Awesome bonne chance!

looks promising.
please keep language understandable to the common, non-scientific reader.
ask for it, because Nick's blog seemed good content but to me it came out as difficult knowledge show-off with complicated words, rather than a somewhat casual poker conversation with lessons in between. if it's the latter i'm sure to follow.

Looking forward to this one.

m1 - The Money Spreadsheet: How To Make Money Playing Poker

As I mentioned in my intro post, I play solely on Ignition, which is a site that only allows players to play up to four tables at a time. Ignition has Zone tables (i.e. fast fold) up to 500nl, which allows low and mid stakes players to get a decent amount of volume in despite the four table limit. Once you get to 1000nl and higher, you’re stuck playing four regular tables. The software is slow and, at best, you can expect to get in about 250 hands per hour.

Before I moved up to 1000nl and higher, I thought this was going to be a major problem. I expected 250 hands per hour to be devastatingly boring. I briefly experimented with adding two extra tables on ACR, but quickly got sketched out by what appeared to be an extreme level of disorganization on the part of the site’s operators and pulled all my money out after a few weeks. I also didn’t want to play high stakes on the Chinese apps because of concerns about cheating and collusion. Like it or not, I was going to have to settle for 250 hands per hour on Ignition. Luckily, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise for a few reasons...

First, I noticed that I was able to learn a lot more from my sessions when I had time to think about every single decision I made. I also tried to watch every hand that I was not involved in. This helped me identify fish even faster than my HUD could. I also learned more about the other regs' tendencies. (Even in semi-anonymous games, you can often ID the same players over and over again by observing unique bet sizing sequences, provided you play in a small enough pool.) My improved focus allowed me to bring my A game to every session I played. This, combined with the higher stakes and the greater number of fish at regular tables, had such a powerful impact on my hourly rate that I no longer cared about my lack of volume. You can easily see this inflection point in my graph around the 140k hand mark, where earnings shoot upwards at an exponential rate.

Understanding the relative unimportance of volume is, in my opinion, the most important realization a beginning poker player can have. It seems like most low-mid stakes players these days are trying to leverage volume for all it's worth*. The basic problem with this strategy is that volume doesn't scale.To illustrate this point, I’ve created a spreadsheet which I call the Money Spreadsheet. It allows you to plug in your win rate, stakes, and volume and gives you an annual income projection based on all of these variables. Feel free to download it and tweak it with your own numbers, or just make your own.

*Sites like PokerStars spend a lot of time and money making fancy software to make pumping volume as easy as possible so that you can pay them more rake.

The Money Spreadsheet

If you play with the spreadsheet enough you will find that the factors which affect your income are: 1. stakes, 2. win rate, and 3. volume, in that order. However, you need a good win rate in order to move up in stakes. Therefore, the most effective way to make more money is to focus on playing high quality poker.

Think of it this way: imagine you are currently playing 20,000 hands in a month and winning at 5 bb/100 at $100nl. That means every 1 bb/100 you add to your win rate increases your monthly income by $200, which is the equivalent of adding an additional 4,000 hands of volume at your original win rate. Each additional 4,000 hands of volume requires exponentially more energy to sustain, and certainly there is some threshold where you will literally die if you try to add more volume. On the other hand, you could certainly add another 5 bb/100 to your win rate, which will take a lot of effort in the short term, but will take almost no effort to sustain. As someone who has doubled his win rate over the past year, I can tell you that poker is no harder for me while I am playing now than it was a year ago. In a lot of ways it's actually easier. Furthermore, we can agree that it would be almost impossible for you to 10x your win rate to 50 bb/100. However, if you merely sustain your current win rate and move from 100nl to 1000nl, you have managed to 10x your income. Again, as someone who has done this in the past year, I can tell you it's not any "harder" to win at high stakes than it was at low stakes. Yes, the swings are sicker, but you gradually get used to them.

In the three charts below, I have plotted the annual income projection vs. volume, win rate, and stakes, respectively, so you can see a visual representation of each.

As you can see, the first two charts show a linear relationship. As volume and win rate go up, annual income goes up in a straight line. The key difference between volume and win rate is that increased volume takes a significant amount of energy to sustain. Win rate, on the other hand, is more scalable. Increasing your win rate takes very little energy to sustain because once you get better at poker, you’re just better. It really
doesn’t take a ton of study effort to maintain your current skill level.

The third chart is the most interesting, because it’s the only chart which shows an exponential relationship. Every time you double your stakes, your annual income also doubles, assuming your volume and win rate remain constant. Moving up in stakes also takes very little energy to sustain as long as you don't get lazy and stop working on your game*. Clearly, the stakes you play is the most scalable factor which affects profitability. The hardest part of moving up is the initial adjustment to the slightly tougher regs at the new limit, combined with the anxiety of risking more money than you’re used to. Again, once you adjust to those factors, and learn to stop respecting other players so much, it will not be any harder for you to win at high stakes than was to win at low stakes. You'll just be making a lot more money.

*Here is Linus talking about the same thing.

I see a lot of up-and-coming players confusing volume with profitability. They frequently justify playing their B or C game just to hit some arbitrary volume goal, and I hope this post makes it clear that this is a big mistake. Volume goals are a good idea in general, but like anything else, they can be taken too far. Past a certain point, volume has nothing to do with the one reason why we're all here: to make money. I personally aim to play only 80 hours of poker per month (20,000 hands). If I want to play a little more, I do, but I like how the goal is easy to hit. It makes me feel good, and it allows me to focus on what is really important, which is the quality of my play.

 "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." –Charles Goodhart

m2 - You Should Probably Stop Playing Zoom

In my last post, The Money Spreadsheet, I talked about why playing high quality poker is far more important for your profitability than the amount of volume you play. When I wrote that post, I mainly had in mind low stakes players who struggle because they play way too many hours per week, or they play distracted or exhausted, and end up crippling their win rates by playing lazy and unfocused poker.

A lot of these break even players are currently multitabling on PokerStars Zoom. The speed of the software, combined with their grueling play schedules, allows them to put in a ridiculous amount of volume. Upwards of 60,000 hands per month is not uncommon—a sad fact considering these players are not making any money. It’s like the guys who go to the gym 6 or 7 days per week but still don’t get results. I always suggest these players cut their volume goal dramatically, find some softer games, and put all their focus on improving their quality of play.

That being said, there are plenty of Zoom players who actually play solid poker. They generally have healthy playing routines and they don’t try to put in more hours than they can handle. The speed of the software still allows them to get in plenty of hands per month and they gradually make money in their games. Still, almost all of them find their win rates hovering around the low single digits and are struggling to move up in stakes. But why? Is poker really that hard to beat, or is there something else going on?

As a side note in the last post, I wrote: Sites like PokerStars spend a lot of time and money making fancy software to make pumping volume as easy as possible so that you can pay them more rake.

These days, PokerStars Zoom seems to be the crown jewel of the MSNL reg, which is why I feel obligated to offer the following counterpoint: Zoom is fucking stupid. I realize that may be somewhat incendiary, but hear me out...

Zoom does not exist because it’s in your best interest to play Zoom. Zoom exists because it’s in PokerStars’ best interest for you to play Zoom. Poker sites are incentivized to reduce players’ win rates because when win rates are lower, the money stays on the site for longer. Players have to play more hands to turn a profit, which means the site gets paid more rake. (This is the same reason why many poker sites do not offer high stakes heads up games.)

Most of you probably understand this intuitively, but you’re willing to make the trade off because you think you get disproportionately more volume for the amount of win rate you give up. I think this is a mistake for a couple reasons:

1. Even if you are able to slightly increase your hourly rate in theory by playing Zoom, this does not account for the fact that lower win rates increase the probability of a loss. This will be detrimental to your mindset. More importantly, it will massively increase your risk of ruin. That means you will need to be much more conservative with your bankroll management and it will be difficult to move up. This is a significant hidden opportunity cost that most people never even think about.

2. With every hand per hour you add to your volume, you reduce the amount of focus you are able to allocate for each individual hand. Thinking less about your decisions at the tables means you will learn less from each session you play. This will stunt your development as a player, which will have compounding negative impacts on your earnings over the long term. Again, this is a substantial penalty, and most players don’t know how much it’s costing them.

Take a look at the chart below, which plots the minimum bankroll needed for less than 5% risk of ruin vs. win rate. In other words, this is how large of a bankroll you would need to ensure that a downswing will not bankrupt you more than 5% of the time. I would suggest multiplying this number by 3-5x for your normal games, but it’s fine to be a little riskier when you’re taking a shot.

As you can see, a player whose win rate is 3 bb/100 needs a bankroll of at least 50 buy ins for less than 5% risk of ruin. A player whose win rate is 15 bb/100 needs a bank roll of only 10 buy ins for the same level of risk. As win rate decreases, risk of ruin increases exponentially. So if you’re moving up in stakes, you want to ensure that your win rate is as high as possible.

If you read my introductory article, you know that I played Zone on Ignition back when I was moving up through 200nl and 500nl. Luckily, my win rate was pretty high and I only had to grind those games for three or four months before I took a shot at high stakes. That being said, if I could go back and do it all over again, I think I would probably stick to regular tables from the start.

If you’re crushing Zoom and your win rate is greater than 5 bb/100, it’s probably fine to just optimize for volume if that’s what you prefer right now. But if your win rate is less than that, I think you should strongly reconsider your strategy. And if you’re breaking even at Zoom, well, any amount of volume multiplied by a win rate of zero is still zero, so you should get out of those games immediately.

You might agree with my feelings about Zoom, or you might not, but my intention behind this article is to at least get you to do the math on Zoom and decide if it’s actually worth it for you. You should consider all the hidden opportunity costs that I have talked about, because it’s more than just a simple win rate * volume equation. Don’t just play Zoom because that’s what everyone else does. If you pick an average strategy, you’re going to get average results.

m3 - The Reason You're Losing At Low Stakes

"It is not enough to be a good player; you must also play well." –Siegbert Tarrasch

I want to talk about the patterns I have observed that separate winners from losers at low stakes. There seems to be a lot of discussion about this topic on the internet. Whenever I see it get brought up on a poker podcast or training video, people usually jump to two explanations:

1. Winners are stronger technically than losers
2. Winners have stronger mindsets than losers

These explanations make no sense to me for a couple reasons. First, there are tons of fish at low stakes. There literally people who don't even know how to play, and just deposit $100 on a website and click buttons until it's gone just for fun. So even if you are pretty weak technically, you should be able to still turn a profit just by playing any reasonably sound strategy. Second, the other regs at low stakes are not good either. If they were good, they would be playing at higher stakes where they could actually make some money. The average reg in your low stakes game probably has just as many technical leaks as you do, and the same can be said for the mental game. So it has to be something else entirely.

And yes, I know the rake is high, but it's not that high.

So here's my theory: I think if you're losing at low stakes, which despite the rake, should be the easiest place to win, then you are breaking down at the logistical level. That means there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that you approach poker as a profession.

