CD9K

Some other stuff I forgot to mention;
-Its shown in experiments that humans tend to over estimate their confidence interval on a prediction by 22x avg (so if you ask someone to guess number of balls in a jar then their confidence in the accuracy of that guess, their confidence is 22x higher)
-Problem with binomial curves is that it results in people trying to overfit small samples to a curve and derive meaning from it

These 2 applied to poker:
1) When playing a new format or stake be very conservative in your risk of ruin calculations. Be particularly careful about over narrating a winrate for yourself based off meaningless samples

Fat tails/Black swans

Some book notes from Taleb's Black Swan applied to poker:
-Give yourself a narrative that allows for big losses, such as "It's silly to be upset by losing, I lose almost half the time as a professional" (in any given session). Also do not detract from your losses/take credit for your wins for your ego sake.
-Can be quite rewarding to keep a private journal where you document your experiences with variance,
-Love fate/prepare to die. Be open to losing chunks of your bankroll,
-A lot of success is found in just surviving long enough, avoiding losses - not deriving profits,
-Don't specialise too narrowly to avoid sudden changes in the field effecting you too much,
-Take asymmetrical risk reward setups where you can,
-Humans are great at adapting to periods of very high/very low intensity, try not to dull your mind through repetitive monotonous grind
-Don't listen to those that have no skin in the game (loosely)
-If taking on an endeavour in a field that is 'extremistan' (e.g. authors, athletes) where a small % of participants take a large % of the earnings: Be prepared to lose/bleed for a long time then have breakouts, in the meantime expect to have insults/doubt hurled at you. It helps to have a team that can support you in this mentally

My main takeaway or feeling from this book is: Take calculated big risks with small % of networth (ideally where possibility of positive fat tail/blackswan) then have acceptance of losses when they do come, but planning ahead a bit expecting them to come. Trust the process basically.

Doesn't necessarily mean try to control risk and reduce to 0, but have an income source/% of portfolio that is low variance whilst still taking on big risk

Results this year have been pretty bad, ran bad at 10k+ in small samples
HU graph YTD (Note I am actually net down this YTD including live and untracked ante app games)

I'm not great at PLO HU so it was probably just a mistake =)
davy is top 6max nlh reg

Thanks mate, going to write a longer form post with some replies to points in this soon

Thanks mate that’s a very valid input, I think I’m still going to play HU and battle but just a lot more conservative on the br stake wise

Risk of ruin

I had a couple conversations with friends where they tried to bring me down to Earth a little bit regarding risk (one of them is a multi millionaire hedge fund manager so there's definitely value in his insight/experience).
Their points were along the lines of:
1) "At your current level of risk there is a non 0 chance you can't handle the mental stress of the swings and overshot take/blow up your bankroll to 0, no need to do that when you are already doing well at a young age"
2) "People don't understand variance and randomness"-
3) "People think they have way more control over things than in reality"-
4) "Winners bias is extremely powerful and amazingly destructive"

I'm trying to make a lesson out of my recent results, I had a sick upswing in early 2024 playing HU off the back off good live results. My bankroll grew to a really big figure for me, then before it even happened I was aware that the usual pattern at that point for me in the past is to not feel satisfied, to keep taking risk/moving up and then have a big downswing.

I took some marginal spots like HU 10k vs davy, live plo £25/£50 and lost most of my online upswing back to a breakeven ish point. I'm getting to a stake level where I'm almost comfortable settling and playing 1k-5kNL table selecting and earn a lot of money whilst investing.

But I also kind of feel that the only reason I have got to where I am is because I took the risks I did; I always thought that was part of my edge/character(?). But when I try look back at previous figures in the poker world, not many of my archetype have stuck around (notably Isildur seem to blew up his bankroll, Stefan seems to be on his way out of poker, I guess Limitless is the success story in this case). But then there are many success cases on the other side of the spectrum: Sunni_92, dudd1, DejanK, Munez(?) etc

Some statistic that kind of fucked with me is: a 5% risk of ruin each year gives you something like 40-50% chance of going broke over a 10 year period. It's not fully accurate as you derisk down stakes, but you could reason that there is a 5% chance I have a bunch of life events coincide with a downswing and then blow up my bankroll. Though I do feel that like anything in life, this is somewhat of a skill and I have a higher tolerance for "painful" events/networth swings than a lot of people.

Poker is a game of showing up with your most present self in every hand/session/week/month. Gym, meditation, poker/sports therapists etc can all be seen as risk mitigators in a way, reducing that 5% chance to a 1-2% chance has huge impact on your long term career.

