analytical way. There was infinite value in actually proving myself wrong through application, instead of continuing to theorize and defend something I was too afraid to actually commit to.

You guys don't know the version of me that turned away from all outside noise and worked myself to total failure. I don't talk about it because it's not worth much in itself. But I failed completely. Not "almost" or "kind of". I made the final decision to take it all the way with my set of tools and theories, and to disconnect from anyone who would rather keep talking instead of doing. I couldn't live with my own bullshit anymore. I worked until I literally had no energy left to justify the lack of progress I had made. All I managed to piece together was the illusion of growth. I absolutely hated myself and my deep-rooted sense of unworthiness that somehow was driving the entire futile quest. Coming face to face with my arrogance was what was necessary for me to become be cracked open to the natural intelligence contained in humility. It was what it took for me to become available to real change. I wish it upon no one, but there are many like me who I think would benefit from it, just from the communal vibe.

So on that note, the only problem I have with the approach of anyone who's struggling is that they're not willing to take it all the way. They just stay in the comfort zone of the application process, doing more talking (or typing) than anything else. My advice is to quit fucking around. if you're going to be stubborn enough to defend a process that hasn't produced the results you want yet, you can at least have the decency to prove it to yourself. Prove yourself right, or prove yourself wrong, it makes no difference. Just prove something from your own direct experience, so you can stop speaking from fear and telling everyone that it's logic. Until you do that, you should speak very little, unless it's to ask questions. Stop wasting everyone's time by trying to manipulate them into agreeing with you. It's disgusting and cowardly. More mistakes that I've personally made. You can trust me when I tell you it's a futile way, or find out for yourself. Just go do one of those and finish it.

You guys have asked me how I got this way, or where my perspectives come from. What I shared in this post is the heart of it. All I ever do is speak from a conviction that knows true failure. And from there, I have a high sensitivity to what ideas contain potential, and what ideas are largely redundant and pointless. I can also sense pretty quickly who's gone through a similar process, and who's dancing around the fire like a pussy, trying to convince the rest of the world that they're worth listening to. We're well into the age of poker where tools and databases are at a level that can produce the black and white data necessary to get you the win rate that you've always talked about getting. I can assure you it doesn't require you to juggle 2 different bet sizes, it just requires you to put in work. The difference is always rooted in action.

I see the relevance for simplifying your strategy as much as possible in 100+BB games as the more sizes you have makes the balancing act so much harder. You explain it very well also sauce has done a vid on this subject a few months ago that might of been inspired by this thread that was very good also. It also makes sense to me to have a simplified strategy pre flop with 10bbs (shove or fold). The question im asking though is do you think this 1 size fits all can be applied at any stack depth, in 20bb cap games and Mtts ( Effective stack 15-30bbs) Pre flop you would have some, Raise calls/Raise folds and Jams. Two bet size strategy. I might be missing the point here but im interested in your reply.

SoZick

I think it's pretty easy to take simplified strategies too far. There are ways you can go about intelligently reducing strategic options, and the main benefit is that you gain more control over your range. That being said, high level simplification is not predicated on "one size fits all", it just attempts to collapse a mixed strategy into pure strategy whenever possible, and it does that by clarifying incentive. A decision point can be simplified by introducing MORE data points into the analysis (it's counter-intuitive). The more fluently you understand the imbalances of the environment you're in, the more consistently and covertly you can exploit it. Using Piosolver preflop subsets alongside large sample database analysis from a specific pool is (imo) the key to training relevantly. 100 hours of work in that direction would slingshot you to the front of the curve.

@ Saulo

yes :)

@ centgas

They're too passive in a lot of different lines, folding too much and not raising enough.

The #1 reason guys don't commit:
Afraid to fail.

The #2 reason:
Afraid to succeed.

Beyond all the seeming randomness, a large sample of choices brought you to where you are today. Don't play the victim card, it has never served your dream.

My twitch stream kicks off Sunday, Oct 2 from 1:00PM - 3:30PM EST

The schedule will continue Mon-Wed-Fri-Sat, same time every time. I'll be playing stars zoom this month, come join me!

Link to my stream

Got to Prague yesterday, just did a Twitch test run at my new place and it's too slow to stream, gonna buy an upgrade at a T-mobile tomorrow. Can't wait until free energy gets leaked by the govs so we can all have high speed. Sorry guys!

@ Johny

Yes, starting in 10 minutes and all streams will be recorded. Will be in Prague for 1 month!

Twitch was fun while it lasted tonight, had a lot of lag issues but did some QnA with the guys that stayed to hang out. Hopefully the stream will be firing on all cylinders on wednesday. Anyway, I wrote the entry below after staying up all night reflecting on the beauty of the struggle. Really looking forward to what's ahead :). Here goes:

My whole life was a search for proof. Proof that I was either doing the right thing, or that I was about to try the right thing (if I ever had the balls to do it). Maybe "right" is the wrong word. Let's say I was just looking for something better, or something more accurate. I think that's natural. I think that's healthy. We're alive and we desire to grow.

But what I really wanted was the feeling. The feeling of infinite safety and excitement at the same time. And I wanted to be able to trust that the feeling was real, and to know that it was safe to trust it. I wanted to be intelligent with an unchallengable resolve. Those were my ideals. But it was really all for the feeling.

If you're looking for the feeling, here's the fast track: Proof will not unlock it. You will never prove it. Not in any way that counts. For as long as you need proof, you will never get the feeling, and you will never get the feeling for as long as you need proof. Now you're getting acquainted with the dizziness of futility.

Assuming you've understood that, here's the code to the next door:

Proof is unnecessary to unlock the feeling. Of course, it's so simple. But simple is not easy. Because the feeling doesn't lie. It demands the truth. It has intricate balance points just like any other skill game. Except this is the game of perception. The art of perception. The heart of perception. The war with yourself. All for the feeling. You're almost home now.

All you actually want is to trust yourself. Because that unlocks the feeling. It's set up like that because trust is inherently good. That's why you want it so bad. You want to know that you are good beyond all doubt. Incorruptable. Pure. Authentic. Somewhere along the way you lost that. Or you thought you did, it's all the same.

Only you can give yourself this gift. The implication of self forgiveness is profoundly underrated. Probably because it doesn't make much sense. But it does unlock the feeling, and that does make sense -- because it's what you actually want. Or maybe you're not like me. Maybe I'm wrong about you. Maybe one person will hear me, maybe that's enough. All of life we wait for our own permission. Untie the knot and claim your freedom. Brother.

Here is at least one person who is very much struggling with this exact, exact point. I hear you loud and clear. Thanks for this great way of expression.

"If I had more time, I would've written you a shorter letter".

