#1 Some Thoughts on Presence

Presence
The ability to be purely focused in the moment on the task at hand. Logical self-analysis, judgement, and premeditated action do not exist in this realm. You tap into instinct and either act through spontaneous creativity, or react without bias, to your environment. The processing of external factors disintegrates. Time loses relevance. Judgement loses impact. Performance loses expectation. Imagination loses binding shackles. Limits lose bounds. There is no discussion around optimal performance states. This, by definition, is the state to perform in, and the state that we should all be striving to generate everywhere. Monks will meditate for a lifetime to access this state. The structure of the modern world lends itself to falling prey to social media overstimulation, the comparison of ourselves to people internationally, the disconnected nature of our work environments, the lack of fundamental human movement patterns in our day to day lives, the absence of valued connection to our peers, etc. These, and other factors contribute to the accumulation of stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms that impede our ability to be fully present in any given moment, or specifically when under performance stress. Once a solid baseline strategy is established, I’d argue that optimizing your efficiency to tap into a flow state in sessions is going to provide a higher winrate upgrade than micro strategy upgrades. There’s a lot of players that are struggling at low to mid stakes that are strategically sound in the absence of performance pressure, but experience a complete technical breakdown when in challenging situations. Higher level strategic upgrades won’t fix them, but being able to contact your flow state will allow you to access the full scope of your technical abilities.

The Meaning Of Dance
Traipsing across the sandbar, the fierce sun peeking through the cirrocumulus clouds and penetrating the sleepy motion of the waves. Frigatebirds patrolling overhead. The palms waving graciously from the shore to the passers-by. Wading through the ankle-deep water between respites of islands of sand, she takes my hand and encourages us to float forwards, escaping the small island town in the growing distance. Moving further away from any semblance of humanity and embracing the natural world, save for the few other people on their own pilgrimage. I close my eyes and embrace her. Finally, the chemicals start their infusion and we step through the boundary into our augmented reality. The spot speaks to us, and we settle down. As we move towards the gentle descent into the waters, the ocean gradually consumes us. Shallow enough to stand, deep enough to be influenced by the currents.

I have never entered the world of dance before, not even been provided the opportunity to taste it. An entire fundamental artform I had never even experienced. Me, and a professional ballet dancer, someone so energetically driven by movement, the fundamental pillar in which her experiences itself are parsed through. Isolated from the judgement of strangers and the noise of the man-made world, and the presence of a gifted teacher imposing no judgement of her own, she monologued with great intensity about dance improvisation. It’s an expression of pure spontaneous creativity into the medium of movement. We construct ideas in the mind about how we want to move, act, or react in the moment and then manifest that imagination into the physical world. We’re transforming an abstract concept into reality. The movement that we observe when someone is expressing the thoughts of their imagination is never isolated. It’s a rolling projection of the mental reel that is forever shifting, morphing, melting, bubbling in the mind. Just understanding this makes observing dance a more engaging experience. Imagine, that solo improv is the manifestation of spontaneous creativity into the physical world, then sharing improv with another person, leading and responding to their movement, which is really leading and responding to the manifestation of their imagination, this is the only way that two people can fully link their consciousness together and share their creative space. I’m generating imagination with her. I have real company in my own headspace.

Mistakes Do Not Exist In This Dojo
There are no mistakes when improvising. I don’t mean to say that you can’t make a mistake because we’re in a loving, forgiving environment where nobody will criticize you. Being in a place where you are allowed to make a mistake is very different from being in a place where the entire concept of “mistake” ceases to exist. It literally doesn’t belong. I will use a musical example here. In the context of functional harmony, there are chord progressions that are outlined that are known to work in the context of a scale, and there are intervals that are known to work well under the context of a chord. Music theory only exists to retroactively explain why certain combinations of sounds work together, not tell you that “you should do this or else”. The commonly thrown around phrase is: “Music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive”. Functional harmony is the framework that most contemporary music is predicated on, because it’s a collection of bullet-proofed guides that have been tested over time to sound good, but the reality is that you cannot make a mistake by deviating from the confines of functional harmony rules, because every single note can work with every single chord, it’s just a matter of context. What is played before that chord? What follows that chord? How is the chord played? These contribute to the emotional expression of the voicings. Something very far removed from functional harmony may sound very aggressive, brittle, spicy, dissonant, but never incorrect or wrong. It’s just a matter of the context in which it’s played. When improvising, you cannot make a mistake: understand this fundamental concept and it releases self-judgement of performance.

All improv is fundamentally understanding that there’s an infinite number of variables that can be manipulated, and you have total discretion with how and why you play with them, purely as a means of self-expression. Anything internal or external that judges this process, impedes the pathway from unconstrained imagination to the processing of how abstract concepts would materialize in the physical form to the execution of that manifestation. The process is sensitive to disturbance.

Movement Therapy
Pressure through our palms, but light on the tips of our fingers. Eyes wide shut. Our shoulders caress each other for a brief moment, before I pull back, barely kissing our fingertips. A new sentence is written. The dialogue, shared in that moment, baptized by the glaring sun, witnessed by the frigatebirds, embraced by the ocean currents. Just for a moment in time, we created a moment of perfection.

Why was this the most present I’ve ever been? Well for a start, I was removed from the judgement of third-party eyes (not really, there were other people around but they were isolated in their own bubbles; nobody was paying attention to us). We were floating in the shallow waters off a sandbar on a remote tropical island. I was with a highly talented dancer, gifted at teaching (this could trigger insecurity about your own performance in a lot of people, but a great teacher expresses an energy that is absent from critical judgement). They provided a safe, nurturing environment that gives breathing room for you to grow your roots and to play around with concepts. A truly great teacher extends their hand of trust to the student. The teacher doesn’t need to direct energy towards a motif that isn’t working for the student, because they trust that the student has the self-awareness to recognize and recalibrate on their own. And finally, the water creates a physical barrier between my head (my mind) and my body. It removes the element of judgement of how my body looks when I direct it to move a certain way, but due to my inexperience, I can’t masterfully manipulate my limbs in the way that I wanted to express them. You’re reduced to pure feeling with how you move your body, the visual element is eliminated. The water also provides a fantastic training environment as the effects of gravity change, and poor footwork is much more forgiving.

All of these elements are reductive in nature. They’re not adding anything to my environment to allow me to be present. I have, and always will have the capacity to access presence, but we have countless barriers that we construct, through traumas/projections/insecurities that block our pathways to access presence. To access this type of presence in poker, we need to be able to cultivate the environment, the teacher (this is our relationship with how we communicate with ourselves), and the water (how can we focus our energy on the intentions of our actions without judgement over the execution).

The Elements We Need
The environment is going to be the structure of your life surrounding poker. Having a clean work environment, the big three: diet, sleep nutrition, organizing your pre-game and post-game routine, streamlining your study process, etc. Mastering these variables removes unnecessary pressures that may affect you in game. Allowing your performance to be capped because of life tasks you were too unstructured to finish is a frankly stupid and easily preventable way to hinder yourself. Planning and deliberate execution over these variables should eliminate these facets of your daily life to seep in and distract you while playing. It’s going to be more subtle than “I didn’t tidy my room and therefore I am going to be thinking about this while I am contemplating a river bluffcatch”, but it’s going to add a low level, almost undetectable stress which most likely will manifest in exaggerating the intensity of the default performance leaks you naturally veer towards.

The teacher is going to be how we communicate with ourselves internally with regards to our performance in poker. Our internal dialogue in poker is a reflection of how we talk to ourselves in all fundamental aspects of our lives when we are placed under performance stress, and these responses are going to be fairly consistent in all industries we find ourselves in. If you follow the breadcrumbs, you will find that they stem from childhood traumas that reinforce inaccurate belief systems, which express themselves as specific performance leaks (topic for another time). The teacher must never speak to their student in a way where the student feels pressured to perform, or else. A student who feels unsafe to make a mistake will break under pressure and revert to their baseline tendencies which results in performance breakdown. The judgemental internal voice that controls us when we play, that beats on us when we make a bluff that doesn’t go through, that scolds us when we misclick, or calibrate incorrectly vs a certain player, it prevents us from growing from the mistakes that we make. When the dialogue shifts, and we heal the relationship with ourselves, we communicate with our internal voice without the need for pressure or threat, as we allow ourselves to have agency to play in our sandbox, and to let go expectations of performance, for if we make a mistake, our internal voice fully trusts that we can recognize it and learn from it.

The water represents our ability to filter our actions from the judgements of those around us. You wouldn’t believe how many people have made calls or folds based on their fear of judgement from those around them. “I’ll look so stupid if I call and I’m wrong” to mind. I doubt many people believe that they’ve made such a rationalization in their history of playing, but I’m confident that it’s a lot more common than people will lead you on to believe. I’ve definitely done this many times. For me the dialogue that resonates with my performance imbalances looks more like “I will look so sick if this bluff gets through/I will look so sick if my wild bluffcatch is correct”. The judgement of peers can manifest in many ways than just this example. It can lead players to feel pressured to play at certain stakes, higher or lower than they should be, how they should study or how much time they devote to studying, how much volume they should play, and countless ways that this can manifest in real time in game. This is related to your connection to “the teacher” in the sense that your judgement of how others perceive you is a reflection of your own projections, and may be completely disconnected from the reality of how somebody actually feels. If we relax the need to prescribe value to what other people think of us when we are performing, no, what we are projecting that people are thinking of us when we are performing, then the remainder of our wavelength is dominated by the clarity of our pure thoughts, and not polluted by judgements.