On a separate note, I did another couple week live trip lately and broke even, got a bit unlucky with buying small % of myself when I won (& vice versa) and quality of games. I played probably one of the biggest private games in the world also with some very famous poker figures (not Linus/pros, famous triton people) with infinite standup game.

Interesting choice to play mixed games, I always thought it'd be my most fun prefered format but thought there was no where to find volume for it on main sites. Aren't the games pretty solved and bottable on HS though?

Something to think about, as a US player the global network PLO sounds really good, ignition was good but recently a lot of collusion gone unchecked, maybe not so much at lower stakes

Also something to consider is that if you look at poker as a market: All the formats are declining somewhat in terms of reaching a point where game is solved and there are no edges, but the games with least computability are going to decline the least, that'd be 5c and 6c PLO and maybe some misc draw games idk. If I was to pick a format to study from ground up right now it'd be PLO5c>PLO4c, they seem to have a lot of recreational growth both online and live in America (especially Florida and recently Vegas I hear)

Thanks mate =) yeah the sunrun has been unreal, also that's interesting hadn't heard that about 4handed+ games ty

In the first email they asked for some basic info about what time I usually play, then the 2nd email was about filming my play with a link, the link was apparently a phishing link, I didn't click it

Pretty scary that these hackers could have my address/full name/know what time I play? I think there's a chance ACR got hacked around Christmas day, their servers were bugging out and a bunch of funds got frozen

Maybe a bit but some of the regs are known guys on stars etc, also I’ve just been asked by acr to record myself playing so they do seem to have decent security

EDIT : lol just got a follow up email from acr saying the first one was a phishing email, luckily i didnt click any link

thankss, On ACR and cant remember who exactly

Had an interesting year, my biggest and most frequent losing months as well as my (by far) biggest winning months in my poker career to date. Went from an avg month of maybe +/-15k (with a couple +60s) to +/-40k avg (with some +100s) lol

High stakes variance has had its tough moments but looking back I’m decently proud of how I got through them. There were even moments where I briefly considered giving up to focus on uni and a lower variance life 😅

My online results weren’t amazing this year, my winrate was lower than I hoped at 1k 2k but I was regbattling a lot and kind of lost my main source of wr ignition (I believe games there are rife with collusion and rta now, so after a small sample I quit the site and focused on trying to find vol at 2k+).But then funnily enough my December sunrun was pretty much 80% regbattle at 5k and some micro amount of 10k, just running really good making some 0ev river catches that were correct (had a funny random punt hand that comes to mind:

SBvsBU SRP: I XC70%, XC turn i think pot or small overbet, river xc polar jam on T85hdh Jc4c with 65dd , in solve it was 0ev catcher rest of 65 were -ev except dd for some blocker reason, but IP bluffed some K6xx .

We kind of get paid as poker players to take on variance, and everyone has their tolerance, those who push past that tolerance at the level of HS where it can become really painful are (hopefully) rewarded. Although I must say per hour the EV of grinding a lot of volume at 1k could actually be bit better than HS online

I think I will make a new blog post like demondoink for 2024, and I have a lofty goal for 2024 not certain if its achievable but I want to try have 1m $ winnings =)
I have some ideas of how I’ll do it, also if anyone has any blogpost suggestions let me know.

Boring life gym stuff
Gym has become the best part of my day for a while now, I’ve started to track my macros for first time since going to gym for last 1-2years, I have decent gains but I definitely plateaued in strength gains/stopped being able to overload on some lifts from not enough volume/desire.
So I’ll add a small gym progress to my blog, ending 2023 1.34xBW 5x5 squat, 0.89xBW 3x5 BP, 0.59xBW 4x5 OHP. Haven’t DL’d in ages have been moving bit away from heavy compound towards machines as it let me overload a lot safer, my progress halted a bit when my squat was beginning to give me lower back pain

Thanks for reading, happy holidays

December graph to date
By stake
Year to date graph excluding HU (HU EV positive but down on 5k I believe, dont have main PC to post but will reply later to this comment with it)
By stake
As you can see pre RB (35k usd) I was on track for a bad year online till last couple months, madeup for by 3/4 months of live trips. Sidenote PT4 numbers aren’t 100% accurate, bunch of acr hands get missed and some app game hands have wrong currency so I was up more in PT4 before last couple month sunrun

Net profit for year including live (including travel expenses and profit splits) is +$391,000
(177,540 from online NLH including rakeback and HU, -30k online PLO)

Hi, thanks man that's a great take =)

I like your way of weighing decisions but it can be hard in practice and always easy to be too hard on yourself after the fact

Been having a great month poker wise, running good online recovering my HU 'downswing' and had a short successful live trip playing mix of 10k NL to 100k NL... Though I did run at least 2buyins behind EV at 100k NL as well as losing 200bb KK v AA

Have a lot of thoughts about the live lifestyle, I went with the intention of maintaining my good gym routine+eating habits but it quickly fell apart due to logistical issues.

