-1.2k in bets
-1.5k in a small site that prob went busto
going to stick with pokerstars from now on
currently taking shots at 1k, current goal is to be a 5k reg until the end of the year, Im confident ill get it if I stop spewing money in life
probably spent close to 6k this month so my BR is probably even this month
Ten years after the original Ultimate Fighter television show put the UFC on the map, one of its cast members fell off. So … whatever happened to Jason Thacker, the quirky Canadian that trained out of the old abandoned truck stop?
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I’ve long been fascinated with Jason Thacker. It’s very possible I’m the only one. Why? It’s sort of complicated. I suspect it stems from overthinking a word like "belonging." In the short history of the UFC, he was a person that ended up in the exact wrong place at the exact right time. Or maybe it was the right place at the wrong time. Whatever it was, man did he catch a lot of hell just for being there. And back then, being there meant something. Remember that?
The original Ultimate Fighter began airing in January 2005, and has long since been accepted as the jolt the UFC needed to break through. If Stephan Bonnar and Forrest Griffin hadn’t had that rapturous, go-for-broke brawl on April 9 in the finale, there might not be a UFC today. That fight hit the broader living room like a magic potion. It was the culmination of something, but it doubled as a real-time epiphany — suddenly mixed martial arts was being translated for people who didn’t speak the language. All at once, it was as if light broke over the taboo.
People got it. Dana White later called it Zuffa’s "Trojan Horse."
Transitioning from Poker - my thoughtsby Romm3l, March 24
Hello
I have noticed that threads here related to transitioning from playing poker as a primary means of income have garnered a lot of interest. I thought some may find it useful if I weigh in and share my own experiences and thoughts, and at the very least I'll benefit myself from organising my thoughts on the subject when I reflect and try to write them here.
Quick backstory
I dropped out of uni to play poker during the mid~2000 boom years. Did well at online hsnl and later hsplo, and managed to save a decent amt of what I earned such that I have ample financial breathing room. Quit poker in 2013 to restart uni from square one (undergrad economics). Targeting a career in investment management - fairly competitive and hard to get into so im not guaranteed anything, but my odds are looking ok currently having secured a relevant front-office internship at a major asset manager. Also got married and started a family.
Poker vs traditional careers
As we all know playing poker rewards luck and skill, and anyone can get into playing and will be guaranteed on average an equal share of luck in the long run, making skill the primary determining factor of expected outcomes. By contrast getting good jobs and working within an organisation may involve not just how well you can do the job but many other factors like how well your managers think you can do the job, your network and relationships, etc. Not to mention some barriers to entry: just getting the job in the first place is a job in itself, with interviews, assessments and competition from other applicants.
It's very easy to think of the situation with poker as better or fairer, especially when it's the situation that happens to favour you more (i.e. when you're playing poker). If we ignore these normative constraints and think only in terms of what gives you the best outcomes, I would argue it's not bad to have the other stuff.
Barriers to entry
It's an economic reality that a field with no barriers to entry and potential to profit will become crazy competitive over time such that profits get competed away (see: perfect competition model in econ 101, and a previous blogpost of mine where I look at the consequences applied to poker). Try winning at online nlhe cash today. Try trading goods on ebay. Try being a coder for hire on quora. Sure you can make some money doing all these things, but your economic profit (net of 'economic costs' which include the effort you put in and what this effort would have yielded if it was instead put into your second best use of time: your opportunity cost) is going to be very low because of the competition. Unless you manage to find some underproduced niche in these things, you are one of many commodity producers and your market price is going to get bid down to or below your economic cost.