Thanks
Thank you, Joseph, for introducing me to the concept of presence, and to Jason Su for illuminating the depth of this performance rabbit hole. Our best state is eternally dormant within us, we just need the means to access it. The path for exactly how this looks will shift from person to person, but you will find what resonates with you as long as your macro compass is calibrated towards seeking the key to accessing your personal presence.

At the climax of the novel, the narrative had run its course. As we transition from water to land, I’m left with nothing more than a memory. The nature of movement is that it only exists in the moment. I sit down, the tide slowly creeps towards us, a gentle reminder that our time is coming to a close. I only had a memory of the moment to look back on, but this may be the most beautiful gift I could ask for. Whenever I want to recount what true presence feels like, I have this memory. One of, hopefully many perfect moments in the timeline of my life, but this is the one that I will choose to think about for now. Thank you, Hummingbird, for making a dancing man out of me.

Def subbed... I've also have a blog about "invisibility" so I know full well what are you talking about.
Best of luck

I mean,,,You would have succeeded even if you had chosen writing/literature as your profession.
Its incredibly good reading. Thanks and GL :)

What up Arya! Great read so far. Keep it going, I'll definitely be following!

#2 Some Thoughts on Tilt Resistance

When I first moved up to 1kNL, I ran good for my first week which allowed me to immediately establish myself as a regular there. I had made a lot of strategy upgrades in the previous few months, combined with the best consistency to my grinding schedule, and for the first time I truly felt like I had a strong understanding of the game. I quickly acclimatised to 1kNL and could show up and play my A-game day in, day out. As someone with a plethora of mental performance issues, this was massive for me. I was fully locked in and printing money, and got to a point where I actively didn’t want to break the cycle because of not wanting to drop off, so my productivity was stacking over itself.

All well and good, until some logistical issues with the site I was playing on prevented me from continuing to play there for the time being. Wanting to continue grinding, I accepted this L and moved some money onto Pokerstars to grind 200z. I became at peace knowing that the zoom pool was much tougher and my winrate was sure to be lower than the 10BB+/100 I had established for the last half a year, but was confident that I had a positive winrate there and the higher volume and rakeback volume challenge offer would serve to mitigate the winrate loss.

What ended up actually happening was I played and did fine for the first week or so, and then fell completely off the rails and watched my winrate nosedive. I ended up playing some of the worst poker I had played in 2021 and after only a few weeks abandoned my attempt at trying to establish myself as a reg there. I was shellshocked as to how the mental resilience I assumed I had built up around me was ineffective when I was playing 5x lower stakes, and I sat on this thought for a long time.

I realized that mental resilience is far more specific than I had previously thought. You don’t play a format, develop tilt resistance and then become impervious to any form of mental game stressor in anything poker related. The mental resilience you develop is so specific to the exact format that you play, and it doesn’t translate all that well when different variables change. I developed, not a mental resilience to poker, but a resilience to 4 tabling anonymous 1kNL NLH 6max no ante reg tables. I then moved to 3-4 tabling know pool 200z and expected to be as resilient. That’s like a powerlifter starting BJJ training and being surprised that he’s gassing out because his “fitness” is high. No, his fitness is high for the very specific discipline that he’s trained himself to become efficient in.

I would get tilted over very basic things that would never anger me at 1kNL. I would get paranoid about the fact that I was playing against regs in a known pool and started pre-emptively adjusting my strategy in uncalibrated ways that made my winrate suffer, and then would stretch to make crazy assumptions about what regs were doing because of previous history where I would make ridiculous bluffs/bluffcatches. All of this on top of the fact that you need to build intensity slowly to acclimatise to it, otherwise it will overwhelm you. Going from 4 reg tables to 3 zoom tables is a huge jump in intensity and I frankly over estimated my ability to perform at a high level without conditioning to that. I got paranoid about regs making specific adjustments over me because I was used to playing in an anonymous pool where this wasn’t really possible. I just never had the mental muscle for that specific skill trained because my environment didn’t have the equipment needed to train against that specific threat.

Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to developing tilt resistance in the specific format that you’re playing in other thank putting the reps in. This applies even more if you’re moving not to another site/format/structure, but to a different game type, for example cash game reg transitioning to tournaments, or NLH reg transitioning to PLO. What’s the end goal here? I would define it as “holistic resistance”, this is where you have built format specific resistance in a wide array of formats that you start to develop an overall resistance to any new stimulus. The guy who only grinds Stars 100z and jumps into PLO will have to put in a high number of reps to start to develop mental resilience, but the seasoned pro who is adept at NLH both online and live, cash and tournaments, and PLO, will be much quicker to adapt when they decide to pick up HORSE.

This is not to say that you should push yourself to diversify formats for the purpose of developing holistic resilience. You only need to be resilient in the formats that you care about. This is just to bring awareness over the effects that can happen when transitioning sites/formats/game types/shifting between live and online, so that one can plan around this effect taking place and ease into a new format with less expectation.

Mental balance aint that easy. Sometimes one pretend that is on control, but suddenly something hit you on a different manner and you feel human again. Nice insight, hadnt thought on that before

#3 Some Thoughts on Fish

There’s only one type of professional in most performance industries: the individual that maximizes skill. Let’s look at chess for example. You’re judged by your ELO and that’s the metric you’re optimizing for. As your ELO increases, the calibre of player you are required to battle increases. You are therefore rewarded by increasing your skill level again and raising your ELO more. There’s no incentive to playing people much worse than you.

In poker however, there’s two types of professionals: The individual that strives to maximize skill and the individual that strives to maximize money. It seems like they both lead to each other, and to a certain extent that’s true, but as you scale to high stakes there starts to be a divergence between the two. Spend a minute to clarify if your long-term goals in poker align with the former or the latter individual. Do you want to get to 10/20 NLH on Stars and battle with the best on the daily? Do you want to grind the high roller circuit? Do you want to be playing 200ABI+ online? Do you want to travel the world getting access to soft private/livestream games? Do you want to maximize your hourly while optimizing your work/life balance? Do you want to grind midstakes for that easy winrate while you focus on your true passion in life?

There is some percentage of people out there who have an insane drive to be the best (technically) in the world. That’s not me. I’m way too lazy, I don’t have the work ethic or care to compete with this small group of sickos. It neither aligns with my natural character strengths nor does it align with my interests. I am interested in making stupid money though, and I believe the most important difference is maximizing your time and effort vs fish, as this is where the bulk of the money-making prospects come from.

Definition of a fish: VPIP/PFR gap > 14 OR VPIP > 40

Fish Axiom 1: Players overestimate their winrate vs other regs and underestimate their winrate vs fish.

Ask your friends how much they think they’re making vs fish compared to regs. I think they’ll say 3-5x more. Interesting how live players I’ve spoken to think they have a larger edge vs regs than online players, but also tend to game select better than some online regs I’ve known. I’ve even heard people say they make more money from regs than fish because “you can predict what a reg is going to do easier than a fish” (although now that I think about it, I probably just heard this from the poker subreddit). The reality of the situation is very different. You make anywhere from 10-200x from a fish than a reg you’re slightly beating. This may seem extreme but I have data to back it up.

This is a database from a winning 200z player. I don’t know who the player is but it’s landed in my lap. At a winrate of 7.6BB/100, this is one of the top players in the pool, a very worthy winrate that most players would only dream of attaining. What’s illuminating about this is the breakdown of this players winrate by the number of fish at the table. On tables with no fish, even one of the best regs in the player pool is winning at 1BB/100, and you are most likely not THE strongest reg in your player pool, so a cool simplification we can take away from this is your winrate vs regs is breakeven. Once we add only one fish to the table, his winrate increases to almost 5BB/100, the golden winrate that online players consider “making it” at any limit. 2 fish and your winrate is double digits and then past that it just gets ridiculous (his winrate dropping with 5 fish is due to sample size).

This photo caused an immediate pivot in how I approached poker. I stopped reg battling overnight when I saw this filter and realized how fruitless that pursuit is. Now that I’ve established why we want to focus on quantity of fish, let’s talk about quality of fish.

Fish Axiom 2: Players underestimate the effect of VPIP on the winrate of fish.

Fish who play more hands lose more money. Shock horror. What’s the most surprising is the winrate at the extreme ends. Over 70VPIP and you’re making insane money from these players, but a nitfish is actually losing at a clip that isn’t even that incentivized to bumhunt for.

Fish Axiom 3: Players undervalue the importance of site, table and time selecting.