Something I've noticed in HS live pros is that some of them stop thinking about anything except their next session, the adrenaline from playing such high stakes in a fun environment is pretty unmatched and normal life can be quite dull in comparison.

Also, I remember Stefan saying something in his blog about how he thinks it's bad to get staked for stakes above 10k NL as it's just a rabbithole and you lose motivation for your main game 5k NL. I can fully see what he means now, since I've come back from this trip I'm for the first time ever struggling a little bit to motivate myself to study/regbattle online. I also feel quite rusty in general, maybe its not rust though, maybe its an uncertainty about my actions that before I was autopiloting from constant exposure to sims, not rust but a more conscious thought about every hand akin to how I was playing live.

At one point during my trip I was really close to having a panic attack from lack of sleep and built up stress but managed to pull through with a hot shower+meditation. The mix of lack of sleep, a higher than my average intake of caffeine and a lot higher stakes led to a rather unpleasant elevated state of alert/heart rate, I think a lot of people would've been pretty anxious in my shoes though.

So going to try and catchup with my routine here and figure out what I want to work on in the time being, maybe I'll pursue my endgoal of being a HU NLH/PLO specialist a bit more as it's quite fun

Recent online run

By stake

Live results small sample

I had a couple powerful discussions about some of these topics with an old friend and my therapist - that helped me realise that it's not really that I don't have empathy for others but more that I feel I don't have agency/control over the situation. I feel that I can't have an impact and that there's no value in discussions about things we're not taking action on, but I need to realise that even a discussion can motivate someone down the line to take action - and to not be part of the problem

Today I want to ask a couple questions to myself and the reader:
Why do we play poker?
What is success in this field or life to you?

At the moment I’m studying at University alongside poker which is fine, I’m handling both decently well. But I do feel pressure from people around me to give up on poker and live a normal life, to fill the role they want me to, or fill the role society wants me to. That could and is likely all in my head

But I have an opportunity to potentially play Nosebleeds live cash staked and make infinitely more than I would online but it means quitting uni completely halfway through the course and a fair bit in ‘debt’. It essentially means going allin on poker and isolating myself from the things that I’ve built around me (my relationships and healthy routine).

Part of my brain weighs the options and feels its stupid to not take that opportunity as its like a football player being signed to Barcelona and just staying at their local team. But part of me also sees people with ‘success’ who say a lot about these topics (some of its bit conflicting):

1. The idea that the person who flies in a helicopter to Mt Everest and takes a selfie is not as fulfilled as the person who climbed/no-one cares
2. The things that you think serve you in your 20s often don’t serve you for life. On that note also, it’s likely that its not money I want to attain from Poker but success/competition, maybe for validation of myself/from others.
3. Something I don’t put nearly enough value into is family/relationships/society at large to be honest. I have some very strange conscious biases to be a bit selfish with some things. I feel no desire to vote, I feel no desire to learn anything about Ukraine or Gaza or Covid. They don’t feel in my realm of agency or importance. Sometimes I talk to women about these issues and if I reveal my true stance even slightly it outrages them, their level of empathy is mountains higher than mine on most topics. But on some things I feel I have higher empathy than others, particularly towards looking after my family/close ones financially and sacrificing for them even if they have done things that some people would cut them out their life for. I often feel guilt for not being as good of a son/brotherI could be and that drives me to act better but only out of guilt, not really because I feel it helps me/is something I care about
4. Try to live so that you’re fulfilled in health, relationships, wealth and spiritually. Taking that opportunity might not be the highest life EV to max out on those compared to staying and playing online, i might end up alone and depressed etc
5. Lastly its a fairly irreversible decision, I wouldn’t really be able to go back to University and complete a degree. But anyways I have close to no desire to do underpaid work for some evil corporation or pay tax to a deceitful government

Might’ve exposed myself as a sociopath/psychopath here idk

Anyways gl at the tables

Thanks mate, yh it's been more mentally tough to run behind EV and lose more bb/100 at HS and lose an absolute value $ despite feeling like I'm doing best I can (other than game selecting maybe).. Been playing more in my comfort zone lately and re-evaluated my game a bit, think on a good trajectory now

It includes 6max , this is hu

Being overly self critical can lead to self hate even when in times of success, can lead to catastrophising after making a mistake, can lead to desperation calls trying to win hands etc - I think it's fairly well known now that how you talk to yourself shapes your behaviour, I don't know enough to say much else on the topic but something worth looking into probably. Also thankz

Also here's a fun HH vs Stefan

Downswing

I've been going through a bit of a mental rough patch lately, but I'm trying to reframe it as a great opportunity for growth in resilience and self esteem. I have a reoccuring habit of self destructing after periods of success (taking on more risk, trying to win more, reach higher etc) - This most recently manifested itself in playing HU against the best HU specialists and getting a bit rekt (EV wasn't terrible but stake variance meant big losses).

