THE LIFE AND WHINES OF AN ONLINE POKER PLAYER

Hey guys, So as part of my joining Cardrunners I've been advised to start a blog. To be honest, I've never had a blog before so I'm going to try to keep up the updates on this thing regularly, but I hope that I can produce interesting and thoughtful entries. I'm kind of busy today so I can't provide a proper introduction just yet, but I just wanted to make a few comments about my joining Cardrunners. Many people must know that I used to produce videos for Deucescracked, and it seems like there are some suggestions that Cardrunners was unscrupulous in acquiring me, or that I sold out, or that my switching sites is indicative of anything about either site. Let me assure you that this is absolutely not the case. I joined Cardrunners because they could offer me opportunities that other sites simply could not. I have no regrets about my work with Deucescracked, and my relationship with all of the people who I worked with there are wholly intact. As much as I enjoyed working there, it is my prerogative to do what I feel is in the best interests of my poker career. I hold no animosity toward anyone in the Deucescracked family, and they respect my decision to leave. There were several sites that offered me a deal to work with them, but I decided that none of them could offer what Cardrunners could. That being said, I don't want to sound like a zealot and I have enough self-awareness to know that I have to do some proving to show that I'm committed to working for Cardrunners, so that's exactly what I intend to do. Within the next couple days I'll try to post a more comphehensive introduction and a brief story of my poker history, but for now I hope you guys are willing to welcome me into the Cardrunners family - and of course enjoy my videos. :)

ON HERO CALLS
I've been kind of lazy lately, but I thought I might enter in another blog entry since I had a couple of hands fresh on my mind. I'll get around to a lifestory sort of post a little bit later, but for now I wanted to write a bit about hero calls, since I've gotten a few questions about them lately. Hero calls are an interesting topic, and they're a very misunderstood topic as well. This is in large part because a lot of people are really bad at them, and it's very hard to discriminate through a hand history alone how bad any particular hero call is. A lot of people hero call out of frustration, some people hero call because they refuse to fold a hand of a certain strength because they feel it's exploitable, and most people hero call because they can imagine their opponents bluffing and want to look cool. But a hero call is always interesting - and what I mean by interesting is it is always a high point of information exchange. For example, two people reraising and getting all-in with AK vs QQ - this is actually an uninteresting hand although it is a big pot, there is no information exchanged when your opponent gets all-in with QQ, and there's no information that he receives when he sees you stacking off with AK. Both players know exactly how their opponents will play their respective hands. There are countless examples, such as getting in top two against an overpair on the flop or a flush over a flush, but in general any hand where two people run into the top of each other's ranges tends to be an uninteresting hand as far as how it affects the exchange of information (and thus, the complexity of the match). But hero calls are different. Hero calls are when one player calls with the bottomish part of his range when his opponent is representing the toppish part of his range. What this means is that there is a lot of communication that is going on - beyond each player seeing each other's hands, the hero caller is always saying something that he wants his opponent to hear. The message is usually along the lines of "you need to bluff less in these sorts of spots, because I'm willing to call weak hands," in which case the hero call is generally going to be a very marginal one, because the hero caller is aware that it's quite possible that his opponent isn't bluffing as often as he needs to be for the call to be correct. The call is mostly for the sake of ensuring that his opponent doesn't bluff too much or think that he is getting too much respect for his own good. It may of course be that the call is correct and the caller thinks it's very likely that the call is correct, but nonetheless the message is passed on to the bluffer that he needs to bluff less in that spot, because he now knows that the hero caller thinks he's bluffing too much. This leads to both players readjusting their games - generally along the lines of the bluffer bluffing less, and the hero caller hero calling less. Now, this sort of "you need to bluff me less" hero call doesn't always work the way it's intended. Like I said, its purpose is to get the bettor to make fewer bluffs because he should be afraid that the caller is

calling with a higher frequency, and I think it can generally be mapped out like this: 1. If the caller hero calls, and the bettor shows the top of his range (a hand that both players know that the bettor is always betting regardless of his perception of the dynamic), then the call will have moderate efficacy in getting him to bluff less. 2. If the caller hero calls and the bettor shows up with a bluff, then the call will have high efficacy in getting him to bluff less. 3. If the caller hero calls, and the bettor shows a thin value bet (insinuating that the bettor was able to foresee the caller making a hero call at that moment), then the result is pretty unpredictable, and the bettor is in control of the situation. That is, he can start bluffing more if he feels that the caller is going to be too scared to hero call again in fear of a thin valuebet, or he can start bluffing less if he feels like the caller is calling too much (as indicated by the hero call he just witnessed). Essentially, the caller failed to communicate anything to the bettor, because the bettor was already able to predict what he wanted to say. A good analogy would be being out with a friend and you say "PUNCH BUGGY BLUE" but before you finish he punches you in the face. Clearly, he has made you his bitch. So, that being said, there is another kind of hero call. A good name for it would be the soulread, and it is very different from the previous sort of bluffcall (which usually railbirds or lower stakes players cannot at all discern, and is sometimes also difficult to tell for good players from a hand history alone). A soulread is essentially when you are able to map out most of your opponent's range in your mind, and when he makes a bluff you realize with a certainty that your opponent can't have valuebets often enough because of the line he has taken. So, essentially, the call is made solely with immediate EV in mind, its value does not rest on communicating anything to your opponent (since, in reality, you'd prefer it not to communicate anything at all, because you'd want your opponent to keep taking horrible lines so you can keep soulreading him). In reality, the soulread is to poker as the pimpslap is to pimping, so as awesome as it is to do, it always has repercussions on the recipient that will usually discourage him or her from getting into similar situations in the future. But the soulread always hinges on very concrete range analysis - even if it's not totally conscious or "based on feel," any true (or, well, any good) soulread will always have range analysis at the heart of it. There's nothing mystical about it, just knowing enough about your opponent to see why he can't have enough hands in any certain bluffing spot. So, that being said, there are a couple of hands that I've gotten some requests to dissect, so I figure this is as good a forum as any to do so. The first hand I'm going to take a look at is my semi-notorious J high call (you can see the original thread here) http://www.pokerhand.org/?3718793 Okay, so let's take this hand street-by-street, and I'll discuss my reads as the hand progresses. I 3-bet preflop with J7s. Obviously a weak hand, but okay for 3-betting as it can make straights and flushes and shit. He calls, and I know that he is calling preflop with a reasonably wide range. Flop comes 862ss. Now, this is a flop that I expect RS_Hustla to be floating a lot, hoping to rep hands later. So, given that read my flop bet is, in a vacuum, probably pretty -EV. But when I bet this flop, I am doing so with the intention of betting a lot of turns to get him off of a lot of marginal floats (random A high Q high crap, T9 97 56 type stuff, and I'm sure 33/44 will fold on most turns). Now, an important thing to realize though was that RS_Hustla was jamming a lot of flops on me in 3-bet pots. I was assuming, then, that on a board like this most of his jamming range would be stuff like big flush draws (stuff that he wanted to jam to get me to fold out AQ/AK rather than slowplay and have to make a sketchy turn decision). He could also of course shove a moderate flush draw or a straight draw, but it becomes more likely that he'd call, and another thing to note is that with a multidraw like 45ss or 97ss, there's actually a reasonable chance that he'd slowpla. So, one of my big reads on RS_Hustla was that he was shove-happy and didn't like to put himself into marginal situations with good hands. Now, he calls the flop, so I'm going to put his range as being some of the marginalish flush draws that he either didn't feel comfortable or decided not to jam, ace high and occasional weaker high card floats, sets, straight draws, 78 type hands, small pairs, and maybe an occasional gutter. A pretty wide range obviously. Now, the turn comes an offsuit ace, and this is one of the ideal cards for me to barrel. I can push him off of a gutter that he floated, I can bet him off a straight draw (or bet twice), and the same is true if he has 44