-Mark Twain

Simplification takes skill. Getting Twitch started a little early today, will record it for everyone who misses.

Recording

edit: link should be fixed now

Great session Nick. Glad you've overcame your technical problems. The stream was way better than i expected and i expected a lot at first place.

Big +1

The stream was great!

Stream was dope. Is it weird complaint that only being able to see you from the nose up was kinda tilting? #showussomeskin

thanks for the stream :)

great stream bro, keep it up

When you truly see there is no benefit in emotionally tilting, you will not do it. Learn to see the value in facing yourself directly. That starts with high quality questions:

"How do I somehow believe that getting pissed off is improving my situation?"

"Why do I continue to force sessions from an emotionally imbalanced state, when I could just postpone them?"

More on this today @ my Twitch, 1pm EST here

Today on Twitch I'll be talking about the most common inefficiencies in the modeling process. Come ask questions and save yourself some precious time. 1pm-3pm EST
Stream

Live 5/10NL is close to Bovada 5/10NL ring? Really?

FR Bovada 5/10 plays consistently nitty with a few major whales here and there. Similar to a lot of 5/10 live games imo.

Saw this today and loved it:

When you encounter some scary obstacle in your life just close your
eyes and pretend you’re an 80 year old man who regrets not tackling
all the obstacles he wanted to in life. Then when you feel like that
old man, say to yourself, “I wish I was young again”, then open your
eyes…

And BOOM!

You’re young again

#NoRegrets

On Twitch shortly, talking today about the power of making yourself accountable to other people in order to leverage your career growth. I might even show a graph at the end!
Stream

Hey Nick! Are subscribers to your Twitch stream able to watch your sessions at any time? I am always at work when you stream and rarely get to catch any of it. Thanks!

Todays Twitch title is "Practitioner to the Bone". It's time to trade all your planning and prophesizing for real DOING. Come get your hands dirty with us. Starts in 10 minutes here

The P.O.V. of others is the single biggest thing that holds us back from our potential. Know that when people doubt you, they actually doubt themselves. Projecting doubt onto you is easier than facing it in themselves. If everyone actually understood this, we could all stop jocking for position in the eyes of others. And we could stop feeling paralyzed by the pressure of outside judgement. It doesn't make sense to define yourself through someone else's insecurity. It started in them, not you. But if you take it on it becomes yours.

When you fully forgive yourself for your insecurities by facing them directly, you naturally begin to give others the benefit of the doubt. You do that because it's simply what's required to maintain your new balance. From that point, you will never go back into judgement and projection for very long, because you'll see how it obstacles YOU from YOUR dreams. You will have deep compassion for those who still judge and doubt, because you will know their suffering as your own. What they do to themselves, they do from confusion and darkness. Be the light.

hi, i buy ur pio product package one, but where can I watch vid? there is no link...

steevelove

You'll receive an invite through your email, my team has to add people manually to this course because it's accessed through Dropbox.com. Usually it doesnt take more than 12 hours from the time of purchase.

The mental game pack I'll be releasing at the end of this month will be imbedded into pokerdetox.com, and will allow access immediately after purchase.

Thanks and sorry for the confusion!

Kevin Lawrence from RIO is my guest today on Twitch, we'll be talking about flow states and neuroscience. He'll do the science part :).

Here's the recording

Your goal should be to increase the equity of your ecosystem. You do that by caring about the people in it. Pretend it was you.

Kevin was a cool guest, seems like everyone viewing has really enjoyed the streams so far. Have you enjoyed streaming / do you plan on growing the stream to help promote your coaching packages? Seems like all the big poker streamers have facebook pages, snapchat, twitter, etc. etc. Maybe the Staples/Martin stream house can exchange stream coaching for advanced PIO coaching lolololol.

straightfloosh

Today I figured out how to use instagram stories. I'm coming!

If GTO strategies were thoroughly incentivized, poker would be a dead industry. It's important to understand this in order to direct your attention toward higher relevance. The games remain highly imbalanced. The goal of today's learner should be to maximize the amount of actions that can be simplified. That means going from mixed to pure. That means going exploitative.

In any hand, there are extra data points available for anyone who chooses to shift their vision from the defensive GTO mode, to the offensive exploitative mode. Learning to detect those data points in a way that's empirically driven and least assumptive is a training process. My new mental game pack (PDMG) is dedicated to 3 things:

-Training you to detect subtler data points in a hand, so you can explode out of the GTO trap and into a more accurate thought process

-Showing you how to expose contradictory thought processes and unconscious assumptive patterns.

-Clarifying your purpose as a grinder so you can find more fulfillment in poker as a career.

We follow 6 different players ranging from small to high stakes, and work with real mental leaks from real hands. Thanks to all the guys who submitted footage. I'm really humbled by this pack and I truly believe this type of training to be the future of the coaching industry.

I'll post a more detailed syllabus sometime next week, after I finish the final edits. I'm making this pack more affordable in an effort to reach more guys. Somewhere between $600-$800 depending on the final length.

Thanks for everyone's continued support of my coaching, it allows me the freedom to make these products. You guys are constantly refining my direction and I'm grateful.

Poker Detox Mental Game. Oct 30

"The greatest fear in the world is of the opinions of others, and the moment you are unafraid of the crowd, you are no longer a sheep, you become a lion.
A great roar arises in your heart, the roar of freedom."

~Osho

Today on the stream, "Data Points". Strengthen your in-game thought process by learning how to expand your vision in hands. There's just so many ways to override theory and regain the edge.
Recording

You can't just copy shit and expect it to work. Every little thing that works is working within a greater context. Now, the efficiency of your context depends on 2 things:

-Your understanding of what is holding an equilibrium together in a model. Without it, you are severely limited in your ability to identify a proper exploit.

-Your vision over the environmental trends and imbalances across major lines.

Understanding the environment + equilibriums. It's both. Because that's what it takes to include all the data points. That's what it takes to optimize your decisions. Most guys are focusing on one side of the coin. With the database tools we have, winning exploitative play is no longer a feel game. It's black and white science.

New RIO vid coming soon, 500z live-play, watch me do this in real time, it's completely within your reach.

The sicko-aura you place around the best players at your limit is a direct reflection of your tendency to victimize yourself. Here's the most likely truth: they run you over because you let them.

The only way to stay accurately focused on the goal is to completely deregister the idea that something could stop you. That doesn't mean you become naive, it just means you respond to challenge in the most intelligent way. One of the biggest obstacles to success is the belief that it's reckless to stop stressing.

Generate a massive vision, and live in single-pointed alignment with the energy of that imagined reality. It's safe.