I felt feelings of inadequacy, lack of self worth, anger that I wasn't where I deserved to be (injustice) etc. I think I've realised that I never did anything to tackle this reoccurring pattern, that everything was going well when variance was on my side and I hadn't accumulated this 'tilt' over time, thinking the problem was addressed once I bounced back the week after. But this time I didn't feel that, I felt hopeless in finding volume to play high enough to recoup my losses and questioned why I was even playing poker

Self esteem and being self critical

I did some introspective meditation and think resonated with the idea that I am actually extremely self critical, in times of great success I don't celebrate of feel good, I only aim higher. I thought of 5 times I had achieved success and practiced some much healthier self talk.

Also I'd like to share some snippets from a book I read a while ago that I'd forgotten about, The 6 pillars of self esteem:

"Addiction is silencing consciousness to escape pain"
"The art of noticing feelings in your body. Noticing patterns in your behaviour that aren't serving you."
"Being concerned to be aware and conscious of your goals and where you are relative to them."
"Consciousness that is not converted into appropriate action is a betrayal of consciousness; it is the mind invalidating itself."
"Value the virtues of consciousness, responsibility, curiosity, openness to change, above particular kinds of mastery that may no longer be relevant" (in a world where info on topics is doubling every year)
Self esteem = self efficacy + self respect
"If my aim is to prove I am 'enough', the project goes on forever - because the battle was already lost on the day I conceded the issue was debatable"

I remember the period when I read this book was probably the most productive of my life, I began going to the gym consistently from around that period, I did many things in my routine that served me and my relationships greatly.

But somewhere along the line some of those habits fell off as I forgot the significance of why I did them (namely affirmations, philosophical affirmations and daily/weekly goals). Self discipline + monitoring behaviour = success.

But there is a great section of this book that talks about how "living a life of unthinking routine, with no challenges or crises is pseudo-self esteem. Real self esteem is what we feel about ourselves when everything is not alright. When we are challenged by the unexpected, when others disagree with us, when we are flung back on our own resources, when the cocoon of the group can no longer insulate us from the tasks and risks of life. When we must think, choose, decide, and act when no-one is guiding us or applauding us. We are told to value self sacrifice, but to honor the self - to honor mind, judgement, values and convictions is the ultimate act of courage, that is what self esteem asks of us"

So to conclude, I hope this period can be a point from which I can remember why it is important to keep up certain habits for developing proper self talk, self efficacy and discipline. To value those virtues more than whether I'm hitting arbitrary postflop frequencies.

Also, I find it funny that Nick Howard says he has done many surveys of his players and found that good routine and not being self critical were two of the biggest indicators for a successful HS player. The good routine is all the things you do to prevent negative emotional states/tilt, or to reinforce ideas/self talk etc that help you; being self critical I'm not certain why it's a bad trait (its obviously healthy in some capacity for growth), but in my case it led to some destructive behaviours.

Edit: Something I forgot to mention is something the book puts very well which is why is self esteem important - "confidence in our ability to think, confidence in our ability to cope with the basic challenges of life; and 2. confidence in our right to be successful and happy, the feeling of being worthy, deserving, entitled to assert our needs and wants, achieve our values, and enjoy the fruits of our efforts." Through this I was able to live a lot more consciously back then, and hope to do so now too.

Great video

thanks mate, yeah you could be right but I kind of felt this before ashwaganda too - but I did take a month off from it and started feeling a lot more feelings (both positive and negative, more tilt whilst playing but more enjoyment from social activities). I've apparently already seen this video but I'll give it a rewatch, ty

idk, the cost of cfp is so low for what it gives you unless you have scam deal, so go for that probably

I can't remember exactly but what I would say to myself now is just move up as fast as possible, aggressive BRM, get a job to build BR - aslong as you can get your mental game to a stable enough place then your technical will very quickly be enough if table selecting up to 200nl/500nl . The exact BI numbers idk but can play around with variance calculator, something like 25bi for each stake or even 10/15bi if playing 100nl or lower cus losing it would have absolutely 0 impact on your life in most western countries (but ideally play a stake where you can get a decent sample to know you're winning)

https://forum.gipsyteam.ru/index.php?viewtopic=85514&st=10640

Thanks for the kind words, yeah 10k games can be nice but they dont run often ;(

I've been in Asia for last 2 weeks taking the first amount of time off from poker since I started playing pretty much, I did study a fair bit of HU whilst there though

I've been in a bit of a dilemma recently, even if I have mental strength, bankroll and skill to play NL5k table selecting there is no games running (with a fish). I could spend 15 hours a day watching the lobbies and only find maybe 150 hands/day with a fish at 5k some days

It makes me wonder how did nosebleed guys ever get to where they are unless they had a great opportunity or better game quality.