or a 78 type hand. If he has a marginal flush draw he won't be able to jam this turn (or at least I think he won't), and so with a hand like jack high it's actually probably the best card in the deck besides something that pairs me. So I bet out. Now, what do I think he's doing with his hands here? * 45/68/97 (oesd's) I think he'd call again * 78 he'd probably call to fold river * 44 he MIGHT call to fold river * Weak flush draws he'll call to play river straightforward * A set he will probably jam but he MIGHT slowplay it, but given that the board has a straight draw, flush draw, and the ace hit and of course he'll put me on an ace a lot, usually he'll just ship at this point * A small ace that he floated - he will almost certainly jam the turn. Now, this read is actually crucial I've seen a hand before where he played a hand in a similar fashion, and the reasoning is pretty straightforward - he wants to just ship it in now and prevent a bad card from hitting on the river, maybe get me to call with a JJ that I'm betting thin with, and from his perspective if I have a bigger ace he's just content with losing the pot. Most players would prefer to slowplay a hand like A8 here to try to induce a river barrel, but this player is just jamming the turn the majority of the time. * Aces up, I think he can probably slowplay the turn or jam, both are reasonable. * A gutter is rare, but I think it wouldn't blow my mind to see him float again with 9T hoping I'd give up so he could jam the river himself Now, he calls without too much deliberation (which also suggests to me that he probably doesn't have an ace or a set, since he'd consider jamming both of those hands). Now the river hits an offsuit Q, and I have to make a decision. Do I want to continue and jam this river? Or do I want to check? Well, to make that decision I have to decide what his hand range is and what I think he'll do with it once I check. So the hands he can still have are some of 78ish type stuff, very few 44 type hands, lots of flush draws and straight draws, the occasional Ax, and then some sets. Now, if I jam, I'm probably going to make him fold the 78 and the 44, but he's calling every time with the set and the Ax. If he has a flush draw or a straight draw he'll fold every time, and I beat all of his straight draws and flush draws except for the occasional jack high flush draw that's slightly better than mine that decided not to raise the flop (a Q high fd he'd check back on the river, and a K high flush draw I think he'd almost always get it in on the flop). So if I jam the river, he folds 78 and 44, and then calls his Ax's, w/ a Q8 type thing, and calls his sets. However, if I check the river, what's he going to do? He'll check back 78 and 44, he'll jam his Ax's, jam his sets, and, most importantly, jam all of his missed straight and flush draws. So you can see, between these two options, if I check to call the river then I will always lose my last 1200 if he has Ax or a set or Q8, so you can imagine that we can subtract this from both sides of the equation and just look at what's left. Should we jam to make him fold 78 and the occasional 44, or should we check to call to make him jam all of his straight and flush draws? Well, I thought that he had more than enough straight and flush draws in his range to make checking the river to call better than jamming here, so I checked and called with jack high. That was a long post and took me longer than I expected to do, but I hope maybe some of you learned something from that. I'll try to post a proper introduction tomorrow or the day after. Until then, GL at the tables all.

MY UNEXPECTEDLY UNINTERESTING STORY, PT. 1

Well, I've finally mustered up the patience/motivation to knock down another one of these blog posts, which I guess means it's story-telling time. I've been running pretty bad lately, so I've been taking a few days off to clear my head a little and recharge my luckbox, but maybe making a post like this will revitalize me. I must admit that nowadays I'm a pretty whiny shit as far as poker goes, and I guess I relate to some of Raptor's emorage rants, but I'll hold off on those for a while. For now, I'll recount the story of how I came to know this crazy game, and my rise from nobodiness to being one of the biggest luckboxes on the intertubes. It all started three years ago, back in January 2006. Our young hero was then a disillusioned 16 year old boy, unenthused by school and unsure about what he wanted to do with his life. At that time I was in my second semester at UNT; I was in a program called the Texas Academy of Math and Science, which took high school students after their sophomore year and let them take two years of college early. When I first entered the program, I was convinced that I wanted to major in physics, because I had read a few books about theoretical physics in middle school, and the idea of spending my life divining the mysteries of the universe just seemed sublime and easy to embrace. I knew I was very intelligent and I had always gotten good grades without trying, and I managed to pull a 4.0 in my first semester at UNT. My future

seemed to be chugging along nicely until I actually started to take high level math and physics courses, I found myself strangely uninterested. It never quite took root in me, it felt like a chore. Nothing stuck. I made it through my lectures and pulled through with decent grades, but I skipped out all the time and crammed my way through just about every exam I had. There was never a whiff of any overwhelming purpose, anything that called my name, anything that dared me to challenge it. There was just going, just days, just time passing. I had no idea what to make of any of it. I think I had expected to just fall into something a calling so tremendous that it would possess me like a madness, and then I wouldnt even have to make a choice, Id just know what to do. I waited, but nothing happened. Nothing seemed easy. So, I was afflicted with a vague malaise around that time. I remember a friend of my roommate invited me to play some poker with him and a few other guys. I said okay, as I had nothing much else to do, and we had a friendly game with some play chips. At that time in my life, the only form of poker I'd ever played was five card draw with my cousins or brothers, and there had never been any betting. So we played maybe five or ten hands of Texas Hold'em, and I had no earthly idea what I was doing, or how the hell the community cards worked. I actually didn't really have any idea how the betting worked either, so they kept having to amend my decisions ("Hmm, I dunno what to do, I call." "Dude, nobody's bet. You have to bet or check"). It was pretty dumb and left me feeling pretty retarded when we broke the game, so later that night I looked up some information about Texas Hold'em to figure out the rules so I wouldn't humiliate myself if I ever played it again. I remember I was browsing around the internet for a while and read some stuff about the online poker craze, and about these rag to riches online poker phenoms. It was interesting to say the least, and I thought it might be something worth trying my hand at. Two birds with one stone - pick up a hobby to pursue in my free time and maybe make a little money on the side so it wouldn't feel too pointless or unproductive. Things started to take off when an online friend of mine who I'd met through playing some online computer games back when I was in middle school told me that he had played a bit online poker and made a little cash. He had played under his uncle's account and cashed out the money he made through him, but told me that he was pretty good at it and it was easy money. I was interested by the idea - I figured, shit, if this idiot can make money at it then why the hell can't I? So I decided to partner up with him and we decided that we would learn the game together. I started reading up some crappy poker strategy from one of the billion garbage sites out there, reading up on Sklansky hand groupings and flush draw odds and all that good stuff, really not understanding a lick of it. The game seemed very complex and fascinating, and I wondered what it'd be like to really get good at a game like this and understand all of the nuances that underlie playing a game of poker. It seemed overwhelming. I started dabbling in play money on Stars and PartyPoker to get some experience, and of course I built up some respectable play money bankrolls on both sites and felt like I had the hang of it. Everybody just seemed to be throwing money at me how the hell could I not get rich off of this game, I thought to myself. I decided it was time to take the leap. I was 16, was being supported by my parents, and had no job or anything to produce any cash, but I knew I had to get money online and start playing with the big boys. So, my first option was of course to ask my older brother he was 18, although he didnt have a job at the time, he was going to school and had a credit card so I figured hed be able to get me started. I called him up one day and told him about my great proposition. Listen man, this game is so easy, you know Im smart so Ill be able to dominate this game. Its just that in order to deposit on these sites you need at least $50, so you think you could help me out and get me started? Id pay you back no problem, Im telling you this online poker thing is a goldmine. Ive already made a ton of play money, I know Im ready. A seemingly reasonable request, I thought. I still remember his big-brotherly concern What, are you crazy?! Are you addicted to gambling now? $50, you must be out of your mind, you think Id give you $50 just so you could lose it playing some card game?? Ive watched Intervention before on TV, I know how these gambling addictions go; you need to get this shit out of your mind. Youre an idiot. $50, goddamn. Err Shit. Okay, well I guess thats over. At least, thats what I thought until a few days later when I was browsing around and found the answer to all my problems. Apparently, PartyPoker would give you $50 + a $25 bonus without ANY deposit, just by scanning your drivers license and sending it to them! This clearly solved everything except that I didnt have a drivers license. But being the crafty motherfucker I was, I