Now that we have established why we want to play with more fish and better quality fish, the priority for most players will be optimizing their logistics to gaining access to the most fish. Site selection is crucial as there’s a large spread between % of fish on Pokerstars zoom to Bovada reg tables. Zoom is also not an optimal formate because you can’t table select to select for only the games with the most fish. Certain app games may be even softer for people who have access to them, as well as most live games and especially private games. To put it bluntly, if you’re playing on Stars or PartyPoker, it might be prudent to put some time into finding better games to play in (this advice doesn’t apply to people playing 50NL or lower as there is such a significant % of fish at low stakes that it doesn’t really matter where you play). Once we have found a soft arena to play in, being diligent with tables selection is the next variable to optimize for. Very simply, this is immediately leaving when there are no fish on a table. Finally, figuring out what time to play has the best fish ratio can be important, but balancing between playing peak times and a sustainable life balance is going to be most valuable.

Here's a practical example. You sit down at 200NL with two 40VPIP fish. We’re breakeven vs the 3 regs, and each fish is losing at 40BB/100, so we have 80BB/100 split between 4 regs, which is ~20BB/100 for each reg (this number will be slightly lower due to rake and the fish eating up some % of this winrate). The exact BB/100 isn’t important but we can predict safely that our winrate at this table should be ~15BB/100. We also sit down at 1kNL with one 20VPIP fish. That’s a winrate of -18BB/100 split between 5 regs which is around 3BB/100 each. In this example it should highlight that playing 5x lower with good quality fish will actually yield an hourly higher than playing in poor quality high stakes games.

As an aside, your position vs a fish on any given table will have a significant impact on the % winrate from the fish that you can realize, but this is very hard to know so I’m not considering it for factoring this in for the sake of simplicity.

All of this is important to know, but ineffective to implement if you can’t identify fish effectively. These are the data points I use to identify fish.

Hard tells:
• Preflop limp
• Cold calling SB
• Cold calling 3bets
• Short stacking
• Flop/turn/river donks
• Unusually large/small 3bets
• Buying the button (can be a soft tell on a site like Bovada which can glitch and make lots of people buy the button)

Soft tells:
• Cold calling CO/EP vs open
• Opening 3x (only at higher stakes)
• Use of emojis/text chat
• Showing hole cards voluntarily

If a player exhibits any hard tell, I will auto label them as a fish. I would need to see multiple soft tells to label a player as a fish. If I have one soft tell, I will assume trending fish and modify my play slightly to factor that possibility in. Of course, I also defined fish at the start of the article, but these are all ways of identifying fish before we have a sample size for VPIP/PFR.

Using these tells will have a positive influence on your winrate. It’s not time efficient to sit at every table for 100 hands before you are able to identify fish by their VPIP, but using some of these hard tells we can sometimes identify fish before we’ve even played a single hand.

Conclusion
• Identify that your incentive in poker is to maximize winrate, and you will achieve that by focusing on fish rather than regs.
• Understand why we want to play with a higher quantity of fish.
• Understand why we want to play with a higher quality of fish.
• Understand how to order our logistics to maximize our availability to finding fish.
• Understand how to identify fish as quickly as possible.
???
Profit.

This totally makes sense and might also be the reason a lot of regs are stuck at the lower stakes. They keep battling with each other in 3 bet pots, turn barrels etc while more pragmatic players just don’t care and focus on optimizing and moving up.

Perhaps a good heuristic would be to not focus to much on the regs and at least 1 fish needs to be at the table. Preferable 2.

I wholeheartedly regret making this post about fish and have had people DMing me to remove it. Realistically, there's not many eyeballs here so it's here to stay.

great post OP. I would also chime in a bit on datapoints of fishes.

The location where you sit vs the fish also directly influences your winrate. The better the seat, the higher the winrate.

1) the best seats to sit are directly to his left, and second best seat is two seats to his left.
given fishes tendencies to limp, we can isolate them and play pots with them. and when they raise, we can cold call IP and play pots with them.

I cannot remember exactly, but i think it was a difference of 5-7BB for having the optimal seat vs fish compared to others locations.

2) the 3rd best seat is to the direct right of the fish. mostly in SV vs BB scenarios, where you can play HU pots with them

#4 Some Thoughts on Prison Systems

I never had a criminal streak in me, at most some juvenile delinquent tendencies. The prospect of prison time was never a concern growing up, but I would regularly fantasize about serving a life sentence with no parole. Of course, I never dreamt about the type of crime I would need to commit to earn this reward, but I would lie in bed and think about all of the possibilities I could explore when every functional restriction is imposed on my life.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

How is it possible to convey so much meaning from a six-letter story? Restrictions counterintuitively create an environment conducive to creative expansion. I don’t know for sure why this works, but I can attest to the efficacy of restrictions. Imagine yourself placed in front of a number of types of paper and canvases. You have multiple pencils, coloured pencils, paints, charcoal and other mediums at your disposal. Make something. You would sit there, motionless, having to decide what to draw out of the infinite possibilities, what mediums to use, how you will stylize your work, what colour palate you will use etc. It’s energy intensive just to make these choices, and even when we make these choices and start creating, the answer to every single one of the above questions is a form of self-imposed restriction.

The fundamental formula for becoming elite at a skill is: (Pick something niche → practice it with intent and purpose → repeat for reps) ← Iterate this as long as you need to get to the level that you want to. If you are not improving, you’re failing at one or more of these nodes. You either aren’t practicing something specific enough to get mastery at the skill you really want, you aren’t questioning and redirecting your learning process with self-awareness, or you aren’t putting in enough reps to materialize improvement.

“I want to get good at drawing” is an acceptable dream, but it’s not particularly useful. “I want to get better at life drawing” provides more specificity. Maybe you struggle at drawing hands, so you set yourself the constraint of drawing hands in specific poses every day for a month. You’ve picked something niche with a defined reason and repeated it for reps. Chances are you’ll probably get good at drawing hands.

As much as I hated the school system, as I was tailing the end of my secondary education, it dawned upon me that I was about to be thrust into the real world with no predetermined routine and it terrified me. I would dream about giving everything up: material possessions, friendships, family, and aspirations in the outside world. To enter a system where every facet of my day is under the control of officers dictating when I wake up, sleep, work and rest, would free my mind of all responsibility and I would finally be able to think in the purest sense. How much work I could get done, what books would I read, I would learn like no man I know has learnt. It’s obviously childish and impractical, as the reality of the prison system is a far cry from the intellectual paradise I’m painting it to be.

Poker is an entrepreneurial pursuit. We are our own boss (single mums on Facebook wished they were us). As such, I’ve found myself as an adult in the real world in an industry that has zero imposed structure on my life. I have no time I need to be awake for, no time I need to clock in, nobody to check in on me to see if I’ve studied or played enough during the week. Everything is up in the air, and the responsibility falls on my shoulders to bear the burden of imposing structural restrictions on my life to ensure that I can perform efficiently.

Maybe one day I will become a lifer who gets his dream fulfilled, but for now the juvenile delinquent inside me remains dormant, locked up behind bars. For now, the best way for me to fulfill this structural desire is to implement it in poker.

#5 Some Thoughts on Reaching Out for Help

I commonly hear from low stakes players, once they hear that they should be surrounding themselves with better players than themselves and not be stuck in microstakes echo chambers, is that they aren’t able to provide value to players that are much better than them, so they don’t know how to connect with people that could help them improve.

I reached out a low stakes player because I liked the questions he was asking in a Discord poker group. After some conversations, I realized that these same questions about networking with high stakes players were cropping up again and I thought I’d address a misconception.

You’re not going to, and should not expect to be able to provide (strategoic) value to a higher stakes player, this is why you’re reaching out to them, however you would be surprised how much people are willing to help others that reach out, provided:
• You are genuinely curious.
• You ask smart questions that you actually want answers for – I lose interest in speaking with people (this happens a lot in social settings) where people are looking to validate existing thoughts rather than being genuinely open.
• You are not generally unpleasant to interact with.
• You are malicious in your intent to maximize information acquisition and disappear.

I hope you can see that the bar is surprisingly low. Basically, have actual questions you want real answers to, and don’t be a cunt. If you can manage this, you can reach out to players better than you for advice. The worst that happens is you get no response when extending yourself to someone. You’re pretty much positive freerolling every person you attempt to network with.

The reason why I am happy to engage with people that reach out to me is partly because I love to see people who exude passion and are proactive with their personal development, but the main reason is that I’m vetting people who reach out for advice as potential candidates to be in my inner network. That is actually the secret benefit that I am gaining when someone reaches out for advice. I lose no EV by answering questions from those who choose to reach out to me, but I gain the potential to meet people that we can provide each other with long-term value. Notice how by reaching out, both parties are actually freerolling EV? You’re perpetuating a positive sum game when you ask for help. You should probably do it more.

If anyone who has read this has any questions, my inbox is open. Feel free to message me on Discord at Arya#4100 or my Twitter @Iranian_96

emsterdad I'm one step ahead of you bro

#6 Some Thoughts on Daily Routines

I’ve cycled through many types of routines to facilitate my growth and bombed hard on most of them, but found short term success in a few. I’m sharing my macro ideas on the fundamentals of how to structure a routine to drive goals forward, not so much on the micros of what to include in your routine, as that is going to be quite personal.

Progress
Progress can be thought of as a vector measurement, with a direction and magnitude. Think about yourself at the centre point of concentric circles. Your goals are at a specific point on the circumference of these circles. Your short-term goals are on the closer circles and your long-term goals are points along the outside circles. The idea of making progress requires two components to be aligned: Calibrating your direction so you’re moving accurately towards your goals, and increasing the magnitude towards your goals.