Just do me a favor and picture this. I am going to paint a picture of a hypothetical poker player. This person plays poker about 80-100 hours per month–not a ton of volume but definitely a respectable amount. When he does play, he makes sure that he is as focused as he possibly can be. He's not distracted by anything that's going on around him, he doesn't have his phone nearby, and he's not surfing the web while plays. He's just hitting his volume goal and playing really high quality poker, month in and month out.

He also doesn't have any major health issues. He sleeps well, he exercises most days, and he puts good food in his body. He studies about 20 hours per month, sometimes more when he's really feeling it. (And that includes reviewing all of his pots that he has played over 10 or 15 big blinds to make sure he is able to justify all of the significant decisions he's making.) He has access to a coach who is better than him who he meets with on a regular basis. He's not under any extreme financial pressure because he has alternative sources of income, at least for now until poker becomes more profitable. He also doesn't have any major bankroll management issues and he has a solid plan for how and when he is going to move up in stakes.

Basically he knows his plan is solid, so he sticks to it. He doesn't worry extensively about his plan failing. He doesn't try to do so much that he completely burns out or forgets to enjoy his life outside of poker. He doesn't expect succeeding in poker to be the most difficult thing in the world. He just knows that if he lines up enough good decisions in a row, eventually he'll win enough to move up to mid stakes, and then mid stakes will eventually become high stakes.

Now imagine this player is doing all of that, and he is losing at low stakes.

You can't picture this person because he doesn't exist. I am so certain of this that I will make you a bet: if you can prove to me that you did what I just wrote for six months straight and you still lost money at low stakes, then I will give you an hour of 1-on-1 coaching, free of charge.

Until that day comes, I'm sticking to my theory. If you are willing to trust me on this, then all that is left for you to do is take an honest look at your effort over the past few months and ask what went wrong with your plan.

From what I have seen, there seems to be two types of players: the underachievers and overachievers. The underachievers never seem to put in enough effort no matter what they do. There's always some reason why they didn't hit their volume goal. "I was stressed," "My internet went down," "I had a headache." The overachievers, on the other hand, are capable of putting in extremely high levels of effort, but only for short periods of time, Then they inevitably burn out and turn into some kind of zombie that is even less productive than the underachievers. Eventually, after weeks or even months, something motivates them to get of their ass, and the cycle begins again.

Winners, on the other hand, know that the real challenge lies in putting in a consistent amount of solid effort over long periods of time. If you can't do this, then I honestly don't know what to tell you. If you don't change, you're never going to succeed. And it's not just going to kill you in poker, these are essential life skills for success in any career.

So I'm sorry for the tough love, but I'm tired of seeing losing players search endlessly for the one technical upgrade, or the one mindset shift that's going to turn things around for them. And I'm tired of seeing coaches who profit off of this whole shit show. The only thing that's going to determine your success in poker is the quality of your effort over the long term. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. The good news is almost no one else at low stakes is willing to do what I've said here. So if you have what it takes, then success will come a lot faster than you'd think.

P.S. If you liked this post, I highly recommend Elliot Roe's courses. He is one of the only coaches in the industry that I see giving the logistical side of poker the attention it deserves.

Ty for nice share. GL.

m4 - The Downswing Antidote

Fun session at 1000nl from a couple weeks ago:

The antidote to a downswing is volume minus urgency.

The biggest mistake people make when they are on a downswing is they think they need to change something.

While downswings can be useful to help a player learn from mistakes and improve, most players take the upgrade mindset way too far. In reality, you should always be questioning your decisions in a healthy and productive way whether you are winning or losing. If you only question your plays when a bunch of them don't work out in a row, then you will always limit your growth because you will hold yourself to low standards when you win and impossibly high standards when you lose.

In reality, the only way to get through a downswing as quickly as possible is to patiently play more hands. This also happens to be the recipe for success for poker in general. Most people underestimate how strong it is to just play a solid system over a large sample without making any huge mistakes. You can have a good win rate all the way up to high stakes just by steadily working on your game and not self destructing when things get really tough. Of course that's easier said than done, but what alternative do you have?

Consistency is a virtue. In the long term, the players who are consistent end up with a lot less stress and a lot more money in the bank.

Hey Patrick,
So happy to stumble upon this blog, have enjoyed everything so far and really looking forward to following along and picking up some valuable insight.
Please keep it coming, has been Gold.
All the best.

Random Poker Thought

It seems like a lot of online poker players care more about people on the internet thinking they are good at poker than actually making money.

Probably my number one rule for poker is: An idea that sounds smart isn't smart if it doesn't make money. An idea that sounds stupid can't be stupid if it does make money.

Hi Patrick,

Nice blog. As someone who has always put "quality" over "quantity" in my journey through the micro/mid stakes, I agree with most of your points. I would like you to elaborate, if you could, on two points:

(a) How did your scientific background help you in poker? I am asking because I have a math/CS background myself, so your experience could help me as well.

(b) During your "breakeven" stretch (and before that, and after that period), did you aggressivey move up and down in stakes? Could you elaborate on your bankroll management and mindset when you encountered downswings? (I see that you have already posted above something about mindset -- which I completely agree with. Though putting in consistent effort takes a lot of mental effort, for me at least.)

July Update

Stakes

Graph

I'm not going to make a habit of posting monthly results, but I thought I would share this graph of my first month mixing 2000nl. I have almost 30k more hands at 1000nl with a 15 bb/100 win rate. I hope in a few months that I'll be looking at a graph of 100k high stakes hands at 20+ bb/100. When I first heard Andrew Graham say he did this on Joe Ingram's podcast back in 2017, I thought it was impossible. But now I'm inspired to top it. Shout out to Cindy.

I've been watching a lot of Magnus Carlsen's streams lately (highly recommended). He said something here which really resonated with me:

"I was a bit of a chicken, unfortunately, back in my youth. In my case, the appetite certainly came with the meal. I don't think that's an expression in English, but whatever. What I'm trying to say is that as I got better I got more ambitious as well."

All I ever wanted from poker was $100k per year on my own terms. I think it's safe to say I have exceeded my goal. But even now I see a lot of ways that I can improve my game and I have my sights set on bigger achievements. I definitely feel like I'm just getting started and I'm excited to see what comes next.

sick month, well done!

incredible! can you send more stats? position, cbet etc

Hi Patrick,
Looking at your graphs and high WWSF numbers, we can see you are making a lot of money by getting players to fold. Is this by utilising the research done in the Night Vision courses that show hotspots where population doesn't defend enough versus PIO recommendations?
Ether pack is all around bluff catching so becoming proficient in that would increase showdown winning as opposed to non-showdown winnings.
Without giving away all of your secrets, have you found additional spots where you can take down more pots without showdown?
Also, finally, do you employ a lot of overbetting to generate folds, or do you just employ a strategy that includes lines on certain textures that you know population just overfolds? and would this strategy work in non-anonymous games?
Thanks

Would love to see some hand examples where you have confidently taken a line that may be unconventional because you know population over folds.

Looking at your graphs and high WWSF numbers, we can see you are making a lot of money by getting players to fold. Is this by utilising the research done in the Night Vision courses that show hotspots where population doesn't defend enough versus PIO recommendations?

Yes, and I have done a lot more research on my own beyond what was done in Night Vision.

Without giving away all of your secrets, have you found additional spots where you can take down more pots without showdown?

Yes. I'm not going to get too technical on this blog or post a lot of hand histories, but one example would be that a lot of people know to attack missed c-bets because the population doesn't protect their checking range and has a very hard time defending vs. stabs, but you can also be very aggro with raising flop c-bets as well, because the population is c-betting way too frequently in almost all cases.

Also, finally, do you employ a lot of overbetting to generate folds, or do you just employ a strategy that includes lines on certain textures that you know population just overfolds? and would this strategy work in non-anonymous games?

I do my fair share of overbetting :)

I guess I can't really say whether or not my strategy would work just as well in known pools until I put in a good sample in a known pool. There are some other guys on here that are using similar strategies in PokerStars Zoom pools and putting up great results. I doubt the average online reg would counter me enough for me to want to significantly change what I am doing. That said, it's pretty easy to dial things back and become more balanced, or just disguise your exploits a bit more. I do this all the time when I play HU and my opponent has a larger sample on me and/or is paying closer attention.

Random Poker Thought/Rant

Poker bots are not your problem.

There is so much paranoia about poker bots these days. I simply don't understand it. IMO it's just an easy way out for people to not take any ownership over why they are losing poker players.

I play on Ignition. It's an anonymous site which I am sure is flooded with bots, and I welcome the bots for a couple reasons:

1. Bots suck at poker, period. Unassisted bots play a simple, low win-rate strategy to capitalize on fish. They only make money by pumping huge amounts of volume. Playing against one of these bots is sort of like playing the ChessMaster bots with ratings in the 800-1400 range. If you are a pro poker player and you don't think you can beat a simple poker bot in 2019, you need to reevaluate your life. Maybe the day will come where some superbot like Pluribus is easily accessible and gets unleashed en masse on poker sites, but trust me, we are not there yet.

2. Bots give the illusion of more traffic, and traffic generates traffic. As a fish, would you rather play in a poker room where there are three tables running and almost all the players are pros, or would you rather have your choice of half a dozen tables with a mix of pros and barely +EV bots? Obviously you would choose the latter (especially if you don't even know you're playing against bots), because you will have a higher chance of winning.

A lot of people think spreading fear about bots is necessary, because we need to raise awareness about them before they "ruin the game forever." I believe this sensationalist attitude will actually have the opposite effect on the poker economy. If you write alarmist posts on forums or make YouTube videos freaking out about bots all the time, you're more likely to scare off the recreational players than the pros. The recreationals are just here for fun and can go play other games if they want to. The pros are stuck here, bots or no bots.

Of course I think we should be concerned about unassisted bots becoming more powerful. And I do think there will be a day where a bot like Pluribus (assuming those researchers were being genuine and accurate about their bot's performance) is more easily accessible. But for now, we should just accept that bots aren't really that big of a problem, and if there are accounts that are using unethical means to gain truly massive edges, then it's up to the poker sites and their security teams to ban them.

There's a big difference between identifying a specific poker bot and reporting it privately to a security team (productive), and spreading paranoia publicly on forums about bots in general (unproductive and harmful to the ecosystem). If you're the kind of person who does the latter, maybe you should start thinking about why it's so appealing to you to assume the game is rigged and it's impossible for you to win. Frankly, it's a sign of low competence. You're not helping anyone, and the person you're hurting the most is yourself.

Really dig the frank mental game (or, more broadly, as you put it: logistical) discussion that you're sharing here.

m5 - How To Cope With Downswings

Ouch

You can do all the mindset work you want. Nothing is going to prepare you for the biggest downswing of your life. It's sort of like being a surfer who has only surfed 10-foot waves. Then, one day, a 20-footer comes out of nowhere. Before you even have time to react, this massive thing is on top of you, and it's about to crash.