fired up Google Image and pulled off the very first drivers license that popped up that didnt seem fake or had something blurred out. My friend did the same thing, and we managed to get our very first poker accounts started without having deposited anything. I guess thats how it all started. I still remember my first game on PartyPoker, I needed to play 500 hands to get my $25 bonus unlocked, so I decided to start with the lowest stakes they had available: 2c/4c fixed-limit. I was nervous as hell, and had very little idea of what I was doing. Every bet I had to call scared the shit out of me; I dont think that I had felt a continuous rush like that ever before in my life. I ended up losing like 30 cents or something if I remember, and I just felt absolutely repulsed. Id never felt so bad about anything before. It just seemed impossible to win, and I was convinced that I was doomed to lose all of my money. After all the hard work I had gone through to get my journey started, it seemed like itd never get off the ground. Well, after I finally unlocked my bonus hovering around a $49 for a while, I decided that with $74 it was time to take a shot at real poker, the stuff I had been reading about on these websites for so long No Limit Holdem, the Cadillac of poker. I jumped into a 10c/25c game, since the 5c/10c games back then were always full. So with three buyins, I played a 25NL game and I somehow managed to donk up some money. It was always nerve-wracking to play, but I ended up turning $75 into $125, and I felt like maybe I had some hope after all. Clearly, it was time to try my hand at the big game 25c/50c. God, I was an idiot. I remember I was on the verge of losing everything while playing there my roll dipped down to $30 at one point, but somehow I managed to get on a run and turn that $30 into $200. Despite my good luck, I felt more vulnerable than ever after that experience. It really just felt like gambling, it didnt seem at all like the shit in Rounders. I started to feel more protective of my money, and I remember around then I read an article about bankroll management and how to grind microstakes full-ring basically setmining 101. That seemed to make a lot more sense. That seemed like a real narrative, it seemed sensible. Thats how to really get good at anything, you frame yourself in a narrative and you play it out. The article said that PokerStars was the hardest site because it had the best players, but it was good for learning to grind microstakes. So then I decided, okay, Ill take the hard path. Ill get good, and then Ill crush this game. Its time to start the story of the grind. Once I told my brother that I had turned nothing into $200, he reluctantly agreed to let me use his name to cash out money from PartyPoker and move it onto PokerStars. I made myself an account there ipokeder was born, and I began my experience as a serious poker player. It was hard. I was bad. I was grinding full ring on one table, and although I was playing 5c/10c so I was amply rolled, the money still scared me. I remember the fear of betting a whole dollar, that bigass blue chip came down on the table like a boom of thunder; almost all of my bets unless I had the immortal nuts were under a dollar no matter what the pot size was. Hah, I think that probably the first step in the evolution of any online poker player who built up from nothing is getting over the fear of betting a whole dollar. Well, despite having some reasonable resources on setmining I was still not playing well and didnt seem to be really be winning much, and I was getting pretty discouraged, so I decided to try my hand at 6max instead it seemed less boring, at the very least. Well, on my first day I got totally destroyed. I ended up going down to like an $80 roll, and it felt like the end of the world. It all just seemed insurmountable, I couldnt win at anything. Well, as happens, the next day I played for almost 8 hours straight, missing all my classes, and ended up going on a winning streak beyond my wildest dreams. I ended up making over $100 in a single day! Holy fucking Christ, I never knew I was so good! I decided then that itd be 6-max for me, 6-max to the end. Screw full ring, Im gonna tear this shit up. Well, thats really when stuff started to take off. Of course, it was slow, and I had been playing only full ring for a couple months, but I was starting to get into the swing of 6-max and was even able to play two whole tables at the same time (holy shit), so things seemed to slowly fall into place. It took a while, especially because there werent really any good 6-max resources that I could find at the time (I wouldnt find twoplustwo until much later in my career), so I was in large part winging it and making rules for myself. I remember some of the ridiculous crap I came up with I remember once telling myself that I should limp AJ because I dont want people to call with AK or AQ and win a big pot, and I remember once when my aces got cracked by 62, coming to the realization that if I played small cards and flopped twopair, itd be so disguised that nobody would ever know and Id get paid off so easily. So, I started playing a lot of random small cards so I could spike twopairs. Hoo boy. All-in-all, the first two months were pretty grueling, although I stuck to it. I remember looking up in PokerTracker a while later that during the first two months of playing, I was making $1.75 an hour playing poker. Like a babystep up from working in a Chinese sweatshop, but I was learning slowly.

I ended up slowly working my way up to .25/.50, and finally up to .5/.1, and at that point I hit a roadblock. At this point I was able to 4-table, but I just was breaking even and I could feel it. I could tell that people were too smart, I just wasnt outplaying enough people, the regs were all just too good. I wasnt beating them anymore. Then, the day that stars came out with resizable tables, I was so thrilled that I tried 9-tabling for the first time. I ended up losing like 8 buyins, and just felt horribly depressed at that point. I then decided to do something totally retarded I sent my roll to somebody who I didnt know very well for safekeeping. This guy was supposed to be a good limit player who had fell on hard times, and so I figured Id ease my conscience a little by helping him out and letting him use my bankroll to play for a while, and give myself a break from the game for a while to clear my mind. At the time, I actually felt really good about it felt like a weight off my shoulders, like Id taken my shitty situation and turned it into something positive. But then a week later, I asked him for my money back so I could start up playing again. Of course, he told me he had cashed it out for living expenses. Turned out, he actually owed a lot of people money. A lot of people, a lot of money. He basically told me that the money I lent him was at the bottom of his list of priorities, and hed get it to me once he got on a good run. Ahaha, sometimes I just amaze myself. So now I am pretty sure that I have just totally squandered everything by trusting this apparent degenerate enough to send him my roll, which of course at this point I realize was immeasurably stupid and would never be worth the risk regardless. So I eventually go around asking everybody I know (Id gotten to know several other poker players at this point) to see if I can get a helping hand, explaining my situation. My friend Fira offers to help me out he gives me what he calls a $500 stake, though if I recall it was actually a loan because I didnt pay him back any more than $500. So I end up getting another chance. Well, basically I did a lot of weird stuff around this time I end up spending some time playing prima, I spend some time grinding turbo SNGs, I spend some time bonus whoring boss network sites, and nothing really ended up working I hovered around t he same bankroll for most of it. This went on for a while until a friend of mine, Ludovic Lacay (Cutsss) told me to get onto Full Tilt and start grinding their $1000 bonus. Id never played Full Tilt before that, so I decided that since nothing else had really worked, I might as well give that a shot. So, I started grinding 6-max 50NL on Full Tilt, and thats when everything started to really click, and I started to push ahead of the curve. It was around this time that somebody had introduced me to CardRunners, and I started watching every video. A friend of mine had paid for a subscription and let me bum it off of him, so I was slowly assimilating information as I was moving my way up through stakes on FTP. 50NL, 100NL, and then soon I reached 200NL, which was an enormous milestone for me my roll had surpassed 4k, even after paying back my loan. I had built myself back up to even higher before, having essentially restarted my entire roll. I was running well of course, but my confidence was peaking it was around this time, a couple months after I originally sent him the money, that the degen who I had handed my roll finally decided to pay me back. I soon moved up to 2/4, where I continued to crush relentlessly. It was amazing back then how much profit you could make from just 3-betting people light I was definitely one of the only FTP regs then at midstakes who was 3-betting people light and abusing position, basically parroting everything I saw in these CR videos and netting good results. I was just making INSANE opens with like Q4s from the cutoff! Seriously groundbreaking stuff. Everything was working.

POKER IS A WHORE.
Poker is a whore. But Im sure you all know this by now. I have run absurdly bad against Gus; I should be up several 100k against him, but instead Im down several, so Im going to be playing a little lower for a while and hopefully I can reset my luckbox. Its all pretty frustrating though, PLO is just a really annoying game at times. Lately its been feeling like one step forward, two steps back. But enough of that, Ill talk about some more abstract stuff today. Ill continue my poker story probably in my next blog post. There are lots of ideas that I have that I tend to mull over in my mind but dont really have discussions with anybody about, since they tend to be pretty abstract or inconsequential and dont really make for good conversation fodder, so I figure that a blog is probably a pretty good place to inform some of these meditations. So the topic of the day is variance. Obviously, everybody knows what variance is. There are two main topics that I think I want to talk about, and the first one has more of a PSA feel to it, so I think Ill talk about it first since it probably is more relevant to the average blog reader. To put the thesis simply, variance takes a lot of forms, and people dont really tend to acknowledge variance in every form it takes. The word we essentially use for variance in poker is running bad (since nobody ever cares to talk about when theyre running good; when were running good we either tell people were crushing or dont bother to talk to other people about how were doing). People say that theyre running bad in a number of different situations, the most prevalent of which is when they get their money in