Direction
When your short-term and long-term goals are aligned, progress will look like this, and your progress will compound momentum towards your long-term goals.

When your short-term and long-term goals are misaligned, you will end up making a lot of lateral movement which will stunt your momentum and create unnecessary friction towards your long-term goals.

Magnitude
Most poker players I know at my level work harder than me. You can work 10x harder than me, if you’re not moving in the direction of your goals then it’s all wasted energy, no matter how hard you grind.

Once you’ve calibrated the direction you want to move in and you’ve aligned your goals, then the primary focus should be on increasing your vector magnitude (doing more of what you’re currently doing). All of these integrated plus time guarantees success.

Micro routine → Short-term goals → Long-term goals

The purpose of daily/weekly routines is to direct us towards our short-term goals. The purpose of our short-term goals is to direct us to our long-term goals. It’s counter-productive for us to have short-term goals that don’t align with our long-term goals in the same way that it’s counter-productive for us to have daily habits that don’t align with our short-term goals.

Why have a routine?
Imagine you go to the gym with the goal of getting “fit”. You have no program in place to guide you towards the exercises you should be doing, you aren’t measuring what weight you’re lifting or paying attention to recovery times/reps/sets. You’re a slave to your emotions; you do whatever exercises you feel like doing, you lift as much weight as you feel like doing as you leave when you feel like it. It’s impossible for this person to excel in fitness with such a lack of structure. You don’t have short-term, long-term or routine integrated. Someone else starts going to the gym in the same situation as you. Their long-term goal is to compete is to compete in powerlifting competitions. Their short-term goals are specific numbers on their squat, bench and deadlift. Their weekly routine has their lifting and dietary programming integrated. Everything is aligned and provided they don’t deviate they are sure to succeed (within reason; in this example there is likely to be some type of genetic limit that can prevent someone from being world class).

Limbic Friction
A term coined by Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman, he defines it as “…that gap between the logical cerebral cortex and the emotional limbic system – between wanting to do a thing, and actually doing that thing”. A great consequence of locking into a pre-programmed micro routine is that it helps to minimize limbic friction. I’ve personally made fantastic progress in the gym in the last 9 months, more than I’ve made in the previous 9 years, and it’s all thanks to my programming. I had every single workout programmed 6 months into the future, so I knew exactly what exercises, what reps/sets and how much weight I would be lifting months down the line. The only energy I need to expend is the decision to get to the gym, once I’m there I know I can just switch to execution mode. Minimizing limbic friction is the secret key to creating a routine that you can stick to even when you’re not feeling like it.

Structuring a Routine
This is going to be highly individualized as what you do in the micro is going to calibrate to your short-term goals, but as far as structuring the day goes, I’ve personally found that trisecting it in such a fashion works well for me:

Morning routine → Work → Play

The idea is that my morning routine is purely execution based, with no room for negotiation and as the day progresses, the segments become more relaxed and creative. My work is time blocked so I know when I start/finish, but as to how I spend that time on my work, I’m more flexible. When work is finished for the day, I can switch of and do pretty much whatever I’d like to.

While I think this structure works for a lot of people, I’ve actually switched to a new model that I’ve found increases productivity for me.

Work → Errands → Play

I’m playing on a North American site so I have two options for programming my work slots around peak times: Play late night sessions or wake up early and play morning sessions. I choose the latter because I know I’m more productive in the mornings and it doesn’t interfere with my social life as much. I wake up, and pretty much immediately make myself a coffee and start my session. A great Tweet from Alex Hormozi that I recently found, and was actually the catalyst for me trying this is: “How to get more done: Eliminate the gap between waking up and working”. This has worked well for me, as someone who is trying to increase his magnitude, it positions me more towards a “shut the fuck up and just get it done” mindset.

Let me know if this resonates with you and what part of Micro routine → Short-term goals → Long-term goals you struggle with the most as a poker player.

Relevant update as I was performing poorly at 200-500NL just over a month ago.

Back in my zone, with my first ever 2kNL shot take going well.

Heading to EPT Barcelona today and weekly blog posts will resume when I'm back.

Have fun!

EPT Barcelona

Fired most of the €1k and €2k tourneys early on. Actually fired 6 bullets in the ESPT €1k main, bubbled 2 of the bullets just before the end of the day and bricked early in the money on day 2. 2 bullets in the EPT €5k ME, busted 2nd hand of day 2.

Cash games were dogshit, didn't play much but mainly played 10/20. Took my first ever shot at 20/50 which was an abolutely electric experience.

Photo was taken after doubling up vs a recreational. Won and lost multiple €10k pots but ended up -€6k for the session.

First ever live series in the books. Back to my regular schedule.

#7 Some Thoughts on Overthinking

My mind is plagued by endless chatter in its default mode. I’ve always seen it as a crutch, yet also as a lesser of two evils. I always thought to myself that I was blessed that it was better to overthink than to be a non-thinker. From my assumptions that there was a correlation between how hard you think and intelligence. As a general sweeping statement, most of you who read this, as poker players, trend towards the analytical archetype which easily falls prey to over-analysis.

The crucial error that I made in my adolescence was ascribing value to overthinking, which made it impossible to ascend that paradigm when I actively sought value in holding on to it. When viewed from a balanced archetype, it becomes clear how overthinking is hindering performance, as the reality of the overthinkers mind is that he has no more clear thoughts than the balanced thinker, but that the additional thoughts he has is noise that masks the quality of his balanced decisions.

I’ve had this awareness over my poker mind for a while now, however this pattern stems to all aspects of my life. My trigger for writing this article was just last night when I texted a girl and she sent back a text with a smiley face emoji and I caught myself neurotically trying to decipher what the subtext of that emoji was for 5 minutes straight. Absolute insanity. The dating equivalent of random combo counting in poker. Ascending through the levels is learning what thoughts require energy directed to them, and delegating as little energy to anything else, as by logic these thoughts will not serve your purpose.

Identify what your primary datapoints for navigating a hand are and develop the skill of blocking out any thoughts that don’t fit in that category. Either those thoughts are useless and would have impeded your ability to coherently think through the hand, or those thoughts were actually useful and you should be integrating them into your standard thought process.

I was overthinking writing this whole article.

something i've always cringed a little at is when people say "i'm an overthinker" but they say it with a huge sense of pride, like bragging. they say it like it's strictly a good thing. it bothers me b/c a real overthinker would realize there's a lot of downside that comes with the territory!

#8 Some Thoughts on Harry Potter

There’s one scene in Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone that stands out to me, and that’s when the trio jump through the down the hatch after enchanting the three headed dog. They land in a pile of devils’ snare, a deadly vine that strangulates its victims and tightens as they struggle until they are crushed to death. Hermione, having the intellect to recall information on devils’ snare and know the solution of how to defeat it, relaxes until the vines release her and she sinks through. She’s escaped and now tells the others to relax in order for them to be freed. Harry, who is able to function well under pressure, can receive the advice and relax, freeing him also. Ron on the other hand is under such pressure that he won’t allow himself to relax. He struggles harder and harder, saved only by Hermione.

Urgency puts blinders on your field of vision and convinces your brain that the only way to get yourself out of your dilemma is by planting your foot on the accelerator and driving straight ahead until you lose control and crash.

Urgency kills your ability to access higher datapoints.
Urgency kills your ability to stay sensitive to shifting your strategy on the fly.
Urgency kills your consistency to your schedule.
Kill urgency.

Urgency comes from the lens which you view your progress from becoming distorted. You set an expectation of where you feel you deserve to be, somewhere higher than your current position. To attain your expectation, you believe that you can achieve it by brute forcing your way through your decisions.

Solution? Recalibrate the expectation, refocus on the process. At least one of the above is out of alignment.

You have a warped expectation: “I need to win $x in y time/I need to get to high stakes NOW” (if you meditate on this goal, you will usually find it’s unreasonable).

You are not focused on the process to attain your goal. This comes in two flavours: You lack structure in your process, or you lack consistency to stick to your process. Identify which one resonates more with your sticking point and correct accordingly.

From my experience I’ve found that there’s one variable that causes urgency that has to be addressed directly: financial stress. If you are struggling at midstakes, teetering on the edge of burnout because you need to grind more hands to pay rent, your number one goal should be to do whatever it takes to remove this financial barrier. Anything before this is risking wasting your time. Get a part time job that covers your bills, move to a cheaper apartment, break up with your girlfriend (half joking), see if you can schedule a loan with your poker friends. Trust me, it impedes performance in ways you can’t even see. I played some of my worst poker at 1kNL between March-May 2022 on my own roll because I adopted a stupidly high-risk bankroll management strategy while my technical strategy already has me playing around 115BB/100 standard deviation. It was insanity.