There's no going over or under the wave. You can't go around it. You just have to ride the fucking wave, and it's really scary. But once you come out the other end and realize you survived, you're not as scared of 20-foot waves anymore. Maybe 30-footers are the new 20-footers, and now you look at 20s like you used to look at 10s. That's called growth.

But growth is never pretty. When you're down an amount of money you're not comfortable with, you're not going to play your A game. It's impossible. I used to not want to admit this to myself. I prided myself on having a rock-solid mindset. But I have made some mistakes during my last two huge downswings that I really don't think I would have made unless I was under extreme performance stress.

This actually isn't such a huge problem as long as you know how to manage it. First of all, if you're a winning player, then you should only experience these massive downswings a small percentage of the time. But when they do happen, the tilt can be pretty costly, and we obviously want to minimize that. So here are some practical tips for not losing your mind:

1. Don't expect yourself to play your A game. Instead, shoot for a B+. Maybe you won't make the really sick plays that you make when you're totally dialed in, but you'll still be very profitable in the games.

2. Don't change your volume schedule significantly. Increasing volume will reduce your ability to focus. Decreasing volume will make the downswing feel like it's never going to end. Just put in the hands you planned, give or take a few thousand, and try to play as well as you can.

3. Put the variance in perspective. A lot of players don't realize how hard it is to punt even 10 big blinds in a single hand. If you're on a 20 buy-in downswing, that means you would have needed to make 200 of those mistakes if there was no variance in the sample. Spoiler alert: you didn't play that badly, you just got unlucky. If you're a winning player, try reflecting on your results over the past year instead of focusing on the past month.

Beyond that, I can't give you much advice except to put your head down and play through it. Remember that downswings are only temporary. If you're a winning player, that means by definition every downswing you have ever had has been offset by an even greater upswing. At some point you just have to realize that it's stupid to get mad every time. As long as you have good bankroll management, you're not going to go broke. Downswings don't kill you, they make you stronger.

Hi
Your subject inspired me. Am I on the right track? Can you give me a hint?

https://gyazo.com/71149e1dde1268b0dd2130c4d2226250

Great stuff. I appreciate how you really put time and effort in your posts.

Great stuff, Patrick :D

why i just found this?? Amazing content

I didn't, but I follow Nick.

Too many stats and figures. My conclusions have caused me confusion :) The only thing I have learned is to use too much overbet. :)

my winrate 200nl 5bb/100 but why not more? my English is bad. I hope you understand.

Lol fuck if I know, dude. I am actually confused how you used some of the exact same texture filters I created in Ether if you never bought the course. Sort of seems like you pirated it. I hope that's not true. I hope you didn't really just steal the course and then ask me for free advice on top of that.

I did not think I would get such an answer. I've been following Nick Howard for a long time. My English is very bad and to understand, I watched the videos on the youtube channel maybe 100 times ... Also I spent hours trying to make filters. I erased it wrong. I did it wrong, erased it again. Places I've been inspired by

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b3fwsi5Dtw
https://gyazo.com/282f4f7e7c921f747f6c84af26d772b4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY9nlWR5Lk8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dtb9Du_uTBk

Okay. This is why I asked you how you learned to use H2N :)

Anyway I have decided not to give technical advice here on the blog. I'm using it as a place to write about the logistical side of poker, which is where I think most players, including me, are leaking the most

This blog is pure gold, please keep posting

sick blog, good luck

This is something special!
Registered here just because of this blog.

Great stuff here, keep it going :-)

Random Poker Thought

Poker is a hard game because, in order to play well, you need to constantly make decisions that are guaranteed to lose money some or even most of the time.

Loss aversion is the fundamental cognitive bias which shapes the way we play. Without it, it would be very difficult to exploit your opponents.

I'd take a fearful opponent with vast technical understanding over a fearless opponent with average technique, any day.

Random Poker Thought

Three phases of a downswing:

1. You run bad and lose a bunch of money.
2. You stop running bad, but you still feel unlucky, which leads to mistakes and more losing.
3. You run good and win a bunch of money.

Phases 1 and 3 cancel each other out. Your win rate is dependent on how well you handle phase 2.

m6 - What To Do Once You're A Successful Poker Pro

Almost all poker content is focused on how to become a winner--and rightly so, a lot of people need help with that. But I have noticed there is pretty much no content available for poker players who have already made it and are wondering what comes next. By "made it," I mean they have moved up to high enough stakes where they can consistently make a salary that allows them to live really comfortably. In the US, that usually means six figures per year before taxes, but it could be less if you're frugal or live in a less expensive country.

When I first started playing poker, my only goal was to make $100k per year on my own terms. I have always been a pretty frugal person, so I figured once I had achieved six figures, I would be secure and content financially and could just focus on enjoying the rest of my life. I was pretty shocked when I exceeded this goal and, in a lot of ways, I was actually more stressed about money than I had ever been. From what I can tell, there were two reasons why:

1. I didn't have a plan for paying taxes, saving, investing, or spending. Almost all of my money was just accumulating in a checking account or sitting on poker sites.
2. All of my money was tied up in liquidity because I was always reinvesting my winnings back into my bankroll so I could move up in stakes. There's not really any way around this other than to move up slower, which will cost you money in the long run. So it sort of makes you feel like the money you're making isn't quite "real."

Things finally reached a breaking point in the past couple months. Two months ago, I moved up to 10/20, went on a huge heater, and developed major issues with insomnia. Then, last month, I went on nearly a $50k downswing. This marked the second time in only three months that I had lost over a third of my net worth. This month, after I finally recovered from that downswing, I was completely burned out. I took this past week off from poker and decided it was time to get my financial shit together and start living a more normal life, even if that meant having to move back down to 5/10 for a while.

The reason I have to move down is because my bankroll is going to take a big hit when I pay my taxes. Usually when you are self employed in the US, you are supposed to pay estimated taxes quarterly. If you don't, you pay a penalty at the end of the year. The biggest problem with this is you will move up a lot slower if you're paying taxes along the way, rather than paying them all at the end. So I made the decision to take the relatively small penalty in order to accelerate my move up to high stakes. At this point, having the tax payment hanging over my head feels like more stress than it's worth, so I'm just going to pay it and get on a regular quarterly schedule. I could still play 10/20, but I'd prefer to build a slightly bigger roll first.

So with that said, I want to share the financial systems I have created for myself, and that I would recommend for any player who is consistently winning at high stakes. I learned all of this stuff from Ramit Sethi's book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. You can buy it here. I am not a personal finance expert, I'm just sharing what I have learned from research and experience.

Beginner financial system

For easy math, assume you make $7,500 per month on average.

One third of that should go straight to a savings account for taxes, which you pay on a quarterly basis.

The remaining $5,000 goes to:
-Rent
-Groceries
-Bills (insurance, loan payments, cell phone and cable)
-Savings and investments (bankroll, savings accounts, retirement funds)
-Guilt-free spending (restaurants, clothes, Uber, etc.)

So the actual breakdown might look like this:
-$1,600 for rent (32%)
-$500 for groceries (10%)
-$900 for bills (18%)
-$1,200 for savings and investments (24%)
-$800 for guilt-free spending (16%)

Notes:
-Try to keep rent below one third of your post-tax income.
-Try to allocate at least 10% of your pre-tax income to savings and investments. This value should probably be higher (15-30%) for poker players, because in addition to normal savings and retirement accounts, we also want to be saving money toward our bankroll so that we can take shots at even bigger games or tournaments.

But what about months where we make less than expected? Typical financial advice says you should have a "rainy day" fund that would cover your basic expenses (food, rent, and bills) for 3-6 months should you have some emergency in your life that causes you to lose your job.

As poker players, we tend to have a lot more liquid money than the average person because we need to keep a bankroll. If you lose your job as a poker player, well, you won't really need a bankroll anymore, so you can sort of use that as your rainy day fund. That being said, you don't want to be dipping into your bankroll every time you have a bad month, because this will cause you to stress out about losing and maybe even have to move down in stakes. Unfortunately, this is pretty much unavoidable while you are building a bankroll. But here's the long-term solution that I am now working toward:

Advanced financial system

-One savings account with at least 100 buy-ins for my typical stakes
-One savings account with 3 months of living expenses

Since it should be extremely rare for me to have three losing months in a row as a cash game player, I will almost always just be living off the funds in the second savings account and not having to dip into my bankroll. By using this system I effectively set my living expenses in advance, rather than spending based on whatever I made in the previous month. This is a great way to not fall down the rabbit hole of always increasing your expenses as your salary increases.

So, for example, let's say I play 5/10 and I want to spend $5k per month on everything, including rent, food, bills, and spending. That means I need at least $100k in the bankroll savings account, plus $15k in the second savings account that I pay myself from. At the start of each month, I simply withdraw $5k from my savings, pay my bills, and then I am free to spend whatever is left over on whatever I want. At the end of the month, I pay taxes on whatever money I made that month, replenish my savings account back to $15k, and then contribute any additional money to investments or other savings accounts.

If that sounds boring, well, it sort of is. But you should want your finances to be a little boring. Poker is exciting enough as it is, isn't it? Not to mention that when you are financially secure, you will have a huge edge over your opponents who are still playing scared with their rent money. You can start to make BTO plays (bankroll theory optimal), where you just load huge amounts of money into the pot and watch your opponents collapse under the pressure. In other words, you can be the end boss at your limit who pushes everyone else around. That doesn't sound very boring to me.

And remember that saving money doesn't always mean you are saving for boring things. While the majority of your savings should go toward investments and grown up stuff like buying a home, once you hit those savings goals, you can also save for a new car or a fancy vacation, whatever you want. The point is that you are consciously saving the money for these larger purchases, rather than just spending your money randomly as it comes in.

Finally, Ramit suggests that if you make more than six figures, you should have an accountant handle your taxes. Try to get someone who works with online freelancer types who understands the world you're in and can handle stuff like crypto gains/losses.

Ultimately, the goal is to stop stressing about money and start living your life. In the poker world, we tend to think about money management in a very binary way. If you're not pushing your bankroll to the limit, then you're a nit. (I have definitely been guilty of this type of thinking in the past.) But having a smart financial system doesn't make you Joey Knish. Actually, it just makes you a much stronger poker player, and most importantly, it makes you way better at life away from the tables.

P.S. If you have your entire bankroll in Bitcoin, you're a dumbass.

No idea about this, but I don't plan on having a significantly losing quarter any time soon. If you have any resources on this feel free to share.

Good blog. Just discovered it lol. Keep it up.

High Quality Blog

Random Poker Thought

The reason poker players tilt is simple: we have an extremely small edge and we consistently overestimate it.

When these unrealistic expectations get exposed, such as on a downswing, we have an emotional response in proportion to how much our expectations differ from reality.

So the key to not tilting is to remove your expectations. If that's uncomfortable to accept, then you're still holding onto the idea that you have more control than you actually do.

Well written. Subbed. Already looking forward to the next post.

i heard someone say tilt often comes from lack of knowledge and not understand how to play certainhands, so more study should equal less tilt. This, and breathe exercises.