good, and their opponent ends up sucking out to win the pot. To almost any poker player, this is what it means to run bad. The other situation when people think they run bad is when they get their money into a spot where theyre usually making money but they end up e behind. People think they run bad when they get KK vs AA, they think they run bad when they get a set under a set, flush under flush, etc. And most annoyingly, they think they run bad when a stupid program like PokerEV tells them that theyre running under expectation. Now, most of these events are reasonable indicators of running bad, quite obviously. But none of these situations are actually synonymous with running bad. Heres a simple fact that for some reason people refuse to understand: you cannot run bad and still be winning. Period. If you think that youre just so good and awesome that you were running bad today but you still won because youre just so good and awesome, youre wrong. You didnt run bad. You may have gotten more KK vs. AAs then you would on a normal day, or maybe you got oversetted twice and still managed to win which has convinced you that youre Gods gift to poker, but this whole way of thinking about variance is just deluded and overly simplistic. For the hell of it, lets try to break down why exactly we think were running bad when we get KK vs. QQ and lose. Ive thought about this a bit, and it seems that the simplest way to analyze this situation in terms of a basic impulse is simply this: I found myself in a situation in which I am typically rewarded, but that reward was withheld. Every time we as poker players get dealt KK and get all-in preflop, we of course have a very strong expectation of getting rewarded. After all, when we get KK all-in preflop against QQ, we win a buyin more than 4 out of 5 times, so its a perfectly rational association that we build between getting KK all-in preflop and getting rewarded. In a (gratuitously cynical) sense, we become like Pavlovs dog the expectation to win the pot is like salivating when Pavlov rings the bell the sound of the bell being equivalent to getting dealt KK. And so, getting upset about losing a KK vs. QQ is analogous to Pavlov (poker in our case) ringing the bell, but not bringing us the food we were expecting. Now, I dont know if the emotional palette of dogs extends to feeling frustration, but certainly we humans do when our expectations are so betrayed. (And of course, betrayed is an interesting word to use here maybe our relationship to poker is a lot closer to a dogs relationship to Pavlov than were ready to admit, but thats a grimmer discussion for another day.) So essentially, the emotion of having our expectations betrayed makes us feel that were running bad. As I said before, these events are generally good indicators of running bad so its not irrational by any means to assume that youre running bad when you lose KK vs. QQ. But running bad doesnt mean anything unless you define it over a window of time. You cant just run bad in a vacuum, you have to run bad over some period of time, whether it be a hand or a session or a month. Now, lets take a look at running bad over one hand how should we objectively (rather than emotionally) judge what it means to run bad? Well, running bad means simply running under expectation. So in the course of this hand, we have to look at what our standard expectation is clearly, we got dealt KK and our opponent got dealt QQ, and so well win 4/5 of the time. So were running under expectation when we lose, because in this situation we should usually win. So then were running bad? Yep, we sure are. Okay, lets move on to the next window. Say we play a session, and we get dealt AA/KK five times vs QQ/JJ, getting it in good every time, and we win three times and lose two times; those were the major hands, everything else essentially broke even. Are we running bad? Well, again, clearly we should be winning 4/5 of the time when we get in an overpair against a lower pair, and we only won 3/5 of the time. Again, were running under expectation for this situation. Now, just extend this analogy over a month say youre in the red with KK and AA but still ended up on the month, blah blah blah, you get the picture, running bad. So, in all three of these situations I agree that the conclusion is that were running bad but why exactly are these analyses nonetheless incorrect? Well, the simple answer is that theyre setting constants that arent really constant. Let me explain what I mean. Look back at the hand where we get dealt KK when we analyzed that hand, we were looking at the equity of KK against QQ. But if we want to isolate how were running our expectation alone, then we have to recognize that its arbitrary how much we decide to fix whats constant in the hand. In the situation we looked at, we decided to fix the ranges after getting all-in preflop, and thats where we analyzed the equity and then decided who was running bad (and this precedent of course is established by using things like Pokerstove and hand calculators and PokerEV and whatnot). But that setup is arbitrary: why dont we freeze the hand after the flop is dealt (say the flop is Q 7 5)? Clearly in all hands where we get all-in preflop with KK vs QQ and the flop comes out Q 7 5, were usually going to lose, so in that situation were not running bad at all. That sounds a little absurd, but why is that analysis invalid? Well, you could say, the flop comes out differently, thats just one of the many possible flops, and since you dont have any control over what flop comes out when you get all-in preflop, you should freeze the hand at that point. Well, thats the only counterargument I think that could get anybody out of the Q 7 5 argument, but that argument actually ends up collapsing in on itself too. Heres why: we have established with this argument that its okay to unfreeze a hand and move the moment of constancy (Ill use this term to refer to the point at which the

hand is frozen) earlier in the hand. The reason that we provided was because we had no control over how the flop came out. But once we start to talk about control in poker, we set ourselves upon a slippery slope. So by this line of reasoning, if we want to move the moment of constancy up a little higher, we just have to isolate a point after which we have no control over the results. Well, lets take a look at when our opponent flips up his hand he shows us QQ, but we had no control over what hand our opponent ended up showing up there with. If he had AA, then our equity would not have been 80%, nor if he had AK. So clearly we had no control over him having QQ, so we can move the moment of constancy up one point to the point of getting KK all-in preflop against his handrange (we could of course, if we so desired, recalculate our equity for getting all-in against his range in general). But we can go even farther. We had no control over whether or not our opponent would jam over us after we 4-bet him he could have been 3-bet bluffing us and just have folded his hand, so since we had no control over the fact that he happened to have a hand worth getting it in with after we 4-bet him preflop, we move the moment of constancy up even higher; now all we have is that we 4-bet him after he 3-bet us, which of course is lower EV than getting it all-in preflop. But really, if we think about, we didnt have any control over the fact that he 3-bet us in the first place he just happened to have a hand. All we had control over was our initial raise in the first place. So we move the moment of constancy up again all we were really entitled to was however much money we win when we get dealt KK and raise preflop (the average BB won per KK is like, what, 4 or something?). But then we take the final leap we had no control over getting dealt KK. In reality, the only thing we had control over was deciding whether or not to sit out preflop. By deciding not to sit out that hand, we certainly werent entitled to getting KK all-in against QQ nor were we entitled to getting all-in with KK against his handrange, nor getting 3-bet, nor getting even dealt KK in the first place. So what are we entitled to? Well, simple whatever our average winning per hand is. Boom. And at this point, the argument should make perfect sense. Every time you play 5 hands, your EV over 5 hands is your EV per hand * 5 hands. So every time you win a buyin over 5 hands, no matter what the situation was or how bad your opponent is, you are running way over expectation. Well, you might think that this sort of thinking doesnt allow room for being able to play better or worse affecting your expectation in reality, the games youre playing in, the opponents youre up against, and the quality of your play at the time all have an effect of your EV per hand. And youd be right in that regard but you have to recognize the extent to which we have control over these things. Its important to realize that at any moment youre playing, the set of all strategies that youd use in response to a any situation is already embedded in your brain in a way, you dont have control over that. That is, you cant suddenly decide to use a strategy that you dont know is a good strategy, or decide to not make a mistake in a spot where youre already predisposed to make a mistake. So, for example, if you tend to call too many 3-bets with weak hands, in that moment you have no control over this leak of yours; its a part of your average EV in that moment. Over time you can change these predispositions and make your game slowly stronger as you gain more and more good habits and break bad ones, and your EV per hand will slowly increase over time. But in any moment, the factors over which you exert genuine control as a poker player are actually surprisingly small. I think they are limited to these three things one, how hard you choose to table select. Now note, this is not choosing the table its meaningless to analyze the EV of yourself in a game with 5 superdonks, because you had no control over such a table existing; you only had control over your table selection standards. So youll have an average EV per hand for a certain threshold of table selection. The second thing you have control over is your tilt / self-awareness. This is quite obvious no matter what game youre playing in or how much youre up or down, you always have control over whether to take a short break, whether to get somebody to talk to you to get your head back on straight, whether to quit the game and cool off, or even just take a moment to re-analyze the game and yourself and reset your clarity. This is what decides whether youre thinking through every hand or simply auto-piloting through. And then the third thing you have control over is just when you play, and for how long (which overlaps somewhat with the other two). These three factors are the only things that you as a poker player have genuine control over everything else is out of your control. Who you play, how bad they are, how long the fish stays, how many KK vs. AAs or AA vs. KKs you get, how many times you soulread the fish, and how many times you bluff off a stack to your table nemesis these things are only in your control as much as these three factors are in your control. Everything else is simply permutations that were already there, they are simply one of the many possibilities that could happen given the set of your intuitions about poker and the way you react to different scenarios. So, to put the point simply, your EV over any session is simply whatever the EV is of:

You playing with your game selection standards You playing in whatever state of mind youre in You playing when and however long you play

And thats it. Thinking about what your EV was when you got all-in with KK vs. QQ, or what your EV was when you played heads up with that huge fish, or what your EV was when you made that monstrous soulread, the simple fact is that none of these analyses actually tell you your true expected value. And certainly your PokerEV graph doesnt. The reality is that your EV is going to be, on average (with the three aforementioned factors presumed constant, which they arent) whatever your winrate is. Thats it. If youre winning 50 cents a hand, and you played 1000 hands, then your EV was on average $500, give or take based on those three factors. So, if you won $1000 over that session but you lost two stacks with AA, you were still running good, because you were simply fortunate to run better in the scenarios you were given other than the two AA stacks. Same thing if youre up 100k over a big sample and your PokerEV graph shows youre supposed to be up 20k more, theres a pretty good chance that you ran good on the whole to have gotten yourself into enough positive scenarios beyond the ones where you got your money in good and lost. So ultimately, whats the point of this big long rant? Well, the point is lets simply define running under expectation as winning less than you ought to, and running bad as actually running significantly less than you ought to. Under these definitions, and referencing the fact that of course variance for everyone has grown tremendously in the last year of poker if youre winning at all, then youre not running bad. Ask one of the many extremely good players who are genuinely running bad, losing over large samples of hands, over months at a time, but who are still much better than you and have higher genuine edges in the games that they play they are fucking running bad, and lets reserve the word for those people out of respect for how nice it is just to not lose money. Lots of people dont appreciate winning 1/10th of what they consider to be a good month, and allow me to set those people straight by saying that those people are bitches, and if they actually ran bad (or remembered what it was like when they ran bad), theyd appreciate just not being down and would suck it up. So, all-in-all, if youre not running bad, then shut the fuck up and be grateful. Poker is a whore, but shes like one of those whores in a movie or something who everybody thinks is stupid and doesnt know anything but actually knows all of the secrets of life if you ask her. Even whores have something to teach if youre willing to learn. Well, there was another topic I wanted to talk about, but this ended up taking me way longer than I expected. So I guess Ill post that later (lol). Procrastination FTW. Next post Ill try to make the continuation of the previous blog post though. So, until next time.