Today on the stream I'm talking about the power of diversification. If it's not already at the top of your list, you're missing out on the simplest way to leverage your career into greater freedom and abundance. Work smart AND hard.
Starts now

The problem with theory is that it destroys vision. Or maybe it just has that effect because most guys use it as a shield for deeper insecurities. Either way, the trap is subtle. It starts off with an increase in vision, by strengthening your understanding of equilibria. You feel smarter and safer. But if that's not eventually rebalanced with an increase in vision over your environment, you're tunneling off into heavy distortion. You end up training yourself to dismiss real incentives.

There are two types of vision: theoretical and environmental. You are as intelligent as your ability to balance both.

Whether or not you're afraid means absolutely nothing. I'm afraid every day. But that's because I make the conscious decision to play at my thresholds. The only thing that matters is whether or not your fear stops you from acting in a way that maps to your goal. It takes more courage to act in spite of fear than to be fearless.

Last stream of October was a fun one, thanks to everyone who contributed this month, I appreciate you guys and I'm excited to become a totally free 1-on-1 coaching channel come November. Last night's stream was the first of many with this new model, check the recording out here.

Hello Nick,
in the last stream , talking about br management, you said that if you think you belong to the next limit, you could you use a 3 buyins strategy".
Do you mean leveldown right after your winrate is -3 bi? Otherwise just keep testing the limit?
Also when u will consider give yourself another try if your bankroll is good enough but you just lack of self-confidence? Would you wait like an xy amount of hands with a good winrate in your previous limit or its more just a feeling that can push you into it?
It made me curious because its an interesting approach that i never tried.
Thanks,
your biggest fan <3

Hey,

With regard to the shot taking thing, I meant that you can take 3 buyin shots at the next limit, then if you lose, go back to your base limit and make 6 buyins, rinse and repeat. I like that model if you really believe you should have winrate at the higher limit.
The thing about lacking confidence is that it usually reflects a lack in technical proficiency. If you really know that what you're doing is relatively accurate, you're naturally more confident. So I would not take shots without confidence, because it's a good indicator that you need to improve the parts of your game that make you insecure before moving up.

Thanks a lot Nick

You dont even need to have your shit together to be an awesome person. You just have to cross a maturity threshold where you decide to stop projecting your shit onto other people. No one cares that you're not perfect. They care about the stress you cause them by not taking full responsibility for yourself.

truth^

The best thing since Gay Theory got banned

New PDMG mental game pack will be up on my site Nov 1. Will post a full syllabus and sample videos within 48 hours. Thanks to all the guys who submitted footage, the format is awesome and you made it possible.

Poker Detox Mental Game pack is now available. Buyers will gain eligibility to book private coaching when I reopen in early 2017. A two hour private Crowdcast Q&A is also included. I genuinely appreciate every one of you guys.

For more details and sample videos, hit the link below:
PDMG Pack

How much do you charge for private coaching?

Hey Nick, when is the next stream going to be? What's the new schedule?

@Omahyo

my 1-on-1 rate will be $350/hr when I reopen in Jan 2017.

gmiko

Twitch stream will restart Nov 7. Schedule will be Mon-Wed-Fri 1pm-230pm EST.

I'm in the process of uploading all of the October streams to Youtube. November streams will be available on Twitch for 2 weeks and on YouTube after.

I like type of e-mail I get from the student I haven't heard from in like 6 months, where he confirms he hasn't just been sitting on his ass, he's been crushing. Props to the guys who IMPLEMENT.

This student bought the Pio Unlocked Course when it came out back in Spring, and then he disappeared off my radar shortly after: Here are the before/after graphs he sent me yesterday when we reconnected:

2bb/100 2015, +$20,000 USD

15bb/100 2016 After Coaching +$200,000 USD

Hats off to you bro.

If you haven't checked out the free sample videos of my new mental game paick, hit the link below:
Poker Detox Mental Game

Dude, this is the most insane graph I have ever seen. And he's actually losing @ showdown, so he's probably forcing the aggression to the limit. Wtf.

Yea I was shocked too. I don't train for that high of a red line, but some students push the aggression to the limit in the softer environments and end up with that type of graph. Normally my guys end up with break-even to slightly + redline on the majority of sites.

It's a really good analysis Baraky

@ Saulo

I think the Pio Unlocked did a lot of this, but at this point it's pretty built into my style of training. The new mental game pack teaches how to expand the awareness to find more data-points in any one hand, which leads to more refined exploits. The Night Vision database analysis pack that I'll release in early 2017 is going to be the data-driven end of this. It will show the black and white numbers behind a lot of the most incentivized red-line exploits, so you guys can have the tools to run the numbers for your specific environments and generate your own exploitative blueprints.

Thought:

A good learner knows how to ask a high quality question. A great learner has the patience to sit with it.

It would be great if you had the student with that sic red line on your twitch stream sometime. I'd like to hear about his study process.

I'm starting back up on Twitch Nov 7. My schedule will be split into 2 main formats:

Mondays and Fridays: Volunteer Hand History Lessons.

Completely free private lesson streams. I've got a wait-list of guys from the October stream audience who have each sent me 20,000 of their recent hands. They will be joining us in a live lesson format with no stream delay. I debuted this format on the last stream of October and it was really well received. Everyone has the opportunity to share their thought process in real time. I love my stream audience, it's full of guys who show up to talk real strategy and ask honest questions.

If you want to be a guest on the stream, send me an email at nick@pokerdetox.com and attach 20,000 hands. I'll do my best to get you a slot.

Wednesdays: "Forum Crawl". A new twitch weekly series I'm starting, designated completely to the trolling the RIO forums in a healthy, productive way. I'll answer as many posts as I can in 90 minutes, and I'll speak frankly about the questions and comments that I think are a complete waste of time.
My goal is to redefine trolling. You guys know me by now. I'm interested in relentlessly exposing bias, and I don't care whose feelings get hurt. Wednesdays are going to be my hard love streams. I feel comfortable taking on the role as the community "whistle blower", because I know that my intention is pure, and someone really needs to step up to the plate. There's too much bullshit running rampant. I'd ask you to trust that everything I say comes from the utmost empathy with the struggle. I've embarrassed myself in the RIO forums many times in the past with arrogance and ignorance, and I will again. No one is perfect, and that's ok. I speak to you as a brother who forgives completely. All I care about is truth, expansion, freedom. All good things.

Stream time always 1pm - 230pm EST

Check out today's recording below, this will be my new free lesson Twitch format:

Lesson 1

Hey. Took a quick look through the "Lesson 1" on Twitch and I really liked it thus far! Will definitely watch through it and soak up whatever I can. (Doing some other analysis at the moment).