This post was inspired by a member of the Run It Once community who reached out to me over Discord DM. If you have any topics that you would find interesting for me to talk about, or you are a struggling player who wants to reach out to someone for advice, my DM’s are open.
Instagram: @Iranian96
Twitter: Iranian96
Discord: Arya#4100

#9 Some Thoughts on Reaching Out for Help Part 2

I want to take you back to September of 2020. It’s already been many months of extreme performance cycles, stuck in an insanity simulation. Illusions of breakthroughs that blow away only to reveal twice as many breakdowns. It was here that I had reached my lowest point in poker. I was coming close to the end of my rope. There were many issues that I could point to but they all stemmed from my living situation. Being around people who actively root against you in poker was wasting me away. Peeking through the window of success when I grinded away in Greece two months beforehand, I felt energized coming back to England as I could see the path to high stakes for the first time. I had this potential energy that I knew I had to act on otherwise it would dissipate, but I was paralyzed. I had little money and my head was down.

I had a call with Nick Howard which changed my entire mode of thinking. If you want to listen to the Beyond Poker episode where he talks with co-host Wayne Yap about this conversation we had, here’s the link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6J9PEpON9sIrshLxrKgiDl?si=c85e8105602945ca

The cliffnotes are that I was desperate to fix my situation but I was limited in my ability to leverage the tools at my disposal. In Nick’s words, I wasn’t being “resourceful” enough. He questioned whether I had actually exhausted all of my options, and challenged me further when I said I had.

“Have you asked every single person in your network for help?”

Mind blown. Looking back, this call was one of the core growth moments for me as a poker player and as a human. I had rationalized not reaching out to so many people under the assumption that they would not want to help for whatever reason.

I needed money so I needed to ask someone to give me money, and provide some value in return. I could provide value by giving a decent return on investment and as long as the deal is good and my breakdown for how I was going to use the money was solid, it would be unreasonable to assume that I would have no takers if I were to propose that to the hundreds of people in my network. How blind I was at the time to how simple this proposal actually is. Here’s a link to the original proposal I made in Detox.

Less than one minute later, this happened:

When you reach out for help, be more generous than you’d think in giving value back.

Be creative in the ways that you will ask for help, and the ways that you can find to provide value tot hose who choose to help.

Be resourceful with how many people you reach out to.

Have a plan of action, put it in words and stick to it as if there were a Smith and Wesson pointed at your family.

Reach out for help. You never know what might happen.

#10 Some Thoughts on Compound Interest

Iman Gadzhi – 22 years old. Net worth of $25 Million.
Alex Hormozi – 33 years old. Net worth of $100 Million.
Mr. Beast – 24 years old. Net worth of $56 Million.

What do all of these people have in common?

They’re all young and incredibly successful at what they do, probably a lot better than you in your given industry, but not 10,000x better. So how do they have 10,000x what most other guys hustling at their age have?

• Relentless work ethic
• High discipline
• Aggressively reinvesting in themselves

The first two points have been touched on by many people, but these don’t answer the question of how these entrepreneurs managed to scale exponentially faster than the competition, and why they’ve ended up with disproportionately more.

To understand this, we need to understand the value of compound interest and reinvesting. I’ve created a simple visual model to understand this:

Person X makes $4k/month with $1k expenses, which leaves $3k disposable income. Interest is based on 9.5% annual (S&P 500 over last 20 years).

Example 1: Saving nothing.

Save nothing, have nothing. This is your impulsive friend who lives paycheck to paycheck and wastes their money at the end of every month. Don’t be that friend.
Total: $0

Example 2: Saving $1k per month, no investment.

Saving a fixed amount of money monthly results in linear savings growth. A big difference between saving a % of your income and not saving at all.
Total: $121,000

Example 3: Saving $1k per month, with simple interest.

This illustrates how ineffective linear interest is. As you can see, we’re making a pitiful $950 more than without interest.
Total: $121,950

Example 4: Saving $1k per month, with compound interest.

Saving with compound interest scales better as we have now realized a 3.5x growth in our total investment, but our total is still capped due to the limited monthly contributions. Alex Hormozi has said that investing is not what makes you rich, this is what he means by it.
Total: $202,996

Example 5: Saving $3k per month, with compound interest.

Imagine if we leveraged all of our disposable income, now we can start to see how important the size of our monthly contribution is to our end result.
Total: $608,989

Example 6: Saving 100% of disposable income with a 50% salary increase every 12 months.

Mr Beast notoriously reinvested all of the money he made after every video to make his next one. He spared no expenses and recognized that reinvestment was what would allow his videos to scale faster than any other YouTuber. A 50% salary increase at the end of every year, combined with reinvesting 100% of your disposable income without scaling up your monthly expenditure, and compound interest on top of that? It started with a $3k investment and now…
Total: $2,235,138

This is a financial model, but the concepts that we can take away extend further than personal investment. We can utilize this same model through the lens of scaling a business, or even self-improvement.

From this model, we can see that the two most important factors for determining the highest total are:
• Increasing your income and minimizing expenses (maximizing disposable income)
• Investing the maximum % of your disposable income

As a poker player, the best way to maximize the amount of money you can make is to move up stakes, as every time you move up, you’re playing for double the amount of money. The most common argument against this working is that the games get tougher and you can maintain a strong winrate when you move up. This is where reinvesting comes in.

You can reinvest your time into playing more volume to make more money, or to study more to increase your winrate. You can also reinvest your profits by leveraging coaches and study material.

You leverage money when it buys you a disproportionate amount of time back. Spending money to learn from a coach something that may take you 20 hours to learn independently, allows you to free that time up.

The game is an endless cycle of reinvesting and leverage, and the more reps we can put in, the higher we’ll scale.

#11 Some Thoughts on The Optimal Study Method

Do you want to know the secret to the best study method to accelerate you to high stakes? How to utilize solvers to develop high level strategies to crush the competition? How to make your study time twice as time efficient and 5 times more potent?

Ask someone else.

Literally anyone else.

My study is shit. Those are my thoughts on this topic. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Aquila " walk in the forest, drink a good wine with good friends"

^ Two INCREDIBLY underrated activities in terms of resetting yourself.

#12 Some Thoughts on Traits of Success

The universal traits of high performers:
• Belief that they have the potential to achieve greatness
• Belief that they are never good enough
• High discipline

Success to your fullest potential cannot be obtained without exhibiting all three traits. You must believe you can achieve great success, believe that your current position is not where you want to be, and have the discipline to do the work to get you to where you want to be.

Jordan Peterson’s ranked predictors of performance:
• IQ
• Conscientiousness (industriousness)
• Conscientiousness (orderliness)
• Social network
• Specific skills

IQ is the most important trait but cannot be positively modified (you can definitely lower your IQ permanently though... Meth: Not even once). For the sake of actionable advice, ignore IQ as this is not something that can be actively worked on.

Conscientiousness is the personality trait of the FFM (five-factor model) that correlates the strongest with high performance. I don't know how malleable personality is, but you can definitely develop high conscientiousness traits.

Your social network is a powerful tool you can leverage in these 2 ways:
• You can outsource questions you need an answer for to the entire network, saving you time
• They will redirect you if the question you are seeking an answer for is the wrong question to ask

Action steps that you can implement:

Figure out which of the 3 universal traits of high performers you lack, and put systems in place to develop them. Once all 3 have been established, it makes sense that staying consistent and focusing on work output will make success inevitable.

If you have all 3 traits developed and you are pumping a high volume of work out over a large sample, and are still not successful, then you've either:

• Not actually developed all 3 traits.
• Not actually pumping a high volume of work (easy way to gauge this is to look at your competition: are you at least matching their work output?)
• Not put in enough of a sample size.

If you like my posts, follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Iranian_96
I will be eventually transition my blog to Twitter as there'sa lack of traffic on this site.

#13 Some Thoughts on Routine Optimization

If you have no routine and aren't on the path toward where you want to be, step 1 is to create a routine. If you have created your routine and you’re not sticking to it, then step 2 is to figure out what you’re doing wrong, and there can be a few reasons why:

1. Your routine has too much micromanagement
2. Your routine has too much friction
3. You haven’t clarified how the routine is driving you toward your goals

“Your routine has too much micromanagement”

A symptom of a common low-performance trait: The performance flip cycle. This performer goes through cycles of zero accountability, attempting to counter this by creating extreme structure. This is rooted in an underlying lack of trust that you can sustain a healthy relationship with the goals you set yourself, and instead hope that a militant structure will override your lack of accountability.

Time blocking is a management system where you create “blocks” for your most important tasks instead of scheduling individual tasks down to the minute. You’re free to move these blocks around to fit unexpected changes in your schedule. I have my weekly workout and poker playing schedule written down for the week, so each day I can refer to my planner to see where my fitness and poker blocks are for my day and execute my existing routine, which leads to the next point.

“Your routine has too much friction”

Automation lowers the friction involved in adhering to your schedule, making it easier to stick to your plan. Here’s a snapshot of my schedule on Notion:

For Poker, Fitness, Reading and Writing, I can click on each link that takes me to a sub-page with the specifics of my routine for that day. Let’s take a look at my “Fitness Protocol”.

I look at the current day and immediately know what I need to complete for the day. I also have sub-pages for protocols on every exercise. Investing some time up-front to create these time blocks creates minimal friction when it comes to executing your routine.

“You haven’t clarified how the routine is driving you toward your goals”

Your routine is a collection of repeated processes, each one of these processes designed to move you further towards specific goals you have set. If you haven’t clarified your goals, then the processes you have put in place are unlikely to lead you toward your desired outcome.