A field with barriers to entry protects you from competition and lets you make more profit than one without - this is as true in the labour market as it is in business. Barriers to entry are no good for people outside those barriers, but are great for people inside them. Some barriers can be crossed with a lot of effort others may be unwilling or unable to put in. For initial entry into the job market, barriers to entering a good job may be your academics, extracurriculars, and quality of your educational institution. Later on in a career those barriers may be the unique and unreplicable skills, experience, relationships, credibility and reputation you've built up through your career. I want to highlight one 'barrier' that I personally underestimated or didn't know the importance of, but now think is a huge determinant of outcomes:
Social capital
Since the 'cognitive revolution' 75,000 years ago humans started to get bigger brains and use them for increasingly complex communication, coordination and innovation, allowing us to go from somewhere in the middle of the food chain to right at the very top, driving tons of much bigger, stronger, faster and scarier species to extinction. With the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago the size of our communities and extent of our co-dependence took on another dimension. We are built to be social animals that gain from cooperation with community.
(online) Poker is probably one of the few ways to make a living that don't require any social skills and in my experience, just like with muscles and lifting, it can be a case with social skills of 'use it or lose it'. Unless you're a naturally social and likeable guy (like my good friend Quentin/mipwnya, who by the way is a beautiful man) it's possible that years of not having to use many social skills leads to atrophy in this area. Compounding the problem is the fact poker seems to disproportionately attract people who were slightly uncomfortable or awkward in social situations in the first place.
It turns out that in working for organisations, it's one of the most important skills you can have. An organisation is a large-scale coordination of many people with many different skillsets to produce profitable things that no single person could possibly do. Social capital is a vital part of performance within an organisation, and building networks relationships, reputation, trust and credibility is vital to even getting opportunities for interesting, well-paid work within good organisations. It also serves as a very strong barrier to entry in the market for good jobs, which is very very good for the people inside that barrier. If a natural conclusion of all this is that getting inside barriers to entry is a better idea than being a competitive commodity producer, building social capital might be an important thing to not overlook.
Closing thoughts on poker: Barriers to exit
I found as you get years deeper into a poker career, your (real as well as perceived) barriers to entry into other occupations increase. Your CV gap becomes bigger. You may not like returning to square one at an older age. Your social skills may atrophy more and it may become more and more out of your comfort zone to leave poker. You can get in a situation where as your set of alternative opportunities starts to close, you feel increasingly poker is one of the few only options. This creates (probably mostly perceived) barriers to exit from poker. While in reality you do have an alternative opportunity set you'd be comfortable with (many seem to be turning to coding, or have ideas of 'starting a business of some kind'), if we take the view to an extreme that poker/gambling is going to be your only lifetime income, then the associated observations should be pretty scary. If you are reliant on a source of income to sustain you for life that may not even be viable in 10 years, you need to be making, saving and investing very large income today to not run out of money in the future. Poker profitability trends are already not very much in your favour, from what I can see. I don't want to open a can of worms that iirc has been discussed to death in other threads, but continuing to play poker might not be a wise idea for long if you're not making a lot of money and it might be making transition more difficult the longer you stay in the game.
Closing thoughts on programming: putting the ideas together
I'll end with this as programming seems to be a popular transition choice judging from some comments. I suspect this is in part because it shares some characteristics of poker that may be appealing: no barriers-to-entry, performance more easily judged on what you can build so you might not have to get out of your comfort zone with this uncomfortable business of building social capital, and potentially an immediately gratifying feeling of solving puzzles. It can be a great road to go down, or a terrible one. Coding skills are very much in demand and will continue to be so indefinitely. However you’ll do much better if you create barriers to entry for yourself within coding than if you don’t. I’ll start with a story and extract generalisations:
Last summer I did an internship in equity research for a small independent boutique. They do proprietary quantitative investment analysis on global stocks and sell it to buy-side institutions who manage money on behalf of households, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, etc, who pay pretty generously for the research. The subscriber section of the website (the main way clients interact with the product, unless they’re big clients in which case they get a more tailored service) is impressively coded and connects up to our data backend (result of analysis) to display results and lay everything out well. All of the coding and tech grunt-work is outsourced, mostly to various groups on quora at minimum cost relative to revenues. Those Indians, Brazilians and eastern-Europeans do a fine job building hard stuff (when told exactly what’s required of them and nothing is left to their ‘initiative’) that’s vital to the end-product, but receive a minimal share of compensation the research firm makes. The founder gets the lion share. Prior to starting the company he was a senior manager at a major American ‘bulge-bracket’ bank and so not only knows quite a lot about investment research but also has a large amount of credibility and contacts. This is why clients value his product highly and wouldn’t buy something put together by people they didn’t know or who didn’t have the same credibility/background.