Suggestion: Please make it so that we can hear the student also! It would be much more rewarding to hear the whole exchange, and at times I'm sure some of the context is lost due to not hearing what the student is saying.

Thanks for the content!

Thanks Critter :). I'm working on the audio format for next time.

If you look at something from a narrow point of view, you will find plenty of data to confirm that the position you're looking from is accurate. And you will remain bias, because you lack vision. This is how reality works. The observer will constantly find a way to reinforce his initial bias.

Game theory, believe it or not, is a narrow scope. Let's start by remembering why we felt drawn to it to begin with:

-We lacked vision over our environments
-The idea of an inexploitable strategy appealed to our insecurities.

Theory was the perfect remedy for how we interpreted our dilemma. And it did give us value. It brought more balance to us as a community, from 2013 to 2015.

But now it's almost 2017. We have new tools that offer a MASSIVE increase in vision over the imbalances of the player pools. Yet because of our residual theory obsession, our scope remains limited, skeptical, and dismissive of these tools. We remain collectively guarded by the ideology of how accurate well balanced strategies are.

If you want to understand the essence of progress, you need to understand what drives evolution. Evolution occurs when a species expands its vision to more inclusive, more relevant data points within an environment, thus becoming more efficient. The key word there is "environment". The GTO paradigm barely even sees the environment. It's stuck in it's shell, perfecting it's own strategy, wildly assumptive about how accurately it can even implement it, or how incentivized that type of strategy actually is.

We are crossing a threshold in the evolution of the industry where if you continue to cling to an overly theory-oriented paradigm, you will find yourself gravitating to others who stagnate in their own biases, and you will not evolve. You will be classified as unintelligent. I'm saying it like this because I want it to register within your value system. The only reason you felt like GTO was worth as much effort as you gave it was because you thought it would make you smarter, and help you evolve. It's time to humbly reassess whether or not that incentive is still in place.

At present, the value of game theory for the majority of the elite community is either saturated or distorted past the point of correction. There is no use in trying to fix the problem. There is however a great incentive to replace it with a solution. Please realize that engaging with a problem is completely different than moving toward a solution. For evidence, just look at how we have attempted to solve the GTO paradox by applying more theory to it. The effort is futile. Assessment can only lead to more assessment. It's energetic law.

The evolution of the industry depends on the community introducing more data points into the decision making process than we have validated thus far. Accessing more refined data points leads to more accurate decisions. This is done by increasing vision over the environment. Simple evolution. It's time we learn to think independently again, and exit the defensive theory slumber. Step out of the cave. It's smarter, it's safer, it's why you came here in the first place. The future is played on the offense.

Much love to all the hard and fast ultra-defensive theory boys. If this triggers you, then I'll know I said it right.

This blog has healing powers, thank you Nick.

@Aggroshooter

I should clarify that when I refer to the elite community, I'm referring to RIO elite. which is probably 90% non-HSNL.

That said I still see a lot of HSNL guys pointed In the wrong direction, because they're using solvers without balancing it with mass environmental data. If you're ignoring environmental data you're handicapping yourself right from the jump.

My first episode of "Forum Crawl" starts in 5 minutes on Twitch. I'll speak frankly on as many RIO forum posts as I can get through in 90 minutes. The link to the recording is below:
Forum Crawl

Volunteer Hand History Stream on Twitch today, no-delay all questions welcome.
Recording

LOVELY !!! :-)

The information being given away for free on this stream is insane right now. Get it while the getting's good, guys.

True! The quality of his thought process in this these handreviews is excellent. Some of it is just way above my level and i need to rewatch it several times. It definitly helped me in order to get a structure for my own thoughts and the priorities that i need to set. Thanks for the great work on RIO and pokerdetox!

Def looking forward purchasing your latest package. I dont think i have ever seen a better qualification / recommendation as a coach than your blogs and videos.

I got pissed off on the stream the other day, here's what I said:

The Problem With The Coaching Industry

I have a zero tolerance policy for manipulation of any kind. Please send this to at least one person in your circle so we can raise the bar on what we tolerate from coaches and backers as we head into 2017. You guys deserve more from the private sector of the industry.

I'm reopening 1-on-1 coaching full time in January. For those of you who have been waiting to work with me, it's time. Hit the link below for more details on how to get a slot in January:

PDMG eligibility for 2017 private coaching.

Mad love.

Nick

I'd like to ask about your suggested strat of checking range OOP.

Do you intend to always check OOP or was this a misclick or just a spot where people underdefend?
Nick cbets flop OOP at 1 minute (BvB, SB A9 BDFD B 1/3 K72r)

Nick
More on checking OOP.

Point 1. Many times you say that the solvers stab only 20 to 30 percent after PFR OOP check and then claim that population pools are stabbing too much in these spots (~50 percent). And that by checking IP excess stabbing can be exploited.

But the stab percent is only made indifferent by the OOP defending range, especially the XR range and if the OOP player poorly constructs these ranges he has induced the IP player to stab more ie make the correct adjustment to the poor XR range construction.

I ran some quick Pio sims BvB on Q75r and pure max exploit to equilibrium, yes, the BB flop stab was only 26% but, by simply nodelocking the XR range by stepwise iteration deleting the solver artefacts (cells with frequencies less than practically playable amounts) the max exploit stab jumps to 39% (with cells less than 10% deleted), then to 56% (with cells less than 20%). (The cells deleted from XR are shifted by the solver to either call or fold).

So by reducing the XR range by only 9 combos (out of 64), IP stab max exploited from 26% to 56%, about the population norm. So is the population really overstabbing given the likely poor construction of XR range in the pools?

(By nodelocking IP to underdefend the XR the max exploit stabbing was still over 50%).

(I did not yet try a pure XR strat where each cell is wholly either XR or XC but not mixed in both but I expect it will cause the IP stab max exploit to jump way over 50%).

Point 2. Doesn't checking merely push the mixed strat over the immediate decision horizon, delaying the inevitable mixed strat to XR or to turn decisions?

Checking eliminates the flop CBet range construction decision but the XR needs to be a mixed strat or else the max exploit IP stab will be incentivised to be quite high. It's pretty easy to stuff up the XR range so IP max exploit becomes as high as 90%. It is very sensitive to XR strat.

This seems to take the range construction pressure that was on our flop Cbetting range and move it to the XR range, albeit with more information because we get to see if the BB checks or bets.

While we have eliminated one range, the flop Cbetting range but the XR and XC range absorb the complexity, becoming a greater proportion of the total lines and needing to be better constructed.