A high-performance schedule should highlight short and long-term goals for each protocol you have in place, which should then be double-checked that the protocols align with furthering the goals.

By front-loading more time into the efficiency of your routine, you open up time to focus on being in execution mode every day and creating more time for the things you want to do. To those who try to convince you that they work better without a fixed schedule: How can you be so sure of this when you can’t get metrics for your productivity without a schedule?

Here is the link to the Notion templates that I currently use by Jeff Su:
https://www.jeffsu.org/notion-weekly-agenda-template/

And here is the link to the YouTube video where he shows how to navigate it:
https://youtu.be/M28HPv1l8gY

If you like my posts, follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Iranian_96
I will be eventually transition my blog to Twitter as there'sa lack of traffic on this site.

wonder if there's any relation between Jeff Su and Jason su

#14 Some Thoughts on Crossroads

I wanted to be a poker player. I also wanted to be a soldier. I didn't know how to decide. Here's the process I used to move forward with my life.

We start by logically analyzing the pros and cons of each decision, which is a fine strategy until we rack up a huge list of risk/rewards for both decisions and we're left with no better idea of how to actually come to a conclusion.

What most people do is assume that they haven't applied enough logical analysis to their situation to come to an objective conclusion. "If only I had enough pros for me to feel comfortable making the right decision".

Let's break it down with simple logic: If decisions A and B were not close, we could analyze pros/cons and come to an objective conclusion. You wouldn't need to go further. The fact that you can't shows these decisions are very close and we need a different approach.

If the decisions are very close by objective measurements, then following this logic it doesn't actually matter which one we pick. What now matters is which decision we are in more emotional agreement with.

Hearing this will trigger anyone in the over-analytical archetype because it won't agree with their current system for parsing information. This is how I do it:

"How would committing to decision A make me feel?"
"How would committing to decision B make me feel?"
"Could I live with myself if I committed to decision A and not decision B"
"Could I live with myself if I committed to decision B and not decision A"

I was at a crossroads a while back. I wanted to join the Royal Marines for the last decade but knew that I had to pick between that and poker. I couldn't solve this logically; there were too many perks of both and I didn't know how to be ok with leaving one on the table. I sat with the feeling of both on the table and tried to imagine both realities and what sacrifices would be required. I just wasn't prepared to commit to the military knowing that I would always have the possibility of really breaking through in poker on my mind.

Here's the conclusion I came to: Apply full commitment to poker for a decided timeframe (3 months). The only options were high-stakes success or total failure. This resonated with me because true failure would open me up to fully committing to the Marines.

In the span of those 3 months, I went from having moved down to 100NL to successfully beating 1kNL online. I never looked back and am happy with the path I have taken.

An interesting lesson I learnt: Once you reach emotional agreement on the decision, you automatically have 100% confidence you made the right decision because being in emotional agreement with the decision IS the way of measuring the best decision.

Summary:
· If decisions A and B are not close, you can easily identify the best decision with logic.
· If they are close, you need to adjust the lens through which you are trying to solve your problem.
· Which one "feels right"? Which one can you not live without?

#15 Some Thoughts on A Game Performance

I dated a girl for a month I had invited to a rooftop party of ours during a stint in Mexico that started great and took a downward trajectory. I felt like I had projected a fake version of myself that was so much higher value than my real self. I was in constant low-level fear that she would see through the façade and my real self would be exposed.

It started well, however over the course of the next month it inevitably ended in a trainwreck with a lot of pain. What had happened is a fear of exposing my real self, which led to a subtle leak of insecurity/neediness on a level that men are probably not even sensitive to. By the end, I had fulfilled my prophecy. The fire left her eyes, she lost attraction, and I was thinking neurotically at all times overanalyzing every situation. I was in a mode of resistance, trying to rekindle a spark. I was not able to be present and I drove somebody away in an emotionally immature way.

Woe is me.

My good friend sat down with me and, over dinner, made a powerful observation that shifted my perspective. I had assumed that the reflection of my character demonstrated at the party was artificially inflated and that my real low-level character traits were exposed over time.

“What if the real you is the confident, socially calibrated, interesting person at the party because you were in a good mindset and fully present, and as time went on, your insecurities and neuroticism prevented you from being able to access that level of confidence?” I had never thought to challenge my previous framework.

The old framework had me operating under the assumption that my insecure, neurotic, overthinking self was my default operating mode, and that I could only touch upon higher states if I had the perfect environment set up. As if all of these negative qualities are what all of my core beliefs are structured upon. Maybe I never dared to question the validity of these core character assumptions because I had structured so many higher-level belief systems on top of these. Questioning these assumptions would destabilize so much of my identity.

The new framework, however, has me identifying the character traits that I want to embody and striving to act in a way that a high performer with these traits would act. The clearest difference is that I am now framing my core identity in a positive light rather than negative light. As humans, we tend to make assumptions about someone and then hunt for examples of information that reinforce those beliefs. If the assumptions we make about ourselves are positive (as they rightfully should be, as an overwhelming majority of us are genuinely good people), then we will look for real-life examples where we can reinforce the validity of our positive qualities.

If you hold your top performance traits as your core tenets, you will naturally align towards behaving in a way that is congruent with someone who has fully integrated those high-performance traits.

If you are someone who has an underdog complex, this expresses itself in poker as someone whose state of comfort is to be in a position of struggle, where you’re always on the edge of the next breakthrough. The self that sits at the table with pure presence and focus is the true you. The self that sits down and is mentally unclear and frustrated, is the part of you that is in a lower-level mental state that isn’t able to access the clarity of playing above the emotional clouds. Since this epiphany, a majority of my “study” time outside poker has shifted towards self-practices that are geared towards accentuating the traits that I identify with my A-game self.

“Why can’t I just say that my real self is my best traits and not my worst traits? Aren’t they all part of our character? Isn’t it just as correct to say that our worst traits are just as much our “real self” as our best?” We will view everything that happens to us through a lens, positive or negative. We are able to choose which lens we view ourselves, and this is reflected in how we interact with the world.

The mental acrobatics I’ve just performed help to calibrate the emotional compass which we use to navigate through life, and with an uncalibrated compass, you’ll probably be walking in the wrong direction.

I'm going to be taking a bit of time off from this blog due to mental health reasons. I've removed a lot of social media already and I am going to remove the rest, and focus on a minimalistic life for the time being. I will be doing writing in my down time and will come back when I feel prepared to.

Take care. Will be missed

#16 Some Thoughts on Keeping Score

I’ve seen some players, myself included, try and break down where they’re underperforming in the game tree by diving into deep filters in their tracking software. Even if a player has a good winrate and is overperforming over a given sample, if you filter deep enough you will always find a node where they’re losing money. A player may find that their 3BP IP PFC winrate after calling a c-bet is bad even though their overall winrate is strong, but they fail to understand a key concept: the more specific your filter, the smaller the sample size becomes, and as the sample size decreases, extreme results become more likely. You’re often not looking at a zone where you’re actually punting, you’re looking at a random zone where you happen to be running bad.

Try hard enough and you’ll always find a zone where it looks as if you’re underperforming.

This is part of a message from a player who reached out to me on my Discord. The need to move up stakes quicker than your peers is an insecurity-driven response to hide a core feeling of inadequacy. When you frame your reality around a performance standard, you are sure to feel negative if you don’t perform where you expect to, and if this performance standard is unrealistic, you will be constantly subjecting yourself to unnecessary pain.

Needing to move up stakes faster than ALL of your peers is an unrealistic performance standard. If any of your friends move up in stakes quicker than you, it triggers these feelings of unworthiness and puts you in a mental state where you believe you’ve done wrong. This is an unrealistic performance standard to hold because it’s measured overwhelmingly by variance.

I know from personal experience that any negative feelings I project onto someone with better results than me is actually a reflection of an insufficiency in myself that is projected onto that person, and it’s because I know that there’s a level of work that I should be doing that I haven’t addressed.

I’ve never met someone who feels negative emotions from the success of their friends that isn’t stuck in an internal battle with themselves.

I'm opening up my Discord this year. If you or someone you know is having mindset/performance issues in poker, feel free to message me and I will be happy to schedule a call to help with whatever I can. I'm not asking for anything in return, I am just curious to gain perspectives from a variety of players.

Discord: Arya#4100

#17 Some Thoughts on The Apgar Test

The Apgar test was created to provide a simple, objective score that could be used to assess the health of newborns. Here’s how I’m using it to monitor my poker goals and increase performance.

Prior to the development of the Apgar test, there was no standardized method for evaluating the health of newborns, and babies who were born with problems were often not identified until it was too late to provide appropriate treatment. The Apgar score measures appearance, pulse, grimace, activity and respiration and each category is given a score of 0, 1, or 2. A score of 7 or above indicates that a baby is in good condition and lower than 7 indicates that further monitoring is necessary.

As someone who is highly neurotic, I struggle with identifying my days as “happy/unhappy”. I believe that striving for happiness is a mistake, as happiness is no more than a temporary state, like anger or jealousy. Rather, I believe that I will improve my quality of life by striving for two of the most important metrics: peace and fulfilment.