While working with the founder I was able to deliver a pretty decent project that involved coding (in VBA/excel) which people on quora could not. I learned VBA/coding in a few weeks prior to beginning so my level is nothing like actual experienced programmers. However I added value where coders on quora couldn’t by combining a basic level of coding with a basic knowledge of finance/investing, social capital and initiative. Whereas hard-core coders on quora are useless without a very unambiguous specification of what the code needs to do, I could have lunches with the founder and talk (read: mostly learn from listening to him talk) investing, what he’s trying to do with the analysis and why. Then I’d implement it without needing to be told exactly with the code needs to do as I know in high-level terms what’s needed and can come up with my own ways to attack the problem. Here I also met another friend of the founder who used to work for a major bank but now just does VBA/excel solutions for a living. From his perspective it’s easy work and easy money that pays well, and people hire him over people they don’t know who could easily do the job because his networks and past experience in traditional jobs gives him credibility and contacts.
Generalisations: if you have social capital and can communicate effectively and build relationships with the organisation and people paying you to work, you’ll deliver better results and be more likely to be hired again than someone who doesn’t. If you can combine coding with another field, and view coding as just a tool you must learn to implement solutions that help deliver useful results in that other field, you’ll be much more useful and hireable than someone who is purely just a coder. Both of these are potentially profitable barriers to entry.
Closing thoughts on ‘starting a business of some kind’
For reasons mostly covered my gut feeling is this is a great idea at some point in life, but much more so after having been in traditional work for a good while first, and built experience, skills, social capital, networks and credibility. This will expand your opportunity set of potentially businesses to enter and allow you to find more profitable niches with larger barriers to entry. The opportunity set of potential businesses available to someone who has just quit poker and insists on remaining their own boss is much narrower and consists much more of things with no barriers to entry (with associated lower expected outcomes).
So after a hiatus from training for a long time weirdly I lose weight when I don't train because I have a fast metabolism. My initial plan was just to do the normal bodybuilding stuff and I'm sure it would be easier to gain weight that way, but after coming across Matt Furey and I have looked at freeletics and stuff now I want to just use bodyweight training maybe some weights. I don't really care about looking massive more after functional strength know a lot of people say matt furey is a fraud or something but I don't listen to them. Any thoughts?
Great song amazing footage solar eclipseby Mortensen8, March 22
Where I was unfortunately didn't see the corona for clouds it only came back right after so caught a little glimpse but the change from light to dark was freaky still. These guys got really lucky very few places you could see it. Change to hd.
Retiring Poker- Post career optionsby AndrewSong, March 22
I have been wanting to retire from poker starting sometime last year. I wasn't sure then but I'm pretty sure now that this isn't the life I want 5 years down the line.
I've been dreading playing poker for almost a year. I can no longer say I play poker for a living since that would be cutting my self short with the little amount of time I play this game. I'm still ahead of the curve, however I haven't been making much money for quite awhile. I'm still winning, in the bottom stakes I play(5/10-10/20). Last 6 months, I did slightly better than break even after losing over $250k in the highest stakes I play. My gf used to ask me why I continue to play 25/50+. I would facepalm every time trying to explain to her that it's the same guys I'm playing in lower tables except that 25/50+ is even easier because there's always one guy playing recreationally. She did not get it and I continued to lose.