@iamIndifferent

Hey, cool points. I'm just going to go in order:

Point 1:

...But the stab percent is only made indifferent by the OOP defending
range,

This sounds wrong if you're referring to a situation where IP is stabbing too much vs an OOP PFR who checks his entire range. OOP's range will be stronger than it would be had he played a balanced c-bet range. IP will be exploited here for stabbing too wide. Am I misunderstanding what you meant by "the stab percent"?

"So is the population really overstabbing given the likely poor
construction of XR range in the pools?"

I doubt the pool consciously understands this, but yea I think stabbing too much IP happens to be one of the best exploits you can consistently take, especially since OOP overfolds there too.

While we have eliminated one range, the flop Cbetting range but the XR
and XC range absorb the complexity, becoming a greater proportion of
the total lines and needing to be better constructed.

The balance to that paradox is to go one step further and filter the mass database for pattern recognition, looking at the types of flops that they stab-fold the most on. There's a lot of spots you could XR ATC profitably in a vaccuum. Guys usually have an aversion to this type of strategy at first b/c they think people will counter, but that's actually really assumptive for 2 reasons:

1) The correct counter doesn't appear to be that clear to the majority of the population.

2) Even if they understand it, they rationalize a more comfortable approach by deciding that they'll exploit you by just widening their turn/river calling range after defending vs your XR with the same (tight) range. If your blueprint plan is to just 1-and-done XR the flop, you're no longer forcing turn/river aggression with bluffs, so they just keep offering you +EV flop spots and never capitalizing on later streets.

Basically at some point I realized that the main way to balance the mixed strategy parodox (paradox in the sense that it's seemingly unavoidable while also being too difficult to implement) was to gain as much vision as possible over the environment, so that I could simplify the game tree while actually gaining accuracy at the same time. It's definitely the way to hack into an anonymous player pool for win-rate, which is why I was initially drawn to it for Bovada.. but my 2016 students have been proving to make it work just about everywhere.

That brings up another point. If you do it right you can just rip through your limit in like 100k hands before anyone understood what even really happened. Then move up and do it all over again. Once you get to high stakes you can just put money on every soft site that offers 10/20 and never really have to account for your shitty image. There's a whole nother level to the career once you expand your vision to include diversifying across sites, to idea being to spread your volume out with super-exploitative strategies. They're also soft a f.

What Samu said ^ ;)

It's funny, I get asked why I give away so much information for free. It's because I know that only a very small % of guys will do something big with it, and those are the ones that deserve it in the first place. Fuckin prove me wrong i would love it!!

IamIndifferent

But back to the real world, and, as Nick says, for the moment, BB's
seem mostly oblivious to the SB OOP range check. However, if one Nick
disciple plays another Nick disciple it is the disciple that
understands the BB counter that will crush harder. And, in the
internet age, the window for that information to become well known and
limit the leak will happen rapidly.

This is the giant assumption that keeps everyone from playing the most profitable strategies. The paranoia that they will actually be countered a ton. It's just not true, and I'm speaking from practice, not theory.

What actually happens is you get countered by the best regs at the limit, and slow down vs them. In the meantime you completely stomp the bottom 80% of the pool.

I also feel like you're overcomplicating the XR thing

1) yes, when we X range, we need to XR
2) if they fold way too much vs XR, we should XR a lot. XR'ing more on the boards they over-fold most on makes sense bc it's incentivized and very practical.

This next part I'm saying it to everyone because I think it's such a necessary perspective shift, and highly exploitative strategies just won't make sense until you get this:

YOU GUYS DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW LAZY EVERYONE IS.

Like it's so, so much worse than you think.

Hey Nick @ 51:30 on Mental Game
A viewer asks something allong the lines of..

I play live poker and want to implement PIO in too my studies, what is the best approach for that?

You go on to say to get a sample from a soft site like Bovada.

A few questions;

You make it seem so easy to obtain these mass database.
If I remeber right in one of your streams you said 5 million hands would be a good size for a mass database.
But for the guy that plays live and wants to implemnt these stratgies where would he go to find these databases to work with.? (specifically bovada)
Even for the online grinder that plays bovada regulary it could take hims years to get a data base that size on his own.

Do you know any places that sell hand histories from bovada?
Do you think hand histories from Carbon or Ipoker would do the trick to replicate the bovada enviorment ?
Do you ever plan on making the mass databases for diffrent enviorment avaible via poker detox?
I think it would be a great idea :D

Cheers
DK

@ Dddog and Dirty

I can't say I've found anything that models exactly like Ignition, but there's a lot of sites that model close enough in the major lines to make it worth your time to merge those hands. I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to improve on the limited database issue if we approach it from a win/win mentality. I'll be organizing a private Skype group for Ignition/Bodog guys in early 2017, where everyone can pool hands. It will be part of the Night Vision launch for buyers of the pack.

Basically the Night Vision pack is a combination of tutorials on how to run the research, and then contextualizing or
mapping the research so that it's practical.

The tutorials will show how to filter for the most relevant database stats throughout major lines, and then how to run those trends against Pio flop subset scripts.

My database team created excel templates for plotting environmental stats vs Pio outputs. They will be sold as addons if you don't want to make your own. Templates help with the final part of the process, which is to integrate the mapped trends through pattern recognition.

What you end up with is an exploitative blueprint that you can auto-deploy whenever you don't have enough player reads to deviate. You are never readless anymore, because you respond to vacuum situations with the accuracy gained from the alias research.

If more than 20 people hit the heart I'll post one of the fully mapped templates for a major line in an SSNL zoom pool so you can see how it works.

Hi Nick,

First of all, fantastic content. Your poker mindset and your approach to the game has revolutionised my thinking in a lot of spots. So thank you. I have been one of those people smashing my head against the wall with pio for a while. I invested in GTO preflop ranges, analysed GTO frequencies meticulously, etc. and just felt like I was stagnating. Poker felt overwhelming, impossible and I had paranoia when playing of being imbalanced in spots that didn't matter. I began to want to play and study less and less. I fell into a massive slump.

I have a couple of questions I decided to post here because I think they might be relevant for others.

1) I don't play on a site with HEM support. I have no database and no access to data points. I also have basically no poker friends. Would you advise me to switch my play onto a HEM supported site due to the informational edge it would give me? I am disinclined to do so because I think the site I play on currently is soft and moving money would be a hassle.

2) At what bankroll would you advise someone to invest in your pio unlocked course? I think for me at the moment (I play 50 nl and 100nl) it would be too much of a $ commitment but I think it would help my game massively.

P.S. Iamindifferent - your posts above are fantastic.

Byul

Thanks. I would move toward another platform unless you can get a HUD running on yours. There are HUDS that you can use independent of tracking software, and having one will help increase your ability to profile players more accurately, which leads to higher confidence assumptions. As for the lack of database, you can still get really good value by buying hands from another site that mimicks your environment well. Generally I think most B and C list sites (non-pokerstars) have enough similarities at corresponding stakes for there to be value in using hands from another site.