If I identify the 5 variables in my day that contribute towards fulfilment and focus on executing these, then I can now track the most important metrics for determining how I feel.

Poker Apgar Test

If I score 7 or above, then I can consider the day a success. Note that if I don’t play any poker, then I not only score 0 for volume but also 0 for quality of play which automatically makes the day a failure. This has a built-in effect of requiring me to structure my day to grind, even if for an hour. Volume is my biggest leak in poker and this metric keeps me accountable.

The idea of this system is to reprogram my mind from rating the quality of my day based on how I feel to rating it based on process goals. A roundabout effect of this is that I will end up actually feeling happier more frequently as I will be taking care of myself better and consistently executing on the hard things I need to do.

Iranian96

Interesting concept. I just wonder if it's such a good idea to worry about the quality of the game? In your case, the insufficient playing time is relevant.
How do you evaluate the quality?
Of course it's a good goal to act as high quality as possible, but from day to day, from my point of view, the focus should be on the process. Which in this case would be the volume.
I'm just unsure if it's realistic to assume that you can consistently deliver top quality. We are all only human and a day is not bad just because you made mistakes or are just tired.
In War of Art there is a very good quote about this right at the beginning.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7bFgJpNbR15rH6hNGHtxoC?si=232fbf63bfa04061

It is the beginning. I sit down, etc.

Interesting thread as usual, Iranian96.

"I evaluate the quality of my mental state based on feeling."

Our thoughts and feelings are constantly influx and affecting each other in a feedback loop. Would evaluating the quality of your mental state on your awareness of the changing nature of feelings and thoughts be more productive/helpful?

Personally, this acts like a feedback loop off switch and prevents me from beating myself up over and over. I'm not striving to be happy or cease unhappiness...I'm just becoming aware of how things are.

#18 Some Thoughts on Identity Labels

One of my biggest improvements in 2022 was to stop self-assigning identity labels.
"I am an __ person"
"I think in this way"
I have not once assigned myself an identity label that is negative that has served me.
A negative identity label is nothing more than a limiting belief.

"I'm introverted"
"I'm risk-averse"
"I don't handle confrontation well"
"I'm unorganized"
"I'm a night owl"
(Trigger warning)
"I am depressed"
These labels are part of the story you tell yourself about who you are, as if you're a collection of static, immutable traits.
This is actually a manifestation of a fixed-mindset, because we take these labels as truth on how we are.
In order to take a growth-minded approach to release these labels, ask yourself one question:
"What does someone who is not x exhibit that I do not?"
One of my identity issues used to be "I am irresponsible". I healed from this by asking myself "How would someone who is not irresponsible behave?" and worked on changing my patterns, gaining trust from within as I grew.

My Discord is always open if you have performance/mental game issues and want to ask question or schedule a call: Arya#4100

The biggest boost this has to my WR is an increased sensitivity to when my A-game is slipping.

Yesterday, I was battling a bad-reg for a table (HU PLO). Impressed as I was that villain had no doubtfully invested hundreds of hours perfecting his flop donk and turn bet call ranges, my real admiration developed when he one outted the river vs my flopped full house.

Sarcasm aside, I'm now aware of how my body is feeling. The center of my chest has tightened, my pulse has quickened and I'm getting a little warm in my face. Expletives are streaming through my mind.

The end result?

I closed the table...and that was the last I thought of it until I read your question.

The session didn't end, I didn't invest energy in a negative freeroll ego battle. My awareness then shifts from the changing nature of thoughts and feelings to awareness itself.

I just let go.

#19 Some Thoughts on Building Your Kingdom

6 weeks in, and I’m stepping on the mats but this time it’s different. Just the day before I told coach that I want to fight. “If you’re telling me you want to fight, then you’re ready to fight”. He speaks with a perspective that I can see but not feel. Sometimes it’s better to package all of your fears and worries into a steel box of trust, seal it shut, tie it with a bowtie of faith and hand it to your coach for safekeeping. He knows better than you that you will abuse the power of being absorbed by your fears. One day you may find yourself in a situation that is truly terrible, and only then will your coach recognize when you should be worried, and only then will he allow you to open that box.

It's my first sparring session. If you want to fight, you have to simulate the fight. Run it over and over and build pattern recognition for any scenario you may find yourself in. I’m turning my back, flinching, running away, taking damage from all directions. I’m overwhelmed so much that it doesn’t even seem fair. The first level of improvement in any performance arena is always to learn how to relax under pressure. You will never be able to think about high-level strategy if you are panicking about the thought of being punched in the face. First, learn that you can get hit with a left hook and you’ll be ok.

This level of relaxation comes from exposure to the same types of stress. The more you expose yourself to stressful stimuli, you deepen your understanding of what that state feels like. What flavour does this type of performance stress taste of? It’s an entire country deep within your mind, hidden by lock and key. You’re thrust there as a nomad only under the influence of stress, but there’s no map, no roads, no safety structures, no towns, no potable water. Your only tool is a pen. Each time you’re under the influence of performance stress, you’re teleported back to your kingdom. This time you build a shelter to shield yourself from the harsh climate. You’re safe, but every time you go back and performance stress increases, you need more protection. You start constructing a village to protect you, but you can only build as long as you’re in that mind state. So you start putting yourself in that mental state every day, just so you can return and build your village brick by brick.

Now, every time you’re under stress, you have a place that you can return to where you can survive. But it’s no longer enough for you to want to survive, you want to thrive. You are king, and a king builds himself a kingdom.

Every time you experience stress in a different arena of your life, you’re teleported to a different part of the country. You don’t have the resources of your citadel here and you’re exposed to the elements, but what you do have now is a toolbelt around your waist and a knowledge of how to build a city. You use your existing knowledge to build another city. Now you have roads connecting them together.

You are king and you control your kingdom however you please.

You become a black belt in understanding your emotional state, and once you have such a deep understanding of how your body feels/resonates on the inside, you have full control.

In the same way that an elite Muay Thai fighter is so in touch with the movement patterns that he can see punches in slow motion and effortlessly control his opponents to his will.

When he steps into the ring, he is stepping into his kingdom. He may take damage there, but he knows how to handle it and he can ultimately control any warrior in the ring because they are in his kingdom and they are under his laws.

I have been training for 3 months, and I have my first fight in 2 weeks. For now, I am the king of my village and I will bring my opponent to fight me there.

You can't choose to go into your kingdom and build in your own free time, otherwise you would fortify your defences and build your roads in a mode of comfort. Instead, anytime you are under mental stress, you are teleported to this place. You can become overwhelmed by the elements and freeze, or you can build resilience when you are there.

When you encounter a 20BI downswing, you may experience a strong stress response. If you are conscious, you can go into your kingdom and build your defences. Now, the next time time you face a 20BI downswing, you have resources at your disposal because you've mapped out the territory of what this "threat" feels like. You start to callous your mind to these stimuli.

"Your only tool is a pen"
I experienced grief for the first time in my life in 2022. When you experience a brand new stressor, you are teleported to a part of your mind you have never explored. I had no resources to handle what I was feeling and I felt emotionally exposed, but I could take out my pen and at the least, document what I was experiencing.

#20 Some Thoughts on Insanity

"No one can live without being able to explain to themselves what is happening to them, and if one day they should no longer be able to explain anything to themselves, they would say they had gone mad"

A big skill difference between a high-stakes and low-stakes player is the accuracy to which they can identify when they’re running bad and when they’re playing bad. Or when they got coolered and when they may have made a mistake. These blurred lines are a source of confusion, and I’ve seen a lot of players err on the side of accountability. This isn’t a bad quality to have, but it’s misplaced when you start taking accountability for a mistake that doesn’t exist.

This has a compounding effect when we tend to attach negative emotions to our mistakes. It’s common to project feelings of shame, guilt, anger and confusion onto the mistakes that we make, as the mistakes serve as evidence of our own insufficiency. As emotionally taxing as it is to project these emotions on our legitimate mistakes, now we are adding to this by taking accountability for running bad, and projecting our negative emotions on this.
This is a mental game issue that can actually be partially fixed through study. As our understanding of the game becomes more accurate, we can better discern between when we were coolered and when we may have made a big mistake, not to mention making fewer mistakes overall. This reduces the frequency of these events but it doesn’t reduce the intensity when it does happen.

However you may process your mistakes in-game, it’s of paramount importance that you don’t feel shame for your actions. Shame can materialize as anger or guilt, and this will keep your nervous system in a highly aroused state, preventing you from authentically feeling and processing the emotions you’re going through. Perpetually staying in a highly aroused state only reinforces an environment where we pile more pressure on ourselves to perform at an unrealistic level, then we fail, feel shame and the cycle continues…

Insightful blog and have enjoyed reading it. I am interested to know if there were guys in your old CFP that were able in crush ROW/Euro pools. For example, winning 6+bb/100 on a ROW site at 500NL+ over significant samples?

#21 Some Thoughts on Learning The Hard Way

Reading is an important skill to cultivate to accelerate your growth. You are gifted insights that may have taken a man a lifetime to discover. You are privy to the catastrophic mistakes of generals and politicians and can learn how to better react than your predecessors. Whenever possible, we should learn from mistakes by observation, and dodge the unnecessary pain of an avoidable mistake. It’s not possible to always do this though. To live a life of perfect execution isn’t possible.