So like demondoink+nachos I briefly considered the option of grinding out a living like King10Clubs at 1kNL as there seems to be a lot of games running there, and could basically do what I did this last year and make around 200k USD give or take.

But there are some mental hang ups in doing that, some from JNandez recent podcast and some from sold old Stefan blogposts I read through:
1) I want to do something I'm proud of, I'm not particularly proud of table selecting and settling at 1k.
2) I've been trying new formats which I think have nice future longevity, are more enjoyable for me and potentially have higher winrate reg vs reg at 2k-5k for more consistent volume (specifically HU NLH and HU PLO4) - But the issue with this is that I can't see any proven winners on these formats to give me confidence that it is indeed possible to beat rake regbattling. As JNandez put well in his podcast, it's very scary to play a higher variance format with complete uncertainty about your winrate (It would take so many months to get a reasonable sample to guess my true winrate, I don't know how it works exactly but I'd assume that since standard deviation is higher it means that it takes more than 6max samples to attain true winrate, so maybe as much as 300k hands+ which is like over 1.5 years of HU play)
3) The other option is regbattling 2k 3/6max which seems a bit meh, like I look at the top volume regs for this and it seems like no-one is winning more than 2bb/100 and if they are its a tiny sample/they have table selected in previous years when games were better. But my hangup with giving up on this is that Stefan says in his blog something along the lines of "It's possible to have 10bb/100 regbattling at 2k 5k where everyone sucks and is just copying solver" which could be true, maybe I am just another solver copier who thinks they are deviating/creating nice explo lines but isn't doing it enough. My WR 3-5 handed this year has been 1.21bb/100 over 100k hands which says nothing and is basically no $ lol.
4) The other solution people often give is to play live poker, this isn't really an option for me as I'm locked down to being in London for various personal reasons. I also don't enjoy the experience/find any competitive drive to play live, except maybe some time back in Macau as that game had a very fun dynamic (deep stack, same regs, long sessions, lots of spots)

Lastly I'm somewhat aware that this is an internal battle of ego, as Jnandez said inside my head there is a business owner and a worker, their desires are overlapping. The owner wants the worker to just do the task of grinding out 1k volume and pump $, the worker wants to satisfy their ego and get recognition at higher and higher stakes.

Stefan had some interesting posts about how ego, dopamine, serotonin were all interlinked - That by playing poker (pumping dopamine) and feeding your ego you end up in a place where your dopamine receptors are fucked and your level of serotonin/happiness is low (I skimmed this late last night so I might be misunderstanding a bit). I can definitely feel my self drifting into this sort of place, where I go through periods of struggling to get dopamine from usual activities and only think about poker. I wonder if soon I too will stop satisfying my ego and put poker on the backburner for something else, but I feel that this game is too fun for me. I came from a video game background and saw this as the most lucrative competitive game, thats what drew me in and kept me in so I can't see myself continuing long term if I stop playing the 'game' of climbing the ladder...

Lastly something I want to look into is figuring out a way to gauge my edge by looking at common solver spots and figuring out from showdowns if people are playing nodes wrong in HU NLH/HU PLO and from that calculate a potential winrate using nodelocks and chipEV but it sounds so messy+not accurate so I don't know, maybe better to take a look at how the AIs (pluribus) performed against humans and use that as a max potential winrate.

Ashwaganda - I don't feel at all in a position to give medical advice but I will share my experience taking ashwaganda for about 40 days now. It seems to have had a massive impact on my low level anxiety, and maybe as a negative side effect dulled my emotions a lot.

I feel less impacted by negative events than before, I guess I also feel slightly less impact from positive triggers too, but it does feel like I can semi consciously control this. Or rather the change that I've felt is that emotions negative/positive don't burst up to the surface as much anymore.

I've also noticed an improvement in cognition and memory recently

I recommend it highly for poker players as I think the daily stress and extensive memory work can take a major toll on your brain health long term (I have previously experienced really bad memory issues from stress - forgetting big life events and blanking out whole days) - Here's a good video on side effects