The contradiction there is that if games are way better on your site than on the site you buy hands from, it probably means the games play substantially different. What site do you play on?

Here is a peak into the Night Vision pack. Thanks to detox database team for working as hard as they do at researching and organizing all of this data. I really doubt I would be where I am today if I didn't have their help in this department. They've simplified the direction of my training immensely.

The first image is an example of a blank template for SB v BB srp, mapped from the perspective of the BB. The sample was taken from 20M hands of 100z and 200z mixed.

The line is SB v BB srp. This template plots all major lines from the perspective of the IP player (BB in this case). The first 2 rows of the template are where you can record the specifications for your modeling (sites, stakes, preflop ranges, bet sizings used, etc). The rest of the template is used for plotting the data.

MDA = Mass Database Analysis (player pool #'s).
MFA = Multi flop Aggregation (Pio #s).

In this type of research, we're hunting for major deviations between player pool averages and Pio solver averages across all possible textures. This gives us vision over where the pool is generally imbalanced at a specific decision point. Here's what it looks like after you complete it:

For example, here we can see that in the first yellow line (SB X-flop), The BB environmental is stabbing 50% where Pio stabs 41.6%. Sample size for this line is 201k.

If we look down to the second line (XB-F), we can see that BB is folding 58.5% (!) where Pio is folding 41.5%. Sample size for this line is 47k.

This image is an example of a blank template. We'll be selling these as add-ons to the pack, for all major lines. If you don't like the sizing scheme we picked, we will custom format it for your preferred sizing scheme. This template is built for a larger database, you can see it extends down way further (it's cut off at the bottom). That's because it includes additional rows for texture analysis, unlike the basic template above. The larger your database, the more you can dive into texture analysis. We recommend a 30M hand database for these grids. The advantage is increased accuracy. You'll be able to isolate the types of textures that the pool is most imbalanced on in a certain line, so you can refine your exploits and gear them more toward the major textural hot-spots. This is where pattern recognition becomes highly relevant to the study and implementation process.

The pack will include tutorials compatible with HM2, PT4, a potentially a new software called Hand2Note, which has shown promising capabilities so far for handling larger databases while simplifying the filtering process.

Ultimately this pack is about you guys, so please share your suggestions. The more we understand what the community wants, the more we can optimize its features.

Now, who's got questions?!

@Saulo

Not sure yet, probably similar to PDMG. I'll have a better idea when we get into the production of it next month.

will it include all the MDA and MFA data or just templates?

@Kenaces

Thanks for this. The issue with a one-size-fits all MDA and MFA data drop is that the outputs are sensitive to bet sizings used. That drop will lack relevance to guys who wish to model with different sizing schemes. I would also have to make it a lot more expensive, since a full data drop for a single environment represents about 100 hours of database mapping.

What I plan to do as the major part of the pack (beyond the tutorials) is to outline the biggest imbalances found to be pretty universal among the ssnl-hsnl pools, with explanations on the proper strategy adjustments to exploit those imbalances. The goal is to thread the pack with a substantial amount of "instant-winrate" content, so the buyer can get great value even if he never runs a single database filter. You lazy bastards! :)

It is an incorrect approach to take action numbers from raw Pio sims and apply them in comparison to mass DB analysis unless one nodelocks the Pio sims to match mass DB tendencies and then max exploits those tendencies to elicit the proper exploitative response.

W/reg to what IamIndifferent said, I was wondering this too.

As I see it u do this:
1) Gain vision by MDA
2) Run the MFA's and compare them to MDA
3) Figure out exploits

I was wondering what exploits u delve into, are they minimal exploitive strategies or max exploitive? I guess ur answer will be, Its prolly overassumptive to be unexpoitable after the exploit nodelocking?

Do you go in-depth on the type of exploits and if so which pack show(s) this? In Pio Unlocked/Nightvision?

apostadorfurtivo

Did the Pio sims had into account rake? I think at this stakes it's
something that shouldn't be neglected.

Rake simulations are going to lose relevance as you head out of SSNL, they just don't affect things that much. Below I've attached the reports with rake for SSNL so you can see the differentials for the Pokerstars rake scheme. The differentiation in the template shows one set of data for the 100nl rake, and other for the midpoint between 100 and 200nl rake.

Some lines are affected more than others, with all of the deviations heading in the same direction (players betting slightly less or folding slightly more due to rake).

These templates are derived from Pio subsets designed to mimic the full game. We need to be focusing on areas of highest relevance, since the pre-flop inputs are already assumptive-laden. It's the BIG deviations that should grab our attention, and we can devise exploitative blueprint strategies around them with high confidence in our accuracy. Luckily, there's a lot of big deviations throughout the collection of major lines .. spots where the pools deviate by way more than a few percent. If there wasn't so many of these large deviations, these reports would be way less useful. Basically it's a testament to how weak the games still are.

How big of a flop set did you run the Pio aggregation analysis on?

Most of our initial reports were run on a 51 flop subset, over time Pio has released updated subsets and we've confirmed that the deviations in outputs are pretty much negligable. The advantage of the 51 flop subset is that it's much more practical, since it takes much less time to run the reports. The rake analysis above was done on a 153 flop sub-set, which explains why there are a couple of strange "rake vs no-rake" comparisons -- it's a representation of the subset deviations being different by a couple tenths of a point. For instance, the "flop stab vs X" line shows the same frequency for Rake vs No Rake, where it would be a few tenths of a point different if we used the same subset. Really we should be using the same subset here (we noticed after) but the bigger goal was basically to demonstrate the deviations are decently small for SSNL, and virtually negligable for MSNL/HSNL, especially since our intention is to identify the the most major exploitative hot-spots.

label them something other than MDA and MFA, which look very similar and don't read easily. Something like "pool" and "pio" would make the data a lot easier to interpret at a glance.

I agree, it's on the to-do list!

mike

Why did You mix 100 and 200z?

To increase sample size between two pools that played very similar to begin with.

Are hands in the database from this year?

Everything is from the last 18 months, with the vast majority being from the last 12 months. More notable is that the 2014 hands we bought to run comparisons for these two pools showed almost exactly the same results. That investigation led to my post "the games aren't getting harder, it's just the most popular excuse".

How did You obtain those hands?

A combination of purchased and played by students.

Gandalf

I was wondering what exploits u delve into, are they minimal
exploitive strategies or max exploitive? I guess ur answer will be,
Its prolly overassumptive to be unexpoitable after the exploit
nodelocking?