Hello,

On your post named:

"m2 - You Should Probably Stop Playing Zoom"

I mean, you said all which needed to be say.
Why people still play a HUGE amount of hands a month at NL2 to NL25 at a very small winrate or breakeven player?

Isn't more interesting playing 2 or 3 normal 6 max tables just to focus on A-game? This is more interesting to get a higher winrate, increase skill in general to reach higher limit step by step?

Even if you decrease your volume of hands played a month but gain some BB/100, is the choice not better to stop zoom?

Why everyone is making "blogs" zoom poker? I mean, 90% of the blogs I see on twoplustwo are made of zoom players.

What do you think about that?
Can we really consider climbing stakes one by one by making a less amount of hands in a month with a bigger winrate? Is it worth?

August-September Update

Hi all,

I just wanted to quickly say thanks to everyone who has commented on this blog, liked, or subscribed so far. I started this blog for fun, so all the positive responses has been a really nice surprise.

RIO also gave me a free month of Elite from all the "points" I have received lately, so that's cool.

It has been a difficult month for me, as you might have guess based on all the downswing-related content. Although I am not going to make a habit of posting monthly results, I think it's only fair that I post a couple months of bad results after posting my personal best month in July. So here it is:

Stakes

Graph

For those wondering, the 1/2 hands were from a random stream I did privately for Poker Detox CFP (that was expensive). The 2/5 hands were from times where action at 5/10 was poor or I just honestly didn't feel up to playing my normal games due to the downswing.

These past two months have given me a deeper appreciation for variance, and how impossible poker can feel when you are running bad. I feel lucky to be in a position now where I can break even for a couple of months and it doesn't affect my financial security. The last time I had a 2-month stretch like this, it was at the beginning of this year when I was just starting out and I had very little money to my name. That actually felt unsafe. This just feels like an annoyance by comparison.

My plan for October is to play another 20-25k hands at high stakes, as usual, and play my best. I think the last two months have made me a much stronger player and I hope to heat up again soon. To my opponents: when that time comes, be afraid... be very afraid >:D

If there are any topics/questions you would like me to write about in future posts, feel free to make a suggestion in the comments below or DM me.

In the mean time, good luck at the tables (unless you're at my tables!) and thanks for reading.

August-September Update

Hi all,

I just wanted to quickly say thanks to everyone who has commented on this blog, liked, or subscribed so far. I started this blog for fun, so all the positive responses has been a really nice surprise.

RIO also gave me a free month of Elite from all the "points" I have received lately, so that's cool.

It has been a difficult two months for me, as you might have guessed based on all the downswing-related content. Although I am not going to make a habit of posting monthly results, I think it's only fair that I post a couple months of bad results after posting my personal best month in July. So here it is:

Stakes

Graph

For those wondering, the 1/2 hands were from a random stream I did privately for Poker Detox CFP (that was expensive). The 2/5 hands were from times where action at 5/10 was poor or I just honestly didn't feel up to playing my normal games due to the downswing.

These past two months have given me a deeper appreciation for variance, and how impossible poker can feel when you are running bad. I feel lucky to be in a position now where I can break even for a couple of months and it doesn't affect my financial security. The last time I had a 2-month stretch like this, it was at the beginning of this year when I was just starting out and I had very little money to my name. That actually felt unsafe. This just feels like an annoyance by comparison.

My plan for October is to play another 20-25k hands at high stakes, as usual, and play my best. I think the last two months have made me a much stronger player and I hope to heat up again soon. To my opponents: when that time comes, be afraid... be very afraid >:D

If there are any topics/questions you would like me to write about in future posts, feel free to make a suggestion in the comments below or DM me.

In the mean time, good luck at the tables (unless you're at my tables!) and thanks for reading.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences, very insightful! glgl

Hi Patrick. Thanks for the blog posts.

Your blog mostly talks about your experience when you were already at mid-high stakes (200NL+). Could you talk a little bit more about your experience at NL100 and lower?

For instance, in my experience, some "jumps" were tougher than others. I found the jump from 2/5 to 5/10 to be my first major obstacle. Then from 50NL to 100NL was fairly challenging as well. Obviously, this kind of thing depends on the player pool and the individual player themselves, but perhaps some things can be generalized.

Any other kind of thoughts you may have about this period would also be good to hear.

Hi Patrick.

Do you think one-tabling zoom is also bad idea? If you can 100% focus on one table and not mass multitable like it is common for zoom players. On one hand you lack dynamics, but also if you want to keep hands per hour for comparing, 1x zoom equals 2-3x regular tables, so your focus will be better with 1x zoom obviously.

Thank you

Great blog dude. Since you are very knowledgeable respective the mental part of the game, i have question about beeing results orientated in poker.

With beeing results orientated i mean mainly struggling to not check results several times during a session while playing. I struggle with this now for years. I tried everything but never succeeded. Especially when i feel that i am running bad i always find an excuse to check results. When running good/mediocre the feeling to check results is not there.

I understand variance and know that a high percrntage of our sessions will be losing one. However, with everything which i tried to implement to at least not check results daily, i failed. I even thought to pay that somebody writes a script for me to block PT4 for a certain time period.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Random Poker Thought

I don't know what is more offensive to my poker sensibilities: that people are shady enough to cheat, or that they are dumb enough to get caught.

@Pape just play lower stakes so you don't care about the swings, than cashier will not be so interesting to look at. clearly playing above bankroll.

radiosick great Blog, love it

I assume that you use H2N to analyze Population tendencies because it is way better for this kind of work than PT4 or HM2.

But it seems from your posts than you use PT4 or HM2 in game . Is there a reason why you dont use H2N also in game ? missing Hand Converters or the marking system of H2N ?

Hey Patrick - can you comment on the specifics of how you managed your shots on the way up? I know you mentioned you never took a shot at the next stake w/out at least 30BI for the one you were currently playing. But what was your plan going into those shots? 5BI shot, 10BI shot, etc and when would you of forced yourself to drop back down had you needed to? Since the primary goal is to scale to higher stakes and increase earn exponentially just wondering how aggressive you think you can be with shot taking while still remaining responsible. If you could please address this from the seat of someone who already is a proven winning player and already has all aspects of the "Advanced Financial System" from above in place but has not yet reached high stakes. And also on a more basic level what did those shots look like? did you play 4 tables at the next level right out of the gate or start off with 1 or two and slowly work into it? Did you play very short sessions at first to get your feet wet? etc. Thanks!

i'd be interested in reading answer to this question that too.

About studying, do you still go deep into concepts or not really since you did it already aswell when you were upcoming? So now you just grind pio sims of your hh?

Hi Patrick, great blog thanks for sharing!

I have a few questions regarding Ignition specifically. Do you download the cards up hhs after 24hrs to review? Do you think there is benefit in knowing you made the correct fold or bluffed the hand you were targeting to bluff after the fact? If you do download the hands, given that you use real time card catching for the HUD at regular tables do you purge those hand histories before you import the cards up hands 24hrs later?(is there a work around this?)

Thanks in advance, and good luck :)

Random Poker Thought

Some musings about the Mike Postle case...

1. The poker world is obsessed with this story because it gives us something to rally around. Sure, it's interesting that he cheated, but I think the bigger draw is the sense of community that has been created around the investigation.

2. My biggest confusion point about the case is if someone is godmoding at a table, it is literally impossible for anyone else at that table to win. That means every regular on that stream had to be not just losing, but losing badly. How did they not communicate? I'm assuming it was harder to detect than I would expect for a few reasons:
   -Live poker players don't have tracking software to easily spot patterns in their losing sessions. They might also not be as diligent about tracking their results as more serious online pros, though I am sure at least some of these players take the game very seriously.
   -The turnover rate among pros was too high for anyone to stick around long enough to catch on. I haven't watched the stream so I have no idea how many long-time regs were in the game.
   -They probably only played like 10% of their hands on stream, meaning they could still make the money back off stream. Still, it would be really hard to recover those losses.
   -You just don't expect something like this is going to happen to you.
   I can get on board with all that, but still. A year and a half? You would think someone would be like, "Hey, I can't ever win here." And someone else would be like, "You know, now that you mention it, I never win here either." And if you asked around a little more, you would find that actually no one was winning--except Mike Postle.
   Maybe I'm just more paranoid than the average person, especially after seeing some of my friends get cheated on the Chinese poker apps. Over the last couple months when I was breaking even on Bovada, I was asking everyone I knew how their results were on the site. If even one other person is winning, the probability of a security breach basically vanishes. But if everyone is losing, you should be suspicious that you are in a fraudulent system.

3. It's a good thing that, presumably, most people who are shady enough to cheat are also greedy/stupid enough to cheat blatantly. But I do wonder how many guys have had access to an unfair advantage like this and been able to keep it under the radar, occasionally dumping some money back and winning at a more "human" rate of 10-30 bb/100. This, to me, is the scariest thing to imagine.

Great posts Patrick. I just wanted to ask what you recommend for coaching for someone who’s a slight winner at 200nl on bodog 100nl stars. Not sure what to look for. Thanks.

Hi,

I'm not really up on the coaching scene at all. All I can recommend is my brother Nick's website: www.pokerdetox.com, which has a CFP program.

Dude, you are fucking hilarious! Best poker related material I have ever read! Very sound writing and approach to. Thank you for the effort!

m7 - Selection Bias in Variance Calculations

I am a huge fan of the PrimeDope variance calculator. In fact, one of my favorite pastimes is to go on a huge downswing, plug the downswing into the calculator, and then figure out exactly how unlucky I am.

For a while, this was a very educational hobby (and also an expensive one). But eventually, I got the genius idea that something may be wrong with the way I was doing these calculations.

The main reason I became suspicious was some of the answers I got just seemed ridiculous. Extremely improbable events, according to the calculator, were happening way too often in my experience, and in the experience of other players in my network.

For example, I have seen multiple players go on downswings of 50-60 buy ins (with graphs to prove it). These were very good players with high win rates. According to the calculator, here is the probability of a 7 bb/100 winner going on a 50 buy in downswing in 50,000 hands...

Inputs

• Win rate: 7 bb/100

• Standard deviation: 100 bb/100

• Observed win rate: -10 bb/100

• Number of hands to simulate: 50,000

Results

Table 1

According to the calculator, the probability of running at or above the observed win rate (-10.00 bb/100) over 50000 hands with a true win rate of 7.00 bb/100 is 99.9928%.

100% - 99.9928% = 0.0072% or roughly 1 in 14,000

In other words, there is only a 1 in 14,000 chance of going on a downswing worse than this over 50,000 hands if your true win rate is 7 bb/100. I personally have never gone on a downswing nearly this big (I also haven't played very much), but like I said, I have seen it happen to multiple players.

Now, of course the variance calculation isn't a perfect model. One of the key assumptions you make when you do a calculation like this is that a player's win rate is constant. We know that can't be true, because the player's opponents change all the time. Also, in the real world, people tilt. People play worse when they are down tons of money, which makes extreme downswings more likely to occur.