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Entry Tags: poker, whore, is a

When lemons give you life, make lifenade

So I havent written a blog entry in a couple weeks. From what I hear, this is not a good way to run a blog, so Im going to try to be a little more regular with writing entries. Ive felt a vague sense of guilt over not having written one yet, but I think I know why that is. The first and probably primary reason is that I have been on a rough downswing since Christmas and have just felt really shitty about poker in general. Unfortunately, thats made me feel a lot less motivated to do extraneous stuff like writing blog entries. Also, I have promised a couple of times to chronicle the latter half of my poker history, and really, I just dont find it very interesting to write about. Im not really in a positive state of mind nowadays, and its not very cathartic to try to frame my bitching in some glowing narrative; Id much rather write some sobstory about how the world sucks and god hates me. So, in the interest of

writing anything at all, Ill delay the poker story crap for a day when I am feeling less negative. So the first thing that I should probably get out of the way post is a follow-up to the preceding post I made, Poker is a Whore, which got an insane amount of views and feedback (thanks in large part to Taylor Cabys props). There were some comments and messages I got from a number of people, either wholly disagreeing with me or pointing out some inconsistencies / leaps of logic that were present in the post. As for those people who disagree with me outright, I dont think theres a lot to say other than that if my general point didnt come across then the argument probably isnt going to be resolved. But as far as some of the inconsistencies or leaps of logic, many of my detractors are absolutely right that I took a few leaps of logic and some of my arguments were hyperboles. Specifically, when I said that you cant run bad and still be winning clearly, thats not true, and it was mostly an exaggerated point for rhetorical effect (obviously if you have a winrate of 10ptbb with a low standard deviation and you win 1ptbb over 100k hands, youre running pretty bad). I was mostly thinking of higher stakes players when writing it. At lower stakes, winrates are higher and SDs are lower so its not as reasonable of a claim. That was the main point I made that was a half-truth, and I was probably remembering the quote Ive read many times on twoplustwo: someday you will run worse than you ever thought possible. Just think of me like the preachers who will an hour long sermon describing how mindfuckingly hot the fire is in Hell. I just wanted to strike a little bit of the fear of God into my fellow poker players. The other main contention that people made was that you cant really know your true winrate, so therefore my point is moot. Well, the first part of that is true there is no point in your poker career at which you can know your true winrate due to the enormous variance inherent in poker; that, and the fact that your winrate is constantly changing as you navigate through different stakes, as game conditions change, and as your overall skill level / mental level changes over time. However, at any point in time your true winrate still exists, and obviously its going to be somewhere in the vicinity of whatever your winrate is over a large sample. So while I acknowledge this fact, you can still know your winrate

within some reasonably wide confidence interval but even if you didnt it wouldnt matter, because theres no operational content to my post anyway. Just stuff to mull over. If you failed to apply my thinking, nothing apparent would change in how you play poker or anything, so then clearly nothing important hinges on what assumptions you use to approximate your true winrate. There were some other points that were reasonable objections but theyre probably more tedious to rebut, and really I found that people were taking my post rather seriously while the main point was pretty simple. Disagreeing on the various details is fine; Im a blogging poker player, not an apologist. Anyway, lets settle on a topic for the day. As of late, Ive been emoraging pretty hard and been feeling vindictive about poker, which is a pattern of thinking usually followed by a lot of insecurity about what Im doing with my life. I was talking to one of my students yesterday about it, and we got into a discussion about life and the value of money and other sappy bullshit that Im not shameless enough to repeat here. But we got onto discussion of one interesting topic that has come up a few times in my recent past: the relationship between emotion and rationality in thinking about poker. What I mean by this is not the relationship between intuitive and rational thinking in poker (gut feelings or whatever); nonrational thinking is not equivalent to emotion. What I mean by emotion is rather how or what you feel while playing poker. You cant bring up any discussion about emotion in poker without talking about tilt. Tilt is the inner demon; it is what all players fear. It is the bane of poker, the snake, the thousand-eyed Argos, the sphinx. Tilt is the bitch god that watches everything you do, waiting for a reason to devour you, to strike you down, or just to make you shove every hand preflop. Everybody knows what tilt is, its in our gut, we know it like we know anger or fear. But if we want to lift ourselves out of our ordinary language and understand our relationship to this game we have to define what tilt is a little more clearly. As it happens, the phenomenon of tilt has been well studied by many people of greater insight than me, and tilt itself, under different names, has been a part of human performance since ancient bumfuck whenever. Its an integral part of sports psychology, or just the psychology of performance in

general all sorts of people learn how to deal with tilt, such as athletes, concert pianists, actors, portfolio managers, etc. Id say the cleanest and most reasonably inclusive definition of tilt would be as follows: tilt is when your ability to perform is negatively affected by irrelevant past or future events. Sounds vague enough, but I dont think its too vague. It covers pretty much anything if you lose a stack the previous hand and then you play worse the next hand, that qualifies as tilt since an irrelevant past event is affecting your ability to perform. The same could be said if you had just gone through some messy shit in your life (got in a fight, bad day, whatever) and that made you play poorly. It also takes into account tilting because youre anxious about something in the future. Looking in the other direction, it seems to be appropriately exclusive because it doesnt include something like somebody deceiving you with a metagame play or switching gears which causes you to make a mistake that doesnt qualify as irrelevant to the performance itself (the same way that a portfolio manager making a bad decision based on poor research doesnt count as tilt, although the past events clearly made a negative effect on his performance). One thing that this definition is pretty unclear about though are instances of tilt that involve physical inconstancies, such as being drunk, being tired, being sick, and the like. Lets just call this a special case of tilt, and ignore it for the time being. Of course this is not meant to be groundbreaking by any means, but this methodology forces us to think more clearly about concepts that are too integrated into our language and thought to be brought into focus. So weve established a pretty wieldy definition of what tilt is, whose essential phrase is irrelevant past or future events. If this is the truest definition of what it means to tilt, then we can infer what tiltlessness means: simply, to not tilt is to not let ones performance be affected by irrelevant past or future events. Well, theres a somewhat clich notion known as living in the moment is that the same thing? Living in the moment is more difficult to adequately define and has some aesthetic/spiritual baggage, so lets just say that theyre similar. But the core of the idea is the same I think. In order to completely escape tilt, you must sever your emotional attachment to the past and the future, and only think about now how do I optimize my play now, what is my opponent

thinking now, how are our strategies interacting now. There are things that escape us when we tilt, when emotion starts to affect our thoughts anger or indignation at being down or having a bluff called, anxiety about being on the losing end of a match, or having your concentration waver while something else in your life is hanging over you. You start to desire and think about things that are beyond your immediate situation, and the analytical thinking gets relegated to your subconscious, your auto-pilot. In order not to tilt, nothing else can matter but what matters in that moment you must be reborn into a new situation, and your past experience and choices can no longer matter, all that can matter is what you do in that moment with what the moment gives you. You alone with the moment. That is what completely tiltless play is: utter self-containment (or maybe its self-exclusion). With this characterization of totally tiltless play, we can return to the initial problem what is the relationship between emotion and rationality in poker? I think that the most common answer to this question is as follows: emotion is what causes tilt, since emotion is what makes us react to irrelevant past and future events; if we played purely rationally, then wed be tiltless, so the goal should be to purge emotion from poker. The ideal becomes total indifference. Well, aside from maybe monks or autistic people, nobody can experience poker that way. Each and every one of us, even the most seasoned of grinders, has some emotional attachment in every game he plays. We gets pleasure from winning and displeasure from losing if that werent the case, wed have no reason to ever play poker or get good at it in the first place. You must love to win in order to sacrifice all of the time, mental energy, and potential opportunities for the sake of getting good at poker. So clearly on the most basic level, emotion must have some place in poker, since these emotions are what drive us to put in hours and to better our skills. But I would go even further to argue that not only are emotions invaluable in the context of playing poker, but they can also be rational. Now, its important to clarify what exactly I mean by an emotion being rational because its a deceiving concept. When I say rational, what I mean is furthering ones ends or goals. This is different from the idea of justified emotions for example, the idea of justified anger, the idea that you both can and should get angry if somebody insults you. Essentially, this is a social idea which boils down to