Everything is for practicality in my world. Minimal exploit strategies are not practical because they still use highly mixed strategies, and they still assume (falsely) that the majority of players are capable of countering the exploits that I advocate vs the major hot-spots obtained from the mapping process.

I think this is probably the SINGLE MOST under-rated perspective shift at the current stage of our developing industry. Please take 2 minutes and listen to my explanation in this video so that you can understand why it would be very smart of you to get off the GTO train, to whatever degree you're still hanging onto it.

Why you should be playing a highly exploitative strategy in 2017

Up to a point, it is entirely your responsibility to demonstrate to the people closest to you that your intentions are pure. Beyond that point, it is entirely your responsibility to trust yourself enough to differentiate between a real mistake on your end, and a person projecting their insecurity upon you in the form of blame. In the event of the latter, start with forgiveness. If the conflict persists, finalize those relationships with love in your heart, and remove them from the picture. It is not your duty to serve those who are not available to their own truth.

Missing the stream announcements! Twitch has notification system to alert channel subscribers when something is happening, but doesn't seem to work. Can you give us a heads up when you're going live?

Check out this 2 minute video for a new perspective on WHY so many players have struggled to grow over the last 2 years:

The Funhouse Theory

^Why I do it

New volunteer lesson starting on my Twitch channel in 15 minutes, come join with no delay HERE

Disharmonist
I think it might actually be too simple!

In order for growth to occur as efficiently as possible, truth needs to be valued above all else. That includes feelings. My job as a coach is to establish a level of mutual trust and respect on a PERSONAL level with the student, so that we can train in an environment of 100% open communication. When trust isn't established, communication gets lost in translation, and parties get defensive. Defensiveness is the cause of all inefficiency.

Really enjoyed working with Dimitris, my guest on the stream today. The humble ones have my full attention.

Guys, I'm going HARD on content for the remainder of the year. Each day there will be a new excerpt from one of my recent Twitch streams, I'm plucking the gems and delivering them on a silver platter.

This one is a really common leak. You might recognize it as the tendency to avoid pushing yourself to go deeper into your analysis by using the excuse that "It's a 'whatever' spot".

Take 90 seconds to clear this up for good:
Stop Ranging Like This

Bovada Guys -

I'm facilitating a database merge starting today. If you are interested in being a part of it, please send at least 100K of your original hand files to support@pokerdetox.com

My team will compile all of them and then upload to a private dropbox some time in January, at which point anyone who submitted will be added to the box and can download. I'll make monthly additions to the box past that point.

Hopefully this solves the problem you guys are having with sample issues for mass database research. Let me know if you can think of any ways to optimize this process.

Bovada Guys -

I'm facilitating a database drop starting today, it will be released sometime in January. If you are interested in being a part of it, please send at least 100K of your original hand files to support@pokerdetox.com

My team will compile all of them and then upload to a private dropbox, at which point anyone who submitted will be added. I'll make monthly updates past that point.

Hopefully this solves the problem you guys are having with sample issues for mass database research. Let me know if you can think of any ways to optimize this process.

Happy Turkey Day
Take a moment later to remember how important it is to trust yourself

Anyone that would judge you for something in your past is demonstrating a weaker example of character than you should aspire to. Real vision is to be open to the fact that a person can actually change. We can provide that space.

New volunteer lesson starts on twitch at 1pm EST here

Vision over the environment is a form of balance, even though it happens to incentivize an imbalanced strategy in the eyes of theory. Environmental vision is "macro-balance".

The Future Crushers of the Industry

You can't just copy shit and expect it to work.

Make sure you get this idea, it's so important: everything that works is working from within a larger context!

It's 2017! (well almost). Let's get rid of these ancient thought processes

When the logic you operate from fails to produce a desirable experience over time, you have to seriously reassess your definition of what is logical.

This is what it feels like to walk away.

You can make the choice to stop planning today , and just start a new journey that takes direction from whatever is most immediately relevant. For creative guys especially, this is the best way to get past the organizational starting friction of the creational process.

How I created Poker Detox

Innocence is associated with naivity in western culture. Beware of that read. There are a growing number of us who are deepening in love and innocence from a fiercely intense process along the inward plane. A plane where those qualities are seen to be the growing side effects of a simple, clarified choice. The choice to transmute our perceived vulnerability into love, and to live from that experience. The decision to move in the direction of what feels right without proof.

Logic is simpler than we've been trained to understand. It doesn't depend on reasoning. It simply responds to incentive. To stagnate that flow with overanalysis is our favorite past-time. What happened to baseball?

hey nick you should change the cover of this vid

nick howard is my god

@Bread
..But that's my creative face ;)

But seriously, get rid of flopzilla

Learning to do more with less is an important step toward higher level analysis

Dauntless

Thanks for letting me clarify. The guy in the video was using it to count combos and apply it to 1-a MDF. Using old tools like Zilla as a pseudo-solver is the mistake. That being said, there's nothing wrong with using it for simple range vs range breakdowns and storing ranges. It's just that the solvers have that stuff built in too now. It's kind of like Instagram doing everything snapchat used to do, except better.

Cool, thanks for clarification. Kinda shocked if people use Zilla as (pseudo-)solver for strategies. Though that looks like an argument against being stupid, not an argument against Zilla.

I still feel like Zilla is solid for most simplest types of max exploits. Like we know population of our limit opens about x%, cbets x% on Kxx and we believe population does not play back with air against c-r. Now we just wanna know % of his range that is air and I found Zilla is easier, cheaper and more viewer friendly to use for that than any solvers.

You have full authority to create your own terminology, especially when it helps you contextualize the game. Here's my definition of code red runouts.

My take on meditation through poker

The new direction of my 2017 private coaching revolves around combining mental and technical training. The idea is to use hand review to reveal deep core patterns, so the problem is solved from the root of the psyche. The catch phrase among my students these days is "how you play poker is how you do everything else in life".

I see a LOT of money being burned by players who justify it by having good blockers for the call. When the environments are as imbalanced as they are, that's not a good enough reason. Short clip on why blockers are not enough.

If you pay attention, there are every-day opportunities to assert yourself in ways that are more accurate than the day before. This isn't about being perfect. It's about making an effort to distinguish those opportunities, and to respond in a way that maps to real freedom. Radical honesty. It can help to know that everyone is just as afraid as we are. To build empathy toward the collective struggle is what grants you the strength to lead. To me, most of life is about learning to go first.

Hey Nick, when are you coming back to streaming again?