But even if these calculations are in only in the ballpark... 1 in 14,000? Come on. That can't be right—can it?

As it turns out, the calculations are correct. The problem is the way I that I was looking at them.

The odds of this particular downswing really are 1 in 14,000, but only if you play exactly one 50,000 hand sample. Obviously the players I talked to have played way more than 50,000 hands in their lifetimes. Therefore, they are much more likely to go on a huge downswing like this one simply because they have had so many more opportunities to do so.

Introducing Selection Bias

Imagine I told you that I was flipping a coin the other day, and I flipped tails ten times in a row.

"Wow, ten times?" you ask. "The probability of that is about 1 in 1,000."

"I know!" I respond, "It was so crazy."

The next question you should ask me is, "How many times did you flip the coin that day?"

"Oh... about four or five hundred," I respond.

Well, that makes it a little less spectacular doesn't it? The odds of seeing ten tails in a row are much higher than 1 in 1,000 if you flip the coin five hundred times. It's interesting, sure, but it's not 1-in-1,000 interesting.

The way I initially presented the coin flip story is an example of a selection bias. This is a mistake that poker players (including me) make all the time when they do variance calculations.

The point is that extremely improbable events are much more likely to occur when you give them many chances to happen. Poker players play hundreds of thousands of hands per year. Each hand can, more or less, be looked at as the start of a new sample. So instead of asking, "What are the odds of going on a downswing of x buy ins over y hands?" a better question to ask is, "What are the odds of going on a downswing of x buy ins at any period over all of the hands I have played in my career?"

Primedope gives some additional statistics on downswing variance, but unfortunately they can't be used to answer this question. So I asked a friend who is a lot more capable than I am to run some simulations. All credit for the variance calculations below goes to Holonomy. (Thanks for your help!)

Downswing Simulations

Here's how the simulations worked: 10,000 theoretical poker players were simulated, each with the same win rate and standard deviation. Each played the same number of hands. The largest downswing each player endured over his entire sample was recorded. The simulation was repeated with four different win rates. Here are the results for a 3 million hand sample size, i.e. 10,000 players playing 3 million hands each. (We chose 3 million hands because we thought it was a reasonable estimate for how many hands a professional poker player might play in a career.)

Table 2

• Average Maximum Downswing. On average, this is the worst downswing you should expect to see in a sample of this size.

• 90% Confidence Interval. You can be 90% confident that the maximum downswing will not exceed this value.

• 95% Confidence Interval. You can be 95% confident that the maximum downswing will not exceed this value.

For example, the average maximum downswing for the 5 bb/100 players was 7,000 bb, or 70 buy ins. This means that some of the players experienced a larger downswing than this, and some of the players experienced a smaller downswing, but the worst downswing they experienced on average was 70 buy ins.

The average maximum downswing for the 10 bb/100 players was only 4,300 bb, or 43 buy ins. That makes sense, because a player with a higher win rate should experience less severe downswings on average.

But again, remember that these are just the average results. The 90% and 95% confidence intervals show that the less probable downswings can be a lot worse. For example, at a 95% confidence interval (i.e. two standard deviations from the mean), a 10 bb/100 winner can be expected to go on a maximum downswing of up to 66 buy ins.

Here are the results of the simulations for three other sample sizes: 1 million, 250k, and 50k hands, respectively:

Table 3

Table 4

Table 5

I think it's useful to present the simulations with several different sample sizes because it makes it easier to intuitively understand how frequently these downswings should occur.

For example, let's say you are a 7.5 bb/100 winner over your entire career, and you go on a 30 buy in downswing. If you look at the results for the 250k hand sample size, you can see that the average maximum downswing for a 7.5 bb/100 winner is 31 buy ins. That means your downswing is the worst you would expect on average over a period of 250k hands. So if you play about 20k hands per month, then you should expect a downswing this big to occur about once per year on average.

Of course, you might not experience a downswing that's this bad, but you also could have a downswing that's much worse. At a 95% confidence interval, the maximum downswing for this sample size is 59 buy ins. A downswing this large is unlikely, but certainly not impossible.

In general, poker players massively underestimate variance. Most of the 5 bb/100 winners I talk to don't "expect" to go on a 40 buy in downswing, but they actually will experience a downswing about this large on average every 250k hands they play. For high volume players, that could mean they have to go through something like this once every four months, more or less. If this terrifies you, then you're probably not properly rolled for the games you play.

That being said, I'm not going to end this article with some arbitrary bankroll management guidelines. You have to decide for yourself how much risk you're willing to take on. My goal is just to give you a better understanding of not just what is possible, but what should actually be expected. If you're going to make poker into your career, then get ready for a bumpy ride.

Holonomy's Notes

For those interested in exactly what was done For each simulation the player's 100 hand returns were modelled as N iid normally distributed variables with a mean of X and a stdev of 115, where N = total_hands / 100. The returns were then summed and then for each value at time t, the difference between the value at time t and the minimum value of all values after time t was computed. We then take the maximum of this. The simulation was run 10000 times and the statistical properties described were computed. This does have the assumption that you are only looking at your results every 100 hands as there is a discretisation effect here.

I've yet to experience a downswing where I didn't spew at least 5-10BIs. ethanrox

Hmmm, are you sure about this? I would question what methods you use to quantify the EV of your mistakes. I touched on this briefly in an old post:

A lot of players don't realize how hard it is to punt even 10 big blinds in a single hand. If you're on a 20 buy-in downswing, that means you would have needed to make 200 of those mistakes if there was no variance in the sample. Spoiler alert: you didn't play that badly, you just got unlucky.

I only mention this because a lot of players, myself included, make this mistake. We make a bad play and get stacked, and we feel like we punted our entire stack. But usually even an egregious error only loses a small fraction of the total chips invested in EV.

Nice blog man! Do you play only on ignition?

Hi Patrick, love the blog so far! I've heard Nick mention that you were the first kinesthetic learner he taught his strategy to. Being a kinesthetic learner myself, I'm particularly interested in how you approach the studying process: what methods worked best in terms of being able to upgrade your strategy and apply it in-game?

Thanks!
Charlie

Absolutely love that downswing post, really eloquently summarises something I've been struggling to put into words for a while now when explaining downswings to students.

GLGL and nice blog.

m8 - When and How To Check Results

Prerequisite reading: m7 - Selection Bias in Variance Calculations

In Phil Galfond's excellent article, Poker and Your Life, he writes about the skills that he thinks make a great poker player. I think most good poker blogs try to tackle this question at one point or another. Phil starts with a few hard skills: deductive logic, psychology, and math/statistics. I tend to agree with him on all these points. But then he goes on to list three additional soft skills:

There are also three minor categories, which are less about predicting poker aptitude and potential, and more about predicting how likely you are to reach and use that potential:

• Competitive Drive (especially with oneself)

• Humility and Self-Awareness

• Self Control

Again, I agree that all of these qualities are very important, but I think he left the number one soft skill off the list. Maybe it just slipped his mind, or maybe it didn't occur to him because he's naturally such a beast at it. Whatever the case, here's my vote for the most important soft skill in poker: risk tolerance.

If you're going to play poker for a living, then you're going to swing like crazy--it's inevitable. If you want to become great at poker and sustain your level of skill, you have to have the stomach to deal with those swings without letting them drastically affect the quality of your play or your mental health. You have to be able to show up every day and play well, even when the shit hits the fan and you know that things can always get worse before they get better.

I believe risk tolerance is more or less an innate quality. It is probably genetic for the most part, but it also could be impacted by events in your childhood. I would rate myself pretty low on the risk-tolerance scale, which is actually the main reason why I write these articles. The only way I have been able to manage this weakness is by developing a better mathematical understanding of variance.

Variance is a gift and a curse. On one hand, if there was no variance in poker, then nobody would play it for fun and almost none of us would be able to make any money doing it¹. On the other hand, variance makes it so that you have basically zero control over whats going to happen at the tables on any given day.

For example, even a player with a respectable win rate of 5 bb/100 still has a 44% chance of losing over a sample of 1,000 hands (at a standard deviation of 115 bb/100). And the probability of a loss goes down at a stubbornly slow rate even over much larger samples. Below, I've plotted the normal distribution (also known as a bell curve) of this variance calculation:

The y axis is the probability density. The x axis is the winnings in buy ins (100 bb). Without getting too technical, we can say that the higher up on the bell curve you are, the more likely it is that the result of the 1,000 hand sample will equal the value in buy ins at that point on the X axis.

The mean of the distribution (the highest point on the curve which is marked with the green line) is 0.5 buy ins. This is the expected value of the sample, which is just the product of the volume and the win rate. (5 bb/100 * 1,000 hands = 50 bb, or 0.5 buy ins). The red shaded area is the area under the curve to the left of zero on the x axis. This accounts for about 44% of the total area under the curve and represents the probability of a loss over the sample.

As you can see, the expected value of 0.5 buy ins is hardly noticeable in the context of the range of possible outcomes. In fact, you can actually expect a result of at least ±4 buy ins approximately 20% of the time. And yet, despite the obvious contradictions, many players, including myself, are terribly results oriented. A winning day is a good day; a losing day is a bad day. On a big winning day, we congratulate ourselves for making the right decisions; on a big losing day, we blame ourselves for making mistakes. We're only human, and unfortunately this is how our monkey brains work.

I've been a full-time poker player for about a year now. Initially I thought that as I played more hands and gained experience, I would get better at managing my results orientation. Actually, I don't think I have gotten any better at all. In fact, I may have actually gotten worse. To be completely honest, although thought I would have less fucks to give with a quarter million hands and a year of winning under my belt, sometimes it feels like I have a shorter fuse than when I started. It's not so much the higher stakes the has made coping with downswings more challenging, but that my identity has gotten wrapped up in being a winning poker player. Of course losing money still bothers me, but at this point it's more of a hit to my ego than to my bank account².

A quarter million hands is barely anything in the grand scheme of things, but it's the trajectory that bothers me. I should be getting better at handling the swings, not worse, right? For that reason, I'm making an effort to change the way I look at my results. Rather than check results haphazardly whenever I feel like it, I want to take a smarter, more disciplined approach. So I've made it my goal for 2020 to follow the guidelines below.

Guide For Checking Results

To manage results orientation, it's extremely important to check your results after a predetermined number of hands. This is crucial to avoid selection bias in your interpretation of the results. The number of hands you choose is totally up to you, but it shouldn't be lower than 10k hands for an online player. I think most online players would probably agree it should be somewhere in the range of 10-50k hands.

Now, I'm not saying you absolutely cannot check your results before that time comes. You and I both know we're going to do it, no matter what I say in this blog post. (In fact, it's actually essential to closely keep track of your losses if you're taking shots at higher stakes.) What I am saying is that if you check your results prematurely, you should do so with an understanding that you are merely indulging your curiosity. There's a big difference between glancing at your results at the end of the day, and seriously evaluating those results, giving them a kind of legitimacy and causing yourself to worry about them. When you check your results after a few thousand hands, the data you are looking at is meaningless, and you should make an effort not to draw conclusions from it or let it influence your strategy or sense of self worth³.