people think its appropriate or obligatory to exhibit emotion X in situation Y. This is much different from the idea of rational anger, which would be distilled to in order to further ones ends, one should exhibit emotion X in situation Y. So getting angry at your child if he does something bad is rational because the act of getting angry will discourage the child from repeating the behavior. Of course, the anger is a justified emotion too, but for a markedly different reason. What I want to argue is that a lot of people talk about and approach tilt as though it were synonymous with emotion, and ultimately I think its downright wrong and actually an ineffective approach to understanding the problem. Lets instead use the framework I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and apply it to poker the social context that well assume is the community of professional poker players. Lets look at what are some justified (socially normalized) emotional responses to situations. One easy to grasp example would be getting hit and run anger is considered to be a justified response to getting hit and run. If you get angry after somebody hit and runs you, this is considered normal and a totally acceptable. An example of an unjustified response would be to show contempt after winning against somebody (i.e., berating somebody who lost to you). This would be considered unjustified and scummy/mean/a douche thing to do. Now what about rationality? How do decide which emotions are rational and which arent? Lets use the previous examples. If we get angry at a hit and runner, does this further our ends in any way? Well, Id say pretty clearly not the hit and runner wont be less inclined to hit and run us if we get angry, nothing positive comes out in our external (outside from poker) life from getting angry, and it has the possibility to negatively affect future hands that we play in poker. Clearly, getting angry at getting hit and run has no value to our ends. It is an irrational response. How about berating somebody who just lost to you? Well, Id say it probably depends berating somebody who has lost to you has the possibility of making him want to play you again, and if hes an inferior player then this is a pretty negative outcome. However, it may end up aggravating and tilting your opponent and discourage him from quitting you. In that case, it can have a very positive outcome. Of course, you also have to take into consideration what you think is the value of your reputation as somebody who doesnt berate others

(that is, not the monetary value, but the value to you). So berating your opponent can be rational, or it can be irrational, depending on how you think your opponent will react to the beration. Now lets try to focus on common forms of tilt and try to judge them in regards to rationality. When a poker player loses a big pot, he tends to feel upset or possibly angry. Different players feel this response to different degrees, so lets think about the gradations of this reaction after losing a big pot. On the extreme end of the spectrum is a player who gets very upset and angry when he loses a big pot. What this reaction will do is threefold: first, it will discourage him from losing big pots in the future. This is a good thing, because it will motivate him to want to play big pots well , and it will also encourage him to try to lower his own variance this effect is therefore rational, because it furthers his ends, whether he knows it or not. The second effect it has is that it makes him want to get his money back so as to feel unwronged (as an angry man feels unwronged when he punches the person who insulted him). This has a very negative effect on his immediate expectation, and is the most recognizable form of tilt the desire to get even will cause him to take gambles to try to play big pots with less regard for his holdings, will discourage him from folding hands (since he knows folding means he loses the pot), will get him to try to force more action, and can cause him to disregard his bankroll management. This effect is not merely negative its disastrous. The last effect that this reaction has is the external effect: the effect that it has on a persons life. If one is moved to anger easily by losing hands in poker, then not only does it immediately detriment ones emotional experience, but ones emotional threshold is lowered in general. Clearly, it is better to be more emotionally resolute. So, beyond being absurd, anger as a response to losing a big pot is overwhelmingly irrational. On the other end of the spectrum is complete indifference. That is, if you lose a big pot, you dont feel anything at all. You are totally detached from the money youre playing with; all youre interested in is playing your own game. What are the effects of this response? Well, externally its beneficial to not feel negative in your life when you lose at poker gives you an emotional composure thats hard to disrupt. Most poker players feel terrible when theyre going through rough patches, so

having to totally forego negative experiences is nice. However, there are also a few problems with this response. First and foremost would be that it when you dont feel bad about losing a big pot, your natural self-conditioning is impaired. Imagine one of those kids who are born without the ability to feel pain clearly, these kids will have fewer subjectively negative experiences, because they wont feel the pain of falling down, touching very hot things, running into objects, but ultimately it causes them to have enormous difficulties learning to avoid these negative stimuli. Foregoing the negative reaction also foregoes the conditioning that comes with it, and so if you feel the pain of falling down, youll learn to stop doing it. Perceiving the pain is precisely what forces you to adapt in a way that optimizes your performance. Thats not to say that people who are indifferent about winning or losing money will be clueless and just throw around money but what it does mean is that they will be much less adaptive than players who feel stronger reactions to losing. I think when you imagine this type of attitude, you shouldnt think about a stoic character like Jman shrugging off his losses, but think more of somebody like Guy Laliberte, who drops 500k and doesnt bat an eye, continuing to enjoy his afternoon. There are lots of advantages that players who have strong emotional ties to poker have that those who dont cannot, and like I said before, the desire to improve is closely tied to the desire to win. The last type of response is I think the most tempered one. It is to feel negative about losing a big pot, but not to feel angry about it. This player will think about big pots that he lost and question himself and feels uneasy whenever it seems like he mightve made a big mistake (even if he is being results oriented), but doesnt translate this negativity into anger or a feeling of being wronged . Instead he uses this emotional momentum to channel into constructive patterns of thought and re-evaluation. The effects of this sort of thought can range drastically some people dont have the emotional composure to distance themselves from poker, and so can feel pretty negative in their lives when theyre doing poorly, and yet other people can segregate their insecurities about poker from the rest of their emotional experience. Some people have slight tilt, some people are inclined to take breaks, and other people are driven to put in more rigorous hours and study the game harder. But ultimately what I

want to say is that in order to be a great poker player, your ideal shouldnt aspire to some kind of enlightened indifference. To be a great poker player, you have to struggle, to doubt yourself, to crave winning, and to hurt when you lose. So when you think about to avoid tilt and how to optimize your emotional relationship with poker, you shouldnt try to think of emotion as the bte noire. Being intimately attached to your poker experiences is integral to becoming a fuller player. You shouldnt think about trying to squelch your emotions, but instead you should try to evaluate them rationally, and then channel them into positive endeavors. So when you are going through a big downswing, instead of telling yourself that a real poker pro would be completely indifferent, what you should think instead is this: first, you should recognize that your negative reaction to your downswing is not merely justified, but its also to an extent rational (a process known as hypercognition). Feeling bad about losing is essential to getting better. Secondly, ask yourself how you are using this negative energy that the downswing has imbued in you. If you dont confront this question, then naturally the negative energy will take the form of negative effects on your poker game, making you more inclined to tilt, loosen your bankroll or game selection standards, and feel angry or vindictive about poker in general. Instead, you should consciously make yourself focus this negative energy on positive endeavors use the desire to win money back as an impetus to study the game more rigorously, to review sessions more frequently, to sweat your poker buddies to keep your wits sharp, or whatever else that you feel you can do to turn that negative energy into positive momentum. The third and I think most subtle element of coping in poker is the ability to reframe your narrative. This idea is rarely discussed, but I think its tremendously important to being an emotionally resilient poker player. Its impossible to play poker without framing yourself in some sort of a narrative when we start our careers, we imagine how were going to study and improve and move up stakes; we are all infatuated with the journey from rags to riches. Even for those people who no longer think in terms of moving up and down stakes, we are always framing our efforts into narratives of how much