To assume that we can learn every mistake through study is contingent on 2 presumptions: That every conceivable mistake has been made throughout history and subsequently documented, and that you have studied and integrated the knowledge of this collection.
You may learn a strategic concept through study, integrate it and assure that you’re now more resilient in this area of the game. But you don’t know what you don’t know. Facing punishment for a mistake you are making under in-game stress causes a more powerful desire to overcome that problem.

The region-beta paradox states that if someone is currently in a mediocre romantic relationship, they will be less likely to end it to find an excellent relationship than if their current relationship was worse, thus making their present situation worse overall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6DemLsZgLc

The pain that a disastrous mistake inflicts can act as rocket fuel, propelling you to new heights.

Sometimes you’ve got to lose $20k and a part of your mind to completely re-evaluate your game, and reach new levels you weren’t able to previously.

damn. that "region-beta paradox" is a crazy concept. i see examples of it everywhere in life! i like the application of it to a poker downswing... maybe a player losing 50 buy ins over the course of a year would be better off losing them all in one month just for the wake up call

#22 Some Thoughts on Taking Criticism

When we develop our poker skills, push new PR’s at the gym, learn public speaking, or read a new book, any form of self-improvement takes our current model of reality and changes it to make it more accurate.

When I understood this, every decision in my life got filtered through the lens of: “will this make me see reality more accurately?”

My biggest moments of growth in my life have come from two areas: Intense competition or someone close to me giving me a reality check.

Intense competition creates defined constraints for success and failure with harsh consequences. Far harder to rationalize your mistakes when you fail in the spotlight.

Every so often, someone close to you will give you tough love on something you are doing poorly. Think back to when someone sat you down and told you “I love you, but this thing you're doing is unacceptable”. If you’re available to the lesson there, it provides a powerful jump pad to upgrade your reality.

Value those people because most aren’t invested enough in you or don’t care enough to provide that harsh truth.

If you’re the type of person who gets defensive at any form of criticism, people aren’t going to waste their time giving you harsh truths. In this way, your personality is preventing your personal growth. Ironically, these are the people who need reality checks more than most.

People will respect you if you can provide harsh truths to them in a sensitive way that doesn’t humiliate or shame them. And you should never be upset at someone who delivers harsh truth to you in the same way.

What was a memorable “harsh truth” that someone gave you, that changed the way you think?

Killer blog! Following for sure. Thanks for the add on Discord.

Hi Iranian. I just read mos of your posts and find them very interesting.
I would like to know your opinion about PokerDetox. I'm considering lately to apply so as to train with them.

#23 Some Thoughts on “The Thing”

“Do the thing” – Chris Williamson

What is the thing? You know what the thing is. The thing is what you need to do. It’s what your avoiding, procrastinating, delaying, dreaming about, hoping for, talking about, what gives you purpose, what gives you money, what gives you freedom. So why aren’t you doing the thing?
I abstract work into different categories that I will order in importance of doing:

• Non-relevant but urgent work (Not the thing and not related to the thing but is getting in the way of your life enough that you must address this)
• Primary work (The thing)
• Secondary work (Not the thing but a precursor to the thing, related to the thing, or makes doing the thing easier/better)
• Non-relevant tasks (Not the thing)

The only time we should do work that is not related to the thing is when it is an urgent matter or important for our overall life. Examples: Getting your car serviced, dealing with a breakdown at home, helping a friend in need, doing your taxes.

Primary work is the doing of the thing. Spend as much time here as possible to actually get the most return. Example: Playing poker.

Secondary work examples: Studying a node that will boost your winrate, sleep schedule, eating healthy, networking with other poker players, calculating your BRM.

Non-relevant tasks: Running random sims, discussing micro details on a specific hand history, talking about wanting to play more, talking about wanting to study more.

This is not a check list where you work through each bullet point until completion, but each category has a constant influx of new items on the agenda that you can choose to work on. Instead, you try and delegate what percentage of your time you should be spending in each category and aiming to hit that.

Now we can see how productivity hacks are merely tools in our arsenal that can align us to spending the amount of time doing the thing, not a magic wand that will make the thing be done at your wish. Learning about productivity tools are at best secondary work (they aren’t the thing but they make us more effective at doing the thing) and at worst, a non-relevant task (intellectual wankery that gives us the illusion of hard work without providing any value). Productivity is not productivity if it isn’t increasing the quantity or quality of your time in primary work.

If you are avoiding primary work, general productivity hacks are about restructuring your day to enable you to spend more time in primary work. If they aren’t, it’s not productive.

If you are still avoiding primary work, clarify your visions and goals for the primary work (the why to the what).

If you are still avoiding primary work, then you may have to assess why you even value that work in the first place. If you don’t, then you may realize your purpose and goals are not aligned anymore. Sit down, go deep into your mind and ask yourself what you are really avoiding when you avoid doing the thing. Because it’s never the thing you’re avoiding, it’s your demons.

Here's a list of things that are not doing the thing

#24 Some Thoughts on Not Having Anything To Say

I’ve been trying to write an article for the best part of a year. It’s not easy to draw creative inspiration from a pursuit that no longer excites you, nor is it even a part of my life anymore.

It’s hard to accept not having anything valuable to offer, as that is where I derive a lot of my value from in life: by the value I provide others. Why is internal value so hard to manifest?

Trying to be ok with not having anything of value to add to the conversation.

Musicians know this struggle more than anyone (hot take incoming). Guns ‘n’ Roses write Appetite For Destruction, one of the greatest rock records of all time. And they said what they wanted to say. And then they release Chinese Democracy. And we all hated it.

I feel like a stranger in my own blog.

I have some conclusive thoughts for next time, but my original goal was to write 25 posts here and I try to be a man of my word, because without that, I am nothing.

#25 Some Thoughts on Poker

This blog evolved far beyond my original intention. What I created to share some of the opinions I had about performance as it relates to poker, became a sandbox for me to practice my creative writing, articulate the abstract thoughts in my head into concise ideas, ask myself questions that I became forced to dig for an answer to…

I sit here reflecting on almost a year of absence from the poker world professionally, almost half the time that this blog has been active. I continued as I set myself the intention of making 25 posts, and it was something that needed to be followed through with.

“If you know the way broadly you will see it in everything” – Miyamoto Musashi

I continued to play poker through the years, no matter how devastating the downswing, or how close I came to being broke with nowhere to stay. What kept me going each time was both a carrot and a stick: The carrot being the knowledge that every time I experienced pain (almost daily), I was learning, about myself, life, strategy, games, business, combat, psychology, trauma, risk, all through poker. Most people who haven’t dedicated themselves deeply to a single practice cannot understand how a game such as poker translates to learning universal lessons.

Money, materialistic goods, and status are all things that cannot truly contribute to happiness in our lives. We can deduce this through a proof of contradiction. Assume they make life better; the assumption would be that happiness, fulfilment and peace of mind go up with net worth. This doesn’t happen, as happiness correlates with a household net worth of ~$100k/year.

What is the purpose of life, beyond expanding self-actualization?

To access higher states of self-actualization, our consciousness must become free.

For our consciousness to become free, we must know more about life than we did yesterday.

The disciplines we dedicate ourselves to provide us with a platform to focus our individual growth.

Pain is a prerequisite for growth.

Reframing the pain and discomfort in the actions that I take in my life as a positive, and knowing how the suffering is moving me closer to my goals while understanding the lessons within the pain, is the biggest lesson I have learnt in 2024.

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering” – Friedrich Nietzsche

This is the reason why I retired from poker: I had my first large downswing in February 2023 which I felt nothing for. No drive to dig deep or ask myself how to come back stronger. This wasn’t normal. I had never experienced apathy towards my discomfort like that. After months of travelling in the United States and meditating on this, I realized that it was a pursuit that no longer served me: I learnt the lessons that I needed to, and it was time to find a new avenue to channel my constructive energy.

I have since found that in the business world and I am working more hours per week than I ever thought I could muster. I wake up early, eat a shit sandwich, go to bed late, repeat. Every day. My days are filled with stress and pressure, but it seems to have no impact on my peace of mind. It gives me purpose. I am learning my discipline an order of magnitude faster than in poker.

In a car, we don’t feel speed, only acceleration.
In life, we don’t feel knowledge, only growth.

I would like to give some personal thanks:

Jason Su: For not teaching me how to listen to my intuition, you did something of far greater value. You allowed me to find these answers within myself.

Pierre and Lari: For being shining role models of disciplined high performers.
Kenan: For being a rare person I can trust to be 100% real with me.

Jeff Brayner: For always backing me from low stakes to high stakes. It’s been a pleasure to watch you climb along with your hard work.

Anthony and Marcello: For demonstrating you can live a balanced life whilst in the throes of poker.

Erik: For being a great supporter and someone that I could give back to after having so much generosity handed my way.

Nick Howard: For being honest with compassion, and giving me some of the highest leverage perspective upgrades in the most desperate times.

I will continue my writing endeavours, about topics that presently engage me. I may post them elsewhere, or I may keep them private.

Maybe the greatest value of all from this project is the cognitive time capsule that now exists from a moment in my life when I was a different person.