For example, let's say you choose to check your results every 30,000 hands. Your current volume goal is to play 7,500 hands per week, so you'll check results every four weeks. You can mark it on your calendar, "Results Day." When Results Day comes, you'll be able to put your results into perspective with variance calculations. The variance calculations give you an estimate for your probability of a loss. They will also give you confidence intervals to establish some upper and lower thresholds for how large of a range of outcomes you can realistically expect to see over the sample.

Essentially, all you want to do is compare your results to the variance calculations and see if the outcome lies within a couple standard deviations of your expected value (that would be a 95% confidence interval). If it is--and it will be the vast majority of the time--that's great. Keep playing, keep working hard on your game, and come back to check again in another 30,000 hands. If you actually are experiencing a two-standard deviation downswing or worse, then go ahead, freak out. Take some time off, talk to someone, go to therapy, maybe drink heavily. Whatever it takes to say, "Well, that was fucked up, but I'm ready to get back to playing."

Whatever you do, it's essential at the end of the review to reset the part of your brain that subjectively interprets the results and attempts to create a narrative about how you've been running. You have to let go, because the next 30,000 hand sample has nothing to do with the previous one, or the one before that. Things can always get worse, no matter how bad they have gone; and things can always get better no matter how well they have gone. You're not due for anything in particular to happen. Your expected value is the mostly likely outcome, but nothing is deserved.

The key point I am trying to get across is this: whether your results are positive, break even, or negative, they probably mean much less than you think they do, even over relatively large samples. Almost always, the correct course of action is simply to keep doing what you have been doing and play more hands. But an obvious follow up question that I need to address is, "How long do I have to lose or break even before I actually decide to change my game plan in some way?"

Unfortunately, I can't give you an answer to this question. It can always "just be variance," no matter how bad your results are. All you can say is, the more money you lose, or the longer you break even, the smaller the odds become that it's just variance relative to the odds that you have overestimated your win rate in the variance calculations. In the end, it doesn't really matter, because as soon as you start to doubt whether you are truly a winner in your games, you're already dead in the water. Once you start to expect to lose, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because you will actually play worse. Dropping down in stakes or moving to a different site temporarily can help you refresh your mindset and rebuild confidence, and it also diversifies your game selection to protect your bankroll from ruin in the case that you are actually -EV in your games.

If you like this strategy and want to use it to check your results, I've included a summary of variance calculations over a variety of sample sizes below to help you visualize variance in the short and medium term. I used a win rate of 7.5 bb/100 and a standard deviation of 115 bb/100 for these calculations. If your win rate and/or standard deviation is significantly different from the ones I have used, feel free to make your own versions.

Variance Calculation Inputs

Variance Calculation Results (Table)

Variance Calculation Results (Graphs)

Footnotes

1. By the way, if you think you're super sick poker player and you don't need fish at your table to make money, read this article. If fish didn't exist, there would probably be less than 100 people making any real money playing poker.

2. Jungleman discusses ego and tilt in poker in his interview with Elliot Roe on the Mindset Advantage Podcast.

3. If you have a problem with checking your results way too much, as in multiple times per day, then you can make it more difficult to check results by hiding stats in your tracking software. I've even heard of some players using custom scripts to hide the cashier in the poker client. But unless you're really hardcore, you're probably going to take a peek from time to time. And that's not really a bad thing as long as you are able to manage your expectations.

4. An interesting side note: a win rate increase from 5 bb/100 to 7.5 bb/100 is a 50% increase in expected value. However, over a sample of 1,000 hands, the probability of booking a win for a 5 bb/100 winner is 56%, and for a 7.5 bb/100 winner it is just 58%. That's only a 4% relative increase in the probability of winning. This is why you can work very hard and get a lot better at poker, but it's extremely difficult to actually see the edge that you have gained from a day-to-day perspective.

Resources

1. Primedope Variance Calculator

2. Normal Distribution Applet/Calculator

Good post again. Its really nice for reader when writer puts real effort on his posts.

About checking results: Id still avoid random mid month checking as much as possible. Even though you could manage your expectations (which is almost impossible, at least for me) you lower the threshold for checking them again. So one check leads to another and then you notice you are back with your old habits checking them after every session or something like that.

Good way of putting results into perspective is to always check them with bigger sample. So lets say you play 50k hands in one month. Rather than only looking them separate from anything else, check your last 500k hands graph or so and see if your reactions are justified. Usually they arent.

Just found this. Great read so far. Would love to hear more about your study strategy, especially from the only use pip for flop decisions. I feel like I became totally lost/overwhelmed trying to plan for the turn and river using any systematic approach with pip. Too many branches. So would be really interested to hear how you approach your study. Though I know you've mentioned not posting much technical content. thanks for the read.

k, im out, this blog is too expensive for me, cya

Thanks for the response. Yes pip meant PIO (Auto correct on my phone). Its nice to hear that making money doesn't have to com from a GTO perfect strategy. Starting to think more exploitative on the turn and river. Will also do a bit of drilling with flopzilla to consider how my hands and range interact on the Turn and River.

So you are potentialy family with Nick Howard? That's cool. Perhaps even very cool.

Unfortunately today it doesn't matter.

Will Nick finally do some quality content or more empty words i need to find a dictionary to get it?

I thought you wanted to grind some high stakes and occupy the lobby, but you just keep showing off instead. Gotta click those buttons for volume sooner or later.

It's understood you're an elite player, but aren't you passing too often preflop?

What do you want radiosick?

Don't tell them, it's exploring 3-5 bluff-value ratio shove frequency, because nothing near this number will ever be accomplished and I'm sure you realise that.

Tell Nick to come back to RIO, I miss him :D

Amazing blog!

I'm interested in coaching, where do I contact you?

moar plz

Some Hands

Didn't believe him - Part 1

Didn't believe him - Part 2

Losing at 1000:1 on the flop D:

Update - 100k Hands of 1000nl

I played my 100,000th hand of 5/10 a couple nights ago.

Graph

My redline seems to be falling off slightly. I'm worried I might be turning into a bit of a nit. It hasn't seemed to hurt the results too much though.

Hi
what do you do in downswing times
break? Less table play? Working out of the game?

m9 - The Art of Preventing a Monster Downswing

I want to share an important lesson that I learned the hard way while moving up to high stakes last year. So far on this blog I have only written about moving up in stakes. This article is going to be about the opposite. I want to talk about when it actually makes sense to move down.

In order to illustrate the point, I’ll share my full graph to date below. To quickly recap my journey, I started playing full time at 200nl in 2019. Within about 6 months I made it to 2000nl and took a fairly epic shot that looked like this:

July-August 2000nl Shot

I won about 34 buy ins in my first 12k hands, and then lost about 23 buy ins in my next 8k hands. The result was I won at about 7 evbb/100 over my first 20k hands at 10/20. Pretty good, right? But it didn’t feel that way. It was actually fucking awful, because I simply wasn’t ready to go on a $45k downswing at that point in my career. (Remember, just a handful of months before this I was a 200nl player with a relatively small bankroll). This was the start of a rather dark period in my poker career that lasted half of a year or so, and I’m happy to have moved past it.

It wasn’t the downswing itself that was so bad, although that did hurt. In the end, I think it was the amount of time it took to rebuild at lower stakes that really messed with my head. Even after I moved down in stakes, I continued to run bad and run below EV. I probably wasn’t playing my best poker either, to be honest. I was in a big hole, and it felt like it took forever to recover.

To put this in perspective, here is my full graph since 2019 with the y axis in big blinds:

Graph To Date (Big Blinds)

And here is that same graph with the y axis in USD:

Graph To Date (USD)

Looks pretty different, right? That giant breakeven stretch between the two red arrows in the USD graph lasted about 7-8 months. I wasn’t playing this entire time; I took a three month break during this period dedicated solely to studying and making a new course for the Poker Detox cash game stable. But still, that’s a long time for a pro poker player to not make any money playing poker.

Nothing about my life really changed during this period. I had enough money. The lights were on, there was food in the refrigerator, and my car had a full tank of gas. I was still comfortably rolled to play 1000nl. But it didn’t feel that way--I felt completely burnt out. Losing even a few thousand dollars in a day was now enough to make me quit my session early. I used to not even flinch when that happened. Some days I would just play 500nl, or even 200nl, because I couldn’t stomach the thought of putting in a session at 1k and getting crushed.

It took a lot of time, but I eventually recovered. I’m back to crushing my 1k games and thinking about moving back up to 2k soon. But I learned a valuable lesson from this period. When I take my next shot at 2k, I won’t go on another soul-crushing downswing like this. I’ll simply take a break and move down to 1k before that happens.

The pros and cons of moving down in stakes

I think most people look at the decision to move down during a downswing like this:

• The upside of moving down is it’s safe. It’s a lot less scary to play lower stakes, and it allows you to rebuild your bankroll with confidence.
• The downside of moving down is you make less money for a little while, and it takes more time to recover your losses on average.
• The upside of continuing to play at your current stake is it’s usually the highest EV option (assuming you’re still capable of playing your A game). On average, it’s the quickest way to make the money back.
• The downside of continuing to play at your current stake is you could continue to lose a lot more money, especially if you’re now playing badly because the money you’ve already lost has gone to your head.

That’s probably how most people look at it. But actually, I don’t think number four, i.e. the financial risk argument, is the real downside of continuing to play at your current stake. The real downside is the long-term damage to your mental game that is the result of going on a downswing 50-100% larger than you’re comfortable with, and taking many months to recover from it. For me, this led to playing significantly less volume and playing a weaker, more risk-averse version of my normal game. It also hurt my confidence in real life and made me a generally more anxious/depressed person for a while.

Small jabs vs. the hail mary

When I take my next 10/20 shot, I plan to take more frequent breaks at 5/10 when I encounter a downswing. My consecutive stop loss will probably be around $30k, or 15 buy ins, even if I’m up more than that at the stake overall. If I hit that threshold, I’ll move down to 5/10 to recover, and come back to 10/20 in a month or two to resume my shot with confidence.

This is what I would call the “small jabs” approach to shot taking, as opposed to the “hail mary” approach. Both strategies start out the same way: you start out with a certain bankroll for your shot, say 5 buy ins, and move back down if you bust that. The difference is, in the small jabs strategy, you also have a consecutive downswing stop loss based on whatever your personal “pain threshold” is. That is, whatever amount you’re capable of losing without having major negative impacts on your mindset. For most people, a good stop loss at a new stake is probably around 15 buy ins. So even if you make 30 buy-ins and then lose 15, you preemptively move down and recover some or all of your losses at your previous stake before resuming your shot. This ensures that you never go on a downswing so huge that it takes many months to recover.

On the other hand, the hail mary approach simply pushes the variance to the limit. You stay at the stake until you either bust your shot or you’re too shell shocked to keep playing. Again, the upside of the hail mary is it is the highest EV approach in theory. If it works, it’s amazing. But if it doesn’t work, it really sucks.