Moving forward to this year, things changed drastically. I've been seat scripting for quite awhile now while starting games at my main stakes giving me access to all the good games. That isn't possible anymore with the saturation of scripting market. All my good games are earned by playing vs excellent players and by being KOTH on sites that allow that. I completely dropped 25/50+ out of my game after several bad beats and now things are carrying over to all the stakes I play. Running even worse but this time I can not get enough hands as I want. I'm up slightly for the year but I can't help to feel that I've been losing every single day even on days I win. Preflop coolers has been completely unreal and although I know things will change some day, I'm at a point where I don't care anymore if I have to accept this as part of our job. I feel that I made the decision to retire rather too late but I'm still glad I'm deciding to quit when I have some chips left to pay the life blinds. I'm throwing in the towel.
Last couple weeks, I've been looking for what I can do. Panorama's victory blog post had a lasting impression on me so naturally I spent a lot of time looking at coding. I started taking HTML&CSS lessons on codeacademy and on week5 of CS50. I'm hoping to be efficient in Ruby on Rails quickly and learn everything I can. I know there are a lot of guys here who were in similar position as me. I've always had a special heart for LP and did what I can to give my advice on poker hands(hey! im greenstar) so please, if you have advice for me, drop a line!
Despite success in season long football leagues for the past few years, I was pretty unsuccessful playing DFS. I would deposit a few hundred bucks at the beginning of football, swing up and down a bit, and eventually lose it by the end of the year. I tried out basketball last season, but I knew basically nothing and lost some more money.
Roothlus (the poker player) convinced me that I should give NBA DFS another shot this season. It's more fun, predictable and beatable than other sports. For instance, if Lebron scores 20 points, 4 assists and 4 rebounds thats a pretty bad fantasy game while 30 points, 7 assists and 7 rebounds is a great game. the variance in game to game results is much smaller than other sports like football or baseball.
So at the beginning of the season I threw another $250 on both fanduel and draftkings with the intention of treating it just like poker when i started. I was essentially starting as a .05/.1 NL player and trying to work my way up without ever shooting my roll and using safe BRM.
It turns out DFS is just like poker. You play other people in a variety of cash games and tournaments and the site makes money off rake. The most common cash games are 50/50s (half the field cashes for 1.8x) and HUs (1 on 1 with another player). And tournaments work the same way as in poker, with 10-25% of the field receiving money with top heavy prizepools.
I tried to never put >20% of my roll into play on any given day and split my action between a few lineups to reduce variance. Fanduel went great right from the start. I was winning in cash games and I got 2nd place in a tournament for $1500 early on which allowed me to start playing a bit bigger. Draftkings...not so much. Basically lost every day there until my $250 deposit was gone. I didnt care too much because I could get all the action I wanted on fanduel and i was doing well over there.
Since that initial tournament cash, I have not cashed in another tournament for more than $700. Despite this lack of big scores, I have run up my roll on fanduel despite still not really being an expert on basketball. After the all star break, I redeposited $500 to DK and have run it up there, and started playing on victiv and am winning there.
if you notice, I made a lot of my money in very low buyin 50/50s. its very easy to enter a lineup you like into tons of contests and just let it go to work.
The tracking site is a little buggy for draftkings, but i've deposited $750 this season and have my roll up to $4k, and on victiv ive run a $1k deposit up to about $3k in the past week. So overall, including some bonuses and FPPs im up about 26k this season, all started from $500. I've basically grinded up from micros to midstakes in 4 months without any prior knowledge of NBA.
tips if you want to start playing:
-trust your projections. if your optimal lineup is 290 points, and a lineup you personally like better with players you trust more is projected at 275, throw it in the trash. It's ok to audible a pick over machine projections occasionally, but make sure your lineup is as close to the optimal projections as possible. In general I dont like to give up more than 1% in points for lineups i like. Those points add up over the season and they are where you get your edge.
-use good BRM and start smaller. most poker players who come into DFS just shoot it like they are playing the same stakes in poker/DFS, yet their DFS skill is much lower than their poker skill to start.
-play lots of smaller buyins. It's better to enter your 1 lineup into 100 $1 cash games than to enter it into two $50 cash games. players get better at higher stakes and the only downside to playing more lower stakes games is the time it takes to register them.