New volunteer lesson starting in 10 minutes on my Twitch, come ask Q's with no stream delay, Link

Dudes, if I've ever brought you any value, please sign up for Hand2Note with my new affiliate code. I truly believe this software is going to become the standard by the end of 2017. It's just that much better than Holdem Manager and PokerTracker. In the last 2 weeks my team has explored the program more fully, and we've been able to optimize the Night Vision pack to ridiculous lengths on account of its speed and functionality. Thank you for caring, and please send this post to 1 other friend whose improvement is important to you!

Click Here and use this promo code for 10% off your first subscription purchase: H2N10EP

Theory should be used as a tool that complies with the incentives of the environment. A 3 minute shift in perspective

In order to become someone that others can depend on, you have to become more selective with what you say yes to. That's the part that feels selfish if you've been trained to be a people pleaser. Just realize that you're not doing anyone a favor by committing to something that doesn't inspire you.

Big announcement for Micro and SSNL guys:

I'm unrolling a new CFP format through Poker Detox, the first wave will accept 6 applicants. This is an accelerated program, with a really big twist. Training begins 1st week in January.

To those of you who have been unable to get coaching in 2016 because of your financial situation, start working on your speech.

I'll reveal the twist in a few days. As usual, it favors the struggle.

If you think about what causes someone to lose, it's the difference between their understanding of reality, and what's actually going on in reality. Therefore, mental game is not separate from technical. My new private coaching calendar is opening up tomorrow (independent from the CFP announcement). Really looking foward to to working closer with all of you in 2017.

New volunteer lesson starting in 10 minutes on my Twitch, come ask Q's with no stream delay, Link

Now for the CFP twist..
I'm accepting losers only.

The first requirement is that you must supply a graph of 2016, break even AT BEST. (now you can finally be proud of your graph.)

I will be choosing 6 players to start this program on Jan 5, 2017

Requirements:
-SSNL or Micro players only.
-Supply a graph of all hands tracked in 2016
-Submit a written email or webcam/mobile recording, stating why you want this and what separates you from the field.

What you get:

-Private Skype group for the 6 of you.
-Free access to Pio Unlocked Packs 1 & 2 ($2800 value)
-Free access to PDMG pack ($800 value)
-Free access to Night Vision (TBA)
-Access to prerecorded 2016 lessons that I did with 2 CFP trial students. These were private lessons designed to build cumulatively, so they could be resourced to this CFP program.
-Access to all future 2017 private content that I select for the group.
-Weekly 75minute group call to discuss whatever is most pressing for you guys.

I'll provide additional 1-on-1 training on a case by case basis starting after the first month of results. I don't feel like a concrete model for 1-on-1 time is necessary for a losers only group, since the incentives are in place for me to make sure all members become winners as quickly as possible.

What I get:

$20,000 of your first $30,000 in winnings after joining the program. Profit splits will take place at the end of every month. You will take 33% of your profits at each split until the completion of the profit goal.

I intend for this to be an accelerated program. While there is no timeframe for the student to complete the profit goal, I do expect you to demonstrate that it your biggest priority in life, short of your loved ones.

There is no contract. All of my CFP relationships are built on trust. I'm picking guys who I sense the most potential in as learners. If at at any point I feel as though you're becoming a negative influence on the group, or not giving your best effort, I will remove you and fill the spot with the a new applicant.

I know there are 6 of you out there that are ready for this, so find me.

-First callbacks will be sent out on Christmas Eve.
-Final selections will be made on Jan 3.
-Training begins on January 5

Remember to include 2016 graphs, stakes/sites you wish to play on with your application. Also, please give a general description of your current financial situation. This is coaching for profits, not a staking program, so you need to be able to support yourself during the program. It helps my selection process if you show that you have a clear plan for how you will do that.

Any other questions, just ask below.

All applications, please send to CFP@pokerdetox.com

nick, you rlly are a immeasurable resource. tbh i know i have posted in this thread but i rlly only started reading it this morning. I'm askance at the ludicrous time and effort it you must dedicate to be offering this preposterous amount of value all for free...

dont get me wrong i love it, im just stunned.

A little rant from the October streams on control, drugs, and near death experiences.

New episode of Forum Crawl starting now on Twitch, come join us here

Love that you guys are connecting to this type of material. My whole position in poker right now is predicated on this:

we have new software that offers greater vision over the pools, and it's no longer an "opinion" that highly exploitative strategies are both quantifiable and incentivized for the HSNL climb.

Night Vision pack is coming, end of January! I'm going to spend some time next week showing you guys how Hand2Note has transformed what we're able to do with really large databases. The speed and organization of this software is a dream and I hope to see them crush the 2017 market LIKE THEY SHOULD.

One thing that I think would surprise you guys is how unoriginal most player profiles are. Sure everyone is unique, but for the most part there's only a handful of big leaks that cause most of the winrate problems throughout the community. Here's a short clip where I put this idea into context, hopefully you guys can pull from it.

I re-opened for 2017 private coaching this week. Lessons are open to all PDMG pack holders. The scheduling calendar is integrated to the poker detox site, you can check it out below. I'll keep opening more slots as demand increases. I'm getting pumped to crush the new year with you guys.
Calendar Page

New volunteer lesson starting in 10 minutes on my Twitch, come ask Q's with no stream delay, Link

The concept of self trust came up again on the stream today. I want to nail this up on the wall:

In any environment where full vision is unavailable, self trust will always be the deciding factor in visionary strategy development. If you want to expand, you have to be willing to explore. Stop waiting for someone else to prove it.

If you were actually good at ranging, you'd already be a bigger winner. Hard love clip today.

When your approach is aligned enough on the technical side, the reason you aren't improving is always a lack of mental intensity. If your approach is aligned enough on the mental side, you are obstacled only by poor material. Meaning you're learning the wrong things, so it doesn't matter how good you are at organizing and integrating them.

Realize that both ends of the spectrum require a good amount of humility in order to come back to balance. One requires you to punt your whole training model, the other forces you to admit that you don't care enough about improving. Both are painful confessions.

In my case, it took an intense amount of application and burnout before I could finally trust that the problem wasn't my work ethic. It was the quality of my strategy. Upon realizing that, I experimented aggressively until I found my way.

My purpose at this stage is to help others find direction. Simply and suddenly. Of all the players who contact me, this is the most common thread: "I'm not able to find direction, and I need help". Thanks for your honesty.

I am not a nosebleed player. I have no intentions. What I specialize in is the climb. I know how to move a player from small stakes to high stakes, and for most of you that will be all that is relevant. You'll take your profits and diversify into other more lucrative industries. Ones that resonate more with your true desires and personal evolution. New projects that beat to new rhythms. Let them match your heart. I often feel like this blog only says three things, in three-thousand different ways. Friends, please pick the way that works for you, and never look back. You have more to give.

love for the struggle