The small jabs approach is safer, but more consistently annoying. There is a lot of extra time spent moving down preemptively to recover losses. On the other hand, the hail mary approach is riskier and can lead to either a euphoric victory or a devastating loss.

In practice, I think the small jabs approach is higher EV, even though it should be lower EV in theory. That’s because when a player exceeds his pain threshold on a downswing, it usually results in him playing less volume and playing worse poker. In extreme cases, it can result in him quitting poker. These outcomes are obviously far more -EV than playing lower stakes and reducing your hourly rate for a little while.

Of course there is a third option, which is to take a shot by mixing some higher stakes with your current stake. You could, for example, play 10/20 on the two softest days of the week, and then play 5/10 the other days. But still, there is always going to be a time when you have to decide to make 10/20 your main game, and I think it’s important to set some boundaries when you are making this transition.

I don’t want to say I regret the way I took my 10/20 shot, because I don’t necessarily regret it. The hail mary approach worked for me at 2/5, and it worked at 5/10. Of course, if I had gone on a $40k upswing instead of dropping another $20k, I would have felt great about my decision to stay at 10/20. Also, this downswing is what inspired me to do about 3 months of research which I may not have done otherwise. This made me a much, much better poker player than I was before, and resulted in a new Poker Detox course that I have used to create a second stream of income. But I do think I could have achieved the same result in a much smarter way. Yes. everything worked out in the end, but if I’m being honest, I would have rather just saved myself from going on a monster downswing that was, in retrospect, easily preventable.

No gamble, no future?

There are some people in the poker community who preach a “no gamble no future” philosophy that goes against what I’m saying here. This approach has never really worked for me. It might work for some people with an abnormal level of risk tolerance, but for the average person I think it just makes life harder than it has to be. In my opinion, there’s no glory in going on a giant downswing. At a certain point, you don’t come out stronger. It actually just sucks. Sometimes it really is better to take a more conservative approach, rather than setting yourself up for either a huge win or a devastating loss.

If this resonates with you, my advice is to simply think about how much money you’re comfortable losing in one stretch. Write the number down. Maybe it’s $5k. Maybe it’s $25k. Whatever it is, when you hit that point, move down, even if you don’t really have to from a purely financial standpoint. Take some time to rebuild, and then come back with confidence. You can’t ever truly avoid a bad run, but you can strategically move down in stakes to break up your downswings so that you ever don’t lose way more money than you’re comfortable with.

Great post and excellent blog. I resonate with this a lot, considering 500 and 1k are my main games on ignition, however this month I have been shotting 2k where I’m down about 6bi. The amount of bi are insignificant however the recovery rate at lower stakes hurts plus confidence suffers. I really like the small jab approach. Thank you and good luck with moving back up.

Very good post. So many people underestimate variance. It s nice to see you put so much effort and showing the epic highs and the unavoidable soul sucking lows. Good luck !

Thanks for all the great content :)

This is a fantastic blog, really appreciate the thought and care that's gone into it Patrick. So much useful stuff in here.

hi mobius how is it going?
any updates? Iggy games certainly changed this past 1-2 months

update?

Update - Coaching Success Story

Hey guys, been a while.

I don't normally do 1-on-1 coaching, but at the beginning of this year I made an exception for an aspiring poker player and friend who has been trying to succeed for many years, but has never been able to pull it all together. You may have seen him around these forums under the name Sigmund-Freud (I will refer to him from here on as SF).

SF was a Poker Detox CFP player who we unfortunately had to part ways with back in 2018. Because of our history, we made the split as amicable as possible and gave him free access to future Poker Detox CFP content. We encouraged him to keep studying and playing on his own bankroll, and to keep us updated about his results.

Fast forward to the end of 2019, SF was still breaking even, but highly motivated to become a winner. I decided to take him on as a student mainly because I wanted to see him succeed, but also as a challenge for myself as a coach.

To be perfectly frank, SF had a lot of problems with his game, including bankroll management issues, tilt, and technical leaks. To make things more complicated, he has a full-time job and a family. So there were logistical issues regarding how much energy he could invest in poker. There were a few times where I thought he wasn't going to make it, although I obviously never told him this.

That's why I'm happy to show off his graph for 2020. After starting with a modest bankroll at 25nl, he has just cleared over $10k in profits. All of these hands were played on PokerStars.

Click here to view the full size image.

SF has proven he can make a nice side income playing poker. If he continues to improve as he has been, I think he can definitely make a living playing poker full time, assuming that's what he really wants to do. I hope his results inspire someone to keep their poker dream alive.

I still get coaching inquiries in my DMs from time to time. I wish I could help everyone, but I don't have the time or energy to do 1-on-1 coaching these days. The only way you can access my training content by going through Poker Detox. We have a cash game CFP stable and some coaching options for a small number of independent high stakes players.

Happy holidays and GL in 2021 everyone!

Thoughts on the Landon Tice vs. Bill Perkins Challenge

This challenge has generated a lot of buzz in the community as of late. Given the unique nature of the challenge (Landon is spotting Bill 9 bb/100 at 200/400 over 20,000 hands of NLHE), I thought it would be worthwhile to share my thoughts on the betting line and the variance calculations involved.

These are the odds that Pokershares is currently offering:

Pokershares betting line as of February 18th, 2021.

When I first looked at the betting line, I realized I didn’t actually understand what it meant, and it took me a little while to figure it out. I think I know more than the average poker player/enthusiast about poker variance, so if I am confused, it’s probably safe to assume some other people are confused too (including some people who have already placed their bets).

Let's assume you want to bet on Landon, which means he must win more than $720k over 20,000 hands. The key question you must answer is this: Given the odds I am getting, what does Landon's true win rate need to be in order to make my bet profitable?

Landon’s odds to win are 1.61, which means he must win more than $720k at least 62% of the time to make betting on him profitable.

In order to determine what Landon's win rate needs to be to achieve this, we need to estimate the standard deviation of his win rate. It's impossible to know what the exact value will be, because it depends on the players' play styles, so we'll have to make an estimate.

I am not a heads up player and I actually don’t know what a typical standard deviation is in no limit heads up games. (If someone knows, please leave a comment below.) Let’s assume for the sake of this article that the standard deviation is ~160 bb/100. It turns out that even if this number is slightly off, it won’t affect the calculations very much.

The Primedope variance calculator allows you to input both an observed win rate and a true win rate in your calculations. So all we have to do is set Landon's observed win rate to 9 bb/100, and then increase his true win rate until his probability of running at or above the observed win rate is greater than 62%.

Let's start with a true win rate of 11 bb/100. How often will Landon win the challenge in this case?

Click here to view the full sized image.

If Landon's true win rate is 11 bb/100, he will win the challenge only 57% of the time, which means the bet would be -EV.

Here is a table of Landon’s probability to win the challenge as a function of his true win rate:

The table shows that Landon’s probability to win the challenge exceeds 62% when his win rate is 13 bb/100 or higher. Therefore, if you bet on Landon at 1.61, you are saying that you think Landon has at least a 13 bb/100 edge on Bill.

Is it realistic to think Landon’s edge is this large? I can’t give a clear answer on that, but I will say that in my database, recreational players tend to lose in heads up games at an average rate of -23 bb/100. This includes situations where the recreational was playing against another recreational, so the true win rate vs. a regular will be lower than this. However, the average stake in this database was 200nl, so rake was a significant factor (not all the losses went to the regular, some went to the site).

The big question is this: How much is Bill actually going to prepare for the challenge? If the match was going to be played tomorrow, I’d say betting on Landon is a slam dunk, unless you think Bill is much better than the average online recreational. But Bill has three months to prepare for the match. In that sense, Landon’s fate is mostly in Bill’s hands. Landon can spend a ton of time in the lab, but if Bill just comes away from his preparation with just a reasonably solid strategy, it’s going to be very difficult for Landon to have a double digit win rate against him.

It’s quite a gamble for Landon, but I think he’s smart to take on the challenge provided he sells a ton of his action. I think the challenge is likely to be +EV for him, and even if he loses, he gets a lot of publicity out of it. It might not be the kind of publicity he wants if he ends up losing a lot of money, but as the saying goes, “All press is good press.”

I’ll wrap up with one last thought: In general, the poker community tends to be wayyy too results oriented about these heads up challenges. Even if Landon’s true win rate is 13 bb/100, he still loses to Bill over 20,000 hands 13% of the time. That means that one in every eight times, Landon will lose the full $720k he is spotting Bill and then some, simply as a result of bad luck, even if he has a huge edge.

So if Landon wins a ton of money, it doesn’t necessarily mean he crushed Bill. If Landon loses a ton of money, it doesn’t mean he got crushed. In the end, a lot of it just comes down to luck. Whatever happens, it’s going to be really entertaining. Best of luck to both players!

this thread is poor gold. i got out of the zoom trap quite recently, i burned out several times.
keep up the good work!

m10 - Social Skills & Communication in Poker

So far in this blog I have written mostly about the logistical side of poker and improving poker players’ understanding of variance. I haven’t written yet about social skills and communication, mostly because I did not realize how important they were for poker players until this year.

As some of you may know, Poker Detox has grown dramatically since I started this blog about a year and a half ago. I have now coached 100+ players, hired coaches and research assistants to work under my supervision, and collaborated with other poker coaching companies. This means I get a lot of practice when it comes to interacting with people in the poker industry.

I really enjoy working with our players and coaches, as well as others outside of our company, and most of my interactions are positive, but I’ve also had my fair share of difficult and negative interactions. Additionally, I have had a few jobs in the real world before getting into poker, so I can compare my interpersonal experiences across industries.

Overall I have felt it is harder to communicate with people in the poker industry than any other industry I have worked in. (STEM is close, but still not as bad as poker, in my opinion.) This might sound like I’m placing the blame entirely on other people, but I’m not. My own social skills atrophied severely during the period where I was playing poker full time.

I think the reason for this is obvious: Most poker players are nerds. There is no shame in it! I am a nerd and I’m proud of it. Being a nerd only becomes a problem when you are an extremely unbalanced nerd who never talks to other people in the real world.

Look, poker is a really weird job. If you’re an online pro, you essentially never have to leave your bedroom--and a lot of poker players don’t. They go out to get groceries, and maybe to go to the gym and... that’s it. Their idea of socializing is playing video games and talking on Skype with their poker friends. That’s fine, but it’s not really socializing.

Many poker players also view themselves as outcasts who can’t function in the real world. I’ve worked with quite a few poker players who have never had a real job outside of poker. As a result, some of these players never learned how to behave in a professional environment. When they are put in a situation that demands professionalism, they tend to display immaturity and offend others without even realizing it.

It seems like most poker players want to do something after poker, whether it’s starting a business or something else entirely. And pretty much everyone wants to have a healthy social/personal life. It’s one thing to want these things. It’s another thing to actually do something about it. I think a lot of poker players know the isolation of online poker is holding them back, but at the same time they’re not doing much to solve the problem.

How Did You Get Here?