youll make this month, next month, how much you made last year, how much youll make next year. A downswing is an unexpected blotch on this narrative. Any downswing is always going to frustrate the benchmarks that your narrative has arbitrarily defined for you. The ability to reframe your narrative is basically the ability to allow yourself to wipe the page clean and start anew from your new situation. You must be willing to repudiate your old goals and expectations and to supplant them with new ones. This means that in the middle a bad month, you dont think yourself, Ugh, my goal was to make 20k, but now Im down 10k. Im screwed, Ill never be able to make that money back, I should be up 10k by now, but instead, Okay, well I had a downswing and that was pretty unfortunate. My goal for the month is now just to get even; if I can get myself into the green on this month, then Ive accomplished something! This helps you to keep your spirits up and a positive mindset, making poor results much more manageable. Dont let your goals become your master; become the master of your goals. Tilt builds up gradually. Every moment that something goes wrong, a small increment is added toward your tilt threshold. Once you pass that threshold, then you start to tilt and make mistakes, and the further it goes, the more severe your tilt becomes. The obvious metaphor would be a thermometer that measures the temperature of water as it boils. Tilt itself, however, is not uniform. Downswings are a different species of tilt than the sort of tilt you experience within the window of a single session. Dealing with short-term tilt and long-term tilt are thus totally different skillsets, and I think that there are two main aspects to dealing with short-term tilt. The first aspect is preventative conditioning. Being realistic about your own level of self-control is essential to being emotionally intelligent even the best and most untiltable players will know (or approximate) their limits, and will have enough self-awareness to know when their own emotional stability wont be able to prevent them from some level of tilt. If Jman loses 7 buyins, even if he doesnt feel like hes tilting, he knows that he should quit or take a break. He doesnt tell himself no, Im not tilting I know that I am very good at handling tilt, I think Im playing fine. He has preventatively conditioned himself to quit after hes down however many buyins, or when he starts to feel the first

tinges of anger or frustration or whatever cocktail of emotions that he thinks precedes tilt. He doesnt have to know through his own intuition that hes tilting in order to engage in anti-tilt measures. Thats the point of preventative conditioning the state of mind we call tilt harms not only your poker judgment, but your self-judgment as well. The only way to keep yourself in check when you no longer should have faith in your own self-diagnosis is to condition yourself preemptively (like a sort of superconsciousness). So taking the previous metaphor and butchering it a little, preventative conditioning would be to say okay, after one minute of the stove being on, Im going to take the pot of water off the stove, even if my thermometer doesnt seem to say its boiling. This secondary rule will forcefully prevent tilt even when your inner thermometer is lying to you. The second aspect of short-term tilt is to slow the buildup of tilt. Like I said, tilt builds up gradually in small increments. The two ways to stop the pot from boiling over are either to set a rule to take it off the stove when it will probably start to boil or to turn down the heat on the stove so that it takes longer to boil. This would be the idea behind slowing the buildup of tilt. Essentially what you want to do is look at every possible incident that adds an increment of tilt to your tilt threshold, and to condition yourself so that its less likely to have an effect. For most people, the obvious candidate would be the loss of a big pot. The goal would be to condition yourself to not let this negative event contribute to your tilt threshold. There are numerous ways to do this, and since its a pretty subjective experience, different people have different solutions to this problem. Some people force themselves to shift the notion of winning the pot to making the right play, some people repeat to themselves vague mantras like thats poker, and yet other people have other convoluted mental mechanisms for dampening this effect. The important thing is that you find what works for you, and then you commit yourself to consciously applying it as often as you can. The unconscious association builds up between losing a big pot and some mental process that dampens its tilting effect, which allows you even in your least self-aware moment to keep your inner demon at bay. Ultimately, keeping emotion and rationality both in check is one hell of a balancing act. The key is self-awareness, which means not just to be keeping watch over your emotions, but to understand

yourself in relation to the game. Less self-aware players might think only about what theyre doing internally to the game, but truly self-aware players understand themselves as part of the poker-playing system. Its like the difference between thinking about a pool player who only thinks about the pool cue and which way he wants the ball to go, as opposed to a great pool player who will think not just about what he wants to happen on the pool table, but also thinks about the way that the rest of his body is positioned with respect to the cue. He understands how his every movement and nuance is contributing to the quality of the body-cue-table system. In the same way, you yourself are the least visible factor in any poker game you play, and often you are the easiest part to overlook. In spite of the authoritative air with which Im writing all this, I admit that I am not the best spokesperson for an essay of this character. I dont handle myself at tables as well as others, I am not as emotionally adamantine as many of my peers, Im not even particularly qualified to talk about psychology and I dont really have experience training other poker players not to tilt. In reality, I think you could say that Im writing this out for myself just as much as Im writing it for others. We all spend most of our time trying to hone our rational understanding of poker, but for a lot more players than realize it, emotional intelligence is what is preventing them from taking their next step in poker evolution. I just hope that maybe some of you got a bit of insight or some better perspective about the emotional side of poker. Sorry this post ended being so fucking long, Ill try to keep them shorter from now on. Thanks for reading, and best of luck to you all. INTERNET

I CELEBRATE MYSELF
What is your story? What do you hide from yourself as you struggle and curse and fall and push your way through life? History is a hard thing to grasp, but the truth is that all of us have a history. A legacy. And what a shame it is that once we live our lives, we relegate our story to being a mere commodity to share with other people, to let others marvel at our trials and successes. What we once desired, what we once strived for the history of our growth and successes becomes little more than a resum to dispense to those who inquire. Why do I not feel any of it? Do I have no respect for all of the goals that I so desperately tried to achieve in the past? Its goddamn disrespectful. The secret, you see, is reflectiveness. I notice when I wake up in the morning (or night, at times) and I have just awoken from some vivid dream, in that moment my mind is always scurrying to reorient itself, trying to latch on to reality. This is common. Dreams are often ridiculous. But sometimes in these tiny moments as I become myself again, as I once again assume my own history it all occurs to me at once. I

slip into my life, and in that moment as I am putting on my skin, I become aware of what my own identity means. I resolve myself. Its disconcerting, to say the least. But I remember this morning, I had such an experience, and for once I allowed myself to marvel of how many people in the world who were where I was 3 years ago, who can claim to have made it this far? I must have done things right, I must have traversed a very long way to get here. I must have had many hardships and failures and moments where I wanted to pack up and leave, but I stuck it through, and now Im here. How lost and hopeless was I, playing 5c/10c those years ago, not knowing what I was doing? How could I have possibly imagined this? Not just money, but skill. I am one of the best poker players in the world now, and theres really nothing that can take that away anymore. All of the goals that I set for myself, I fulfilled. I made it to the top, and I decided to stay there. Jesus Christ man, I did it all. How fucking lucky am I? So here I am, wanting to complain about some silly red pro curse, about running bad and omalol and all this bullshit. Ha. Im one of the luckiest pieces of shit in the world. Fuck me. Shit. Anyway, you guys will obviously notice that I havent posted a blog entry for months now. This is of course in spite of all of the promises at the beginning of every blog post that I would be providing regular updates and telling you all how sorry / guilty I felt about it. Well, to be honest, I think that was okay. A while after my last blog post, I decided to take a break from poker I was running quite poorly, but a lot of the dissatisfaction from poker was starting to seep into my everyday life and I was feeling noticeably more depressed and irritable. So I took a hiatus for a couple months during which I played very little and did a bit of traveling, hoping to reset my perspective a bit. As this is a poker blog, I felt that it was appropriate not to write any more entries during that time, as this blog connects me very strongly to my identity as a poker player. So, I dont regret not having written any entries for the past two months. That being said, I am back and playing again, and just a couple weeks ago my red pro status was finalized (fk yea), and so I think Im back into the groove of things. I plan to put out some new videos soon for Cardrunners, I have a potential series churning in the tubes right now, and last but not least, I want to start making TRUE regular updates to this blog now. Now, knowing myself, I know that this resolution in and of itself isnt going to mean a lot. I know that Im bad with priorities, Im a procrastinator, blah blah blah. I dont hold myself to a very high standard of efficiency. But this is something I really want to do, and in order to be able to do regular blog posts, I know that I wont be able to limit myself to only writing developed exposs on poker-related subjects, so in order to be able to write regularly Im going to try to make my requirements as to what I can write more relaxed. But I still want everything that I write in this blog to be relevant, not necessarily to poker technically, but to the part of me that is a poker player. So, that being said, I have decided to put my money where my mouth is in order to hold myself accountable to this goal. Heres what Im going to do. For every calendar week (that is, starting from midnight Sunday until midnight Saturday), I hereby pledge to write at least one blog post a week. For every week that I dont write a blog post, I will randomly choose one commenter from the previous weeks blog post, and give 1 hour and 30 minutes of coaching, and for every week after that that I miss another blog post, Ill have to give another 1 hour and 30 minutes to another commenter. The only way that I am excused from this is if I clearly state at the end of the previous blog post that I will not be writing another blog post until a clearly specified future date, or if some reasonably disastrous events occur (losing lots of money at poker doesnt qualify). Hopefully this will motivate me to keep on keepin on. And of course its also a veiled publicity ploy, but thats ok too; it seems to be quite synergistic anyway, since the more people read and comment, the more inclined I am to write regularly with a high standard of quality. Anyway, Im back and ready to tear this shit up. Thats all I really wanted to say. Also, this video is the best thing ever. In fact, watch all of them if youre awesome enough:

SPIRITUAL BONDAGE TURNS ME ON

So Im getting better at creating indie sounding blog post titles. Cutting it close this

week, but its all good, since the week ends on Sunday. Im not sure what I want to write about today; Ive had a few ideas floating around but none of them have seemed vital enough to realize. Thats alright. I suppose I can just piss out some disorganized thoughts every once in a while. So I just came out with my first video in a while. I have a few others in the tubes but Im such a goddamn procrastinator it makes me sick. I guess the last few years of my life have eroded at my ability to prioritize my obligations and react to pressure. I hate this about myself. Well, whatever. Ill fix it later. Yesterday I registered for classes after getting re-admitted into UT @ Austin. Im technically a senior now, but I only have 24 hours that are on campus, and apparently I need 60 total to graduate, so I need 36 more. Because poker is going pretty well and I have some other projects Im considering pursuing on the side in the Fall, I want to take a pretty light courseload (not to mention that Ive been out of school for a year, I dont have particularly high expectations for my work ethic), so Ill probably take 3 or 6 hours. But it just occurred to me that at the rate at which Im planning to get these courses done, itll be a pretty long while until I can graduate. I suppose thats not really a big deal, but my parents have always expected me to graduate fairly quickly, even though they dont have any idea what Im going to do after getting my bachelors degree (neither do I, of course). I guess its good though that theres no end in sight. Its a strange idea to be a poker player and to be done with school. Theres no more drummer to march to, unless of course youve got your own. I complain too much when I lose at poker. I know that. I need to learn to be okay with losing big. Im running out of excuses. Ive actually run pretty good in the last two months playing poker, but it sure doesnt feel that way. I dont think emotionally Im very cut out to be a poker player, but somehow Ive managed to bullshit my way this far. I should take up meditation or something. Im also starting to feel like I suck at NLHE. I have been playing mostly PLO of course and Ive been winning a lot, but my results at NLHE this last couple of months have been pretty shitty. I just havent really felt as confident. Im not really sure what to make of it. Maybe its just a temporary thing; perhaps if I start running better at NL and making more money there then Ill feel like I can crush again. Ive tried to remove my ego about my NLHE game and stop caring about which regs I can beat and whether or not Im top 10 or top 20 or top 100, but the truth is its hard to let go of that desire. Its what I think fueled my ability to get good in the first place and enjoy the challenge of competition. Im trying to focus more on trying to improve my PLO game, but I think its made my NLHE action much less interesting to me. PLO and NLHE heads up games have very different dynamics. Its hard to describe, and maybe Ill try to figure out what I mean by this in a later blog post. Theres a big difference though in how money flows over time, and the nature of the spots where (between two good players) gameplay actually occurs. The good thing about PLO is that it obfuscates these spots more than in NLHE, which of course makes it easier for

bad players to sit and play and not feel like bad players. But there are still a number of PLO players who if I sit with them, I can truly feel that they have an edge on me. I think there are really two different sorts of distinctions you can make in one case, you are playing somebody and you think (that is, using your analytical mind and looking at all of the situations as objectively as you can) that your opponent has an edge on you, and in the other case, you are playing somebody and you feel that he has an edge on you. You may have no idea why, maybe the difference in gameplay is too vast for you to really know everything hes doing better than you. I dont get that feeling ever in NLHE against pretty much anyone, even if I know theyre better than me, but in PLO there are still some people who can exert that kind of dominance over me. There are still some people against whom I cant rationalize some strategy to counter what it seems like theyre doing, or maybe I just cant really figure out what it is that theyre doing. I guess my goal will be to try to get some more experience against these players so that I can strengthen my unconscious game and analytical skills so that I dont get that feeling anymore. Of course, exiling that feeling wont make me the best, but it will earn me the right to step into the ring. I guess a good place to start will be getting some experience against Stinger and Cole. Anyway thats it for now. This was a shitty blog entry but whatever. Until next week.

MONKEYS IN A HEXAGON

Ive been running really poorly lately. Its been a pretty brutal week, from being up 220k+ on the month to being down 50k. Monetarily of course its a pretty bad downswing and has affected my mentality a lot more than it should. I tend to have two strategies for coping with running really poorly the first one is to take some time off and come back mentally recharged and ready to re-frame my poker narrative in a constructive way. The second strategy is to play a ton and try to get even so that my graph affirms that Im still good at poker. I chose the latter. I played every day and put in a ton of hours, but it didnt turn out too well. The sick thing is that I ran about 130k under EV after that -190k day, which would mean that if I ran at all-in expectation , Id be up quite a bit. Its frustrating and it has affected me a lot more than I wish it did. I never really react to poker that strongly, but a few times this week Ive yelled at my screen when I lost a big pot in a shitty way. Its taken a lot of the energy out of me. Poker is a hard obsession to live with. I wish my identity werent so wrapped up in how I do in poker, and everyone who Ive talked to about it tells me the obvious thing (Im young, Im in a good situation, I should focus on just living life and enjoying myself, Ill be fine in the long run) and I know that their advice is the right advice to give, but nevertheless I know that in a way I dont fully understand myself, poker has primacy in my sense of self. Its a game Ive devoted myself to,

its part of who I am. Its a piece of shit game, but it plays a big role in what I perceive as my evolution. I recently watched a movie called Word Wars, which is a documentary about tournament Scrabble players, which was pretty good if youre intrigued by that sort of thing. Scrabble is a similar game to poker in a lot of ways, although Im not sure whether the world of professional Scrabble is more depressing or less depressing than poker (its certainly got more eccentricity). Anyway, the reason I bring this up is theres a line that has been echoing through my mind for a while. Theyre interviewing a certain US tournament Scrabble player named Joe Edley whos considered to be the best player in the USA at the time. He is well known among other Scrabble players as being very into meditation and a Zen approach to dealing with Scrabble and mental preparation/study. Heres a transcription of a portion of their interview with him:
If you focus too much on winnings, you will have many wins and many losses. You will start to get on a rollercoaster emotionally, of going up, of going down of caring too much Lets say you have 3 Is, 2 Os, an R and a T thats a terrible rack. And if you feel really bad about it, are you really going to spend as much time in objectivity in figuring out how to use two Is, maybe an O, and saving the R and T When I notice it [tilt], I have a place that I go. I know what I have to feel in order to be positive and highly energetic and curious; get rid of the negative stuff That extra step champion is someone who basically has total control over his responses.

Ive said before in a previous blog entry that the goal as a poker player is not to be indifferent to losing, but to be able to channel the negative emotions that come from losing into positive endeavors. I sort of scoffed at the idea that indifference is ideal. But this line sticks out to me. If a true master can choose his reactions then why play at all? If I could choose my reaction to either winning or losing, then I could decide to feel the elation and excitement of winning the WSOP ME without having to ever set foot in a poker room if that were the case, what would ever motivate me to go there in the first place? Hell, what would motivate me to play poker, or anything for that matter? It seems pretty clear to me that to be able to choose your reactions means either that one, youre not actually choosing your reactions but just have conditioned yourself to react indifferently to winning and losing (the same way I am conditioned to react indifferently when I get dealt a bad hand UTG), two, that youre not genuinely invested in whatever endeavor it is for which you can choose your reactions, or three, youre the one and true master of your own mind, and Im just a whiny bitch. If you could achieve this, youd be the ideal poker playing machine. The problem is that youd have no reason to play poker. If you had that much genuine control over your mental states, youd probably go off and join a monastery if you

werent in one already. Someone who can truly control their reactions to both winning and losing is its true the ideal player. The problem is that being able to control your reactions to winning and losing precludes you from ever studying and trying to get good at any of these silly games. So maybe what that means is that to become the ideal player, you should start out really wanting to win, and then once you amass enough knowledge and skill, to then learn how to control your responses. But I guess that's what everyone is doing anyway, so this doesn't actually offer any useful ideas. Anyway that had little to do with anything. Im probably going to take a couple of days off and try to feel more positive about poker a week of playing a ton and losing consistently takes a lot out of me. For those of you who read my ramblings regularly, it might be interesting to compare my measured treatises on tilt and variance to this unfiltered whineathon tearfest. The title of this post comes from Sauce123. It doesnt actually apply because Ive played very little 6-handed, but I thought it was a pretty awesome phrase nevertheless. Until next week.
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