If you’re reading this as a poker player who currently feels isolated, it’s worthwhile to think about how you got into this profession in the first place. What a lonely job poker is! What other profession has no boss, no employees, no coworkers, and no customers? Do you think it’s a complete accident that you wound up here? Or is it possible that you chose this profession, at least in part because you are inherently uncomfortable with socializing, and prefer not to interact with other people if you don’t have to?

If that resonates with you, I would suggest getting a real job somewhere, even if it is a basic part-time job at a restaurant or something. Not for the money, but for the social exposure and life skills. Show up for work when you are supposed to, do what your boss tells you to do, and try to get along with the other people you work with. Do that for a year. If you can go a year without getting fired (and your boss doesn’t heave a huge sigh of relief when you tell them you are quitting), you can consider the experiment a success and move on from it. I know it probably sounds ridiculous, but I think you will find the experience provides you with extremely valuable life skills you can’t get from playing poker.

Personally, I love poker, but this career has also been a convenient way for me to avoid socializing, an activity which I find inherently uncomfortable. It’s worth noting here that some people, myself included, have severe enough anxiety/depression that the best option is to seek out professional help in the form of talk therapy, and potentially medication.

My Struggles with Mental Health

My mental health was a mess after two years of playing poker, studying obsessively, and building our company. By some standards I was doing well: I was more financially successful than I had ever been. But I was essentially a recluse, and an insomniac to boot. At the end of last year I realized I couldn’t manage it on my own anymore, and I got professional help. I invested in talk therapy and I found a medication that worked well for me. So far the results have been life-changing and I am in a much better place now. I have less anxiety, I’m more productive, I’m a lot more interested in socializing, I feel like my social/communication skills are improving, and I don’t have depressive mood crashes like I used to. Best of all, I’m sleeping well and I’m no longer completely exhausted on a daily basis.

I share this even though it is uncomfortable, because in the past I bought into the mental health stigma, and I felt like it was a sign of weakness to seek help from others. Now that I have done it successfully, I realize that this idea couldn’t be further from the truth.

Whether your social skills are just a little out of practice or severely atrophied, neglecting these weaknesses will hold you back in life. It will hurt your social life, and it will make it very hard to develop professional relationships outside of poker. I’ve even seen it squander business opportunities for some poker players within the poker industry.

Burning Bridges

Unfortunately, no one is going to tell you when you burn bridges. Instead, people will simply make a mental note that they don’t want to work with you in the future. They will not consider you for participation in study groups, or hire you for coaching positions, or invite you to come on podcasts, or let you know about a juicy private game, etc. In short, if you don’t start working on this stuff now, it will come back to haunt you, probably sooner as opposed to later.

I genuinely don't believe most poker players want to have such a solitary lifestyle. Being a poker player starts out as a convenience for anti-social types. We think, “Hey, I can get up whenever I want! And I can hang out in my underwear all day--sweet!” Then, after years of being in this career, we become so isolated that socializing goes from mildly uncomfortable to downright terrifying. This causes us to isolate ourselves even more, and it’s a vicious cycle that’s difficult to break.

Source

Breaking the Cycle

If this resonates with you, starting thinking about how you can break out of the cycle of isolation. Forget about studying poker for a few days. Consider getting a part-time job, taking classes at a university, or, in extreme situations, seeking help from a mental health professional.

I would not recommend things like joining clubs or volunteering as a start. These are great activities if you can stick to them, but unfortunately there is rarely any real consequence for not showing up. That means you’ll probably quit as soon as you don’t feel like it. It’s better to do something where you are held accountable by others for your attendance. You will have to show up even if you don't want to, and that's the point!

Poker players are obsessed with the concept of expected value. From my own experience, social skills are one of the most +EV areas a poker player can focus on, both in poker and in life. It may not be obvious from your current perspective, but you are going to have to deal with this at some point, so the best time to start is now.

If this article inspired you to change up your lifestyle, even a little bit, I’d love to hear about it. Please leave a comment below!

m11 - High Performers vs. Low Performers

Over a year ago, I wrote a post called “The Reason You’re Losing at Low Stakes,” which to this day is still the most popular post I have written. In that article, I argued that players who are losing at low stakes are breaking down at the logistical level.

As I mentioned in my most recent post, I’ve now had the opportunity to coach about one hundred students. I’ve had some students achieve incredible success, and many others achieve results that are more modest, but still respectable. At this point, I very rarely have students who completely fail, but I still see quite a few students hit a low ceiling. They usually stagnate at 100nl or 200nl. Sometimes they’ll get to the point where they can take a shot at 500nl, but they never seem to stick the landing. They always get eaten alive in the bigger games and have to drop back down to 200nl or lower for months to recover before they can take another shot.

I could say these players are failing logistically, and that would be true, but it wouldn’t be a complete explanation. The real question that has always bugged me is why. Why are some players able to keep improving, while other players stagnate?

I may never be able to fully answer this question, but over time I have gotten a lot better at recognizing the patterns of high performers and low performers. There are three major patterns I see in low performers in general. A low performer may not have all of these patterns, but they will usually have at least one that is holding them back severely.

#1 Low performers are unwilling or unable to focus on what matters. They are extremely focused on small, insignificant details and rarely interested in fundamentals or the big picture.

If you put a bunch of low performers into a study group together, usually what they will do is start randomly discussing hand histories, and it won’t be long before they get stuck debating something profoundly unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

For example, low performers might spend fifteen minutes talking about what the best value bet size on the river is in a certain hand, whereas a high performer will just say, “I don’t really care, as long as we’re betting, because the EV difference between different bet sizes will be very small--next hand.”

Low performers lack attention to detail for things that really matter: the fundamentals. They will talk for hours about obscure concepts that have no use to them, and then they'll make basic mistakes like overfolding from the blinds preflop.

It's not fun to work on the fundamentals, because the first thing a low performer has to accept is that he is not as good as he thought. Then he has to put in the boring, practical work to fix his leaks, and finally he has to hold himself accountable to making a lasting improvement. In my experience, low performers are, for whatever reason, not interested in this type of work.

#2 Low performers are uncomfortable with consistent, gradual improvement over the long term. They tend to flip flop between not changing anything at all, and changing too many things all at once.

Low performers simply cannot stick to a simple plan over the long term. There is always something that drags them off course.

It’s truly painful to watch what happens when you force a low performer to consistently show up and focus on the fundamentals for more than a month or two at a time. They will start off strong and make slow, but measurable progress. Then, suddenly, they fall apart. They might make up some excuse for why they need to take time off. Or they might convince themselves that they need to do more than what they are doing, and start changing a bunch of things. Either way, they stop doing what they’re supposed to do, and then they quickly ruin the progress they’ve worked so hard for.

High performers are more consistent. They rarely make big changes to their study routine, or take so much time off that they lose progress. They have big aspirations, but they know they can’t achieve them overnight, so they usually are focused on just getting a little bit better each week or each month.

High performers never get tired of the basics. They obsess over the fundamentals, even romanticize them at times, and tend to avoid focusing on minutiae. They understand intuitively that, as the saying goes, “once you get fancy, fancy gets broken.”

#3 Low performers don’t believe in themselves. They think that everyone else is better/smarter/luckier than they are.

This final point is a tough one to nail down. Some high performers, including myself, have a lot of confidence issues. But high performers truly want to win, and they believe that if they work hard and line up a lot of good decisions in a row, they will eventually figure out a way to win.

Low performers tend to think the opposite way. They think that no matter what they do, it’s not going to be enough. They give the players they are competing against too much respect. They always feel like they have to do more in order to win. This feeling of inadequacy causes them to do too much, which distracts them from focusing on what’s important.

A low performer who is beating 200nl thinks he has to change his whole approach in order to beat 500nl. A high performer understands that he’s probably already good enough to beat 500nl. And even if he’s not, he only needs to get a little bit better. And once he gets to 500nl, he’ll take the same approach to beating 1000nl, and so on.

Are you a high performer, or a low performer?

The point of this post is to help low performers identify the behaviors that are keeping them trapped in a low performance cycle. As you read through the examples, do you resonate more with the low performance behaviors, or the high performance behaviors?

If you identify yourself as a low performer, it might be enticing to think about why you gravitate towards these behaviors, but in the end I don’t think it really matters. All that matters is that you identify where you’re going off course. If you can do that, then you’ve already begun to break the cycle of low performance.

At that point, it’s simply a matter of asking yourself: do I really want this? Maybe the reason you’re struggling in poker is because you don’t really want to succeed. You might like the idea of being a successful poker player, but you’re not actually willing to do the work that it takes.

It’s worth mentioning that the very best poker players I know don’t really feel like they’re working when they’re improving their game. The work feels more like play to them, so they naturally work harder than everyone else. You don’t necessarily have to be this passionate about poker to make a decent living, but I think that some people who really struggle to put in the work are better off giving up poker and finding another job that is more interesting to them.

If you do decide that you really want to succeed in poker, then you have to focus on the fundamentals. You should have a very strong attention to detail, and even be obsessive at times, but don’t focus on minutiae. You should be focusing on the basics, and never lose sight of them, even when you add new things to your game.

Next, be sure to work consistently, and focus on gradual improvement. Some day, you’ll be playing games that are 10x or 100x bigger than the games you’re playing now. But the only way to get there is to get a little better each day.

Finally, you have to believe in yourself. You have to respect your opponents, but not too much, otherwise you won’t fight hard enough to win pots. You have to have faith that if you just improve a little bit each day, you will eventually become better than the regs at your current limit, and the next limit, and so on. Remember that there is no mystery to success, just consistent, gradual improvement, day in and day out.

You can’t go from being a low performer to a high performer overnight, but you may be surprised how quickly things can turn around when you stop shooting yourself in the foot. Success breeds confidence, which breeds ambition, and more success.

“In my case my appetite came with the meal. I don't think that's an expression in English but what I'm trying to say is as I got better, I got more ambitious as well.” –Magnus Carlsen

Coming from a low performer... I appreciate your posts. your insights +suaces+my coach's are helping me see the way. Can totally agree on what you said, focusing way too much on minute ev differences, or spots where its very likely 0ev/ we just got unlucky. I don't know where this feeling of having to "tear my whole game apart" every time something goes wrong comes from, but it's definitely a thing, and I am getting to the bottom of it. I think focusing more on fundamentals and the most frequent spots + focusing really hard on your leaks is the way to go. Thanks for your posts. Namaste.

Hey guys,

If you want to stay up to date with new programs I am launching, check out my Twitter @mobiuspoker.

And thanks to everyone who has liked and commented on this blog!

Patrick

This is a cool explanation, thanks a lot from newbies!

Wow - this blog is sooo nice and full of good stuff. Keep up the good work! :)

Hey guys,

I wanted to let anyone who is subbed to this blog know that I have moved it over to my website, Mobius Poker.

There are a couple new posts from this year. I hope you enjoy them.

Patrick

thanks again patrick for all of the posts and information that youve provided to the community.

Thanks a lot Patrick.