-a lot of edge in NBA is due to injuries. its a long season and rough sport, there are often tons of late scratches and random rest days. if a starting player goes down, and his cheap backup is slated to get 30+ minutes, he will often do well. minutes = money. stay on top of the injury news, know the depth charts/rotations, and who to plug in when starters miss a game.
-treat it like a job. i work all day on registering, tinkering with lineups, reading injury reports, figuring out where the projections may be off and which players i should trust/not trust, etc. it's a lot of work, but its not quite as intense as poker. from 9am to 2pm I basically spend 5-10 minutes out of every 30 minutes checking news, registering for more contests, tweaking lineups and the rest of the the time i am free to do other things like run errands, walk my dog, beat off, take a shower, whatever. then from 2-4 i am working really hard on lineups since lineup lock happens at 4pm PST, and then from 4-6pm i check if there are any changes i need to make for the sites (draftkings only for me) that allow changes to be made after the first games started. i dont really even have to watch the games but i do because basketball is a fun, high paced game with the most athletic people in the world.
if you want to sign up i suggest playing mostly on fanduel and draftkings. by far the biggest sites with the most players and largest contests offered.
theres a month left in the NBA season, and probably a 1-2 playable weeks of playoffs after that. i will be working hard for that time, and theres still time for everyone else to play too. and if NBA isnt your thing, baseball is starting soon, and there's also NHL, MMA, golf, soccer, and college sports. something for just about everyone.
good luck to anyone who plays and anyone who decides to give it a shot.
There was a time, once, when I, as a man, thought about the world and the possibilities. Looking down at my hands, the yesteryear's memories swirled and creased to become the man I am today. Somewhere, trapped within those memories was the time I wondered which possibilities would take root. Happenstance, Haphazard, Hogwash.
-playing poker with some co-workers (maybe the other ppl think i'm trying to impress my co-workers but i dunno)
-game is 2/5
-i was playing pretty aggro and raising/cbetting lots of flops
-drunk guy gets moved to this table, i lose 3-4 small hands in a row, cause drunk guy doesn't fold to cbets
-i play much tighter now
drunk guy limps, weakish/tightish regish looking guy raises to 25, random fish calls, i look down at AKo 2 from button, i should
maybe back when i was playing online and trying to play "aggro" i woulda just standard 3bet here without thinking too much, but flatting is clearly better right? we let the drunk retard in, and this hand prob dominates a big portion of the noob reg?
edit: holy shit i forgot how to post relevant informations.
Is it because of my fucking brain malfunctioning that i'm seeing waayyyyyy more monsters when trying to play 4 tables zoom robot mode instead of trying to play "smart" with only 2 tables ?
For 2 hours, I was trying to steal pots at CO, button and everything but everytime I was chasing any sets or draws, they would never fucking come.
Then when I went Terminator, everything were so great that I crushed the tables in no time (read at least +2 bi for each tables) in 1 fucking hour.
Hello brain, you sure u workin' good ? Or is that simply luck ? Or selective memory ? Argh.
This is going to be a bit of a disjointed rando blog. Just letting you know now.
First of all:
Been listening to Beyonce's recent album. Love it. Great for drinking absurd amounts of coffee, cleaning up around the house and dancing ecstatically. Problem is, it is tough to top that high man. Been trying to recreate it for a few days now but coming off a juice cleanse not having coffee for a week and going on a caffeine, dancing, Yonce', cleaning house bender, life just does not seem worth living anymore...
SAUNAS!
Scandis!
Where you guys at. I have been trying to up my sauna game and it is lacking. Or maybe I am overcomplicating things. I just think of like a natural sauna in Finland or one of those sauna houses out in the country in Sweden and think, "Man! Those guys know how to sauna! I gotta travel over there and spend a few weeks just learning how to sauna!" Basically, I just went to the gym. Sat in the sauna with some gym bros for like 15 min. then I got out and took a shower and then went home. I felt amazing but it was way too cold outside and I was still super hot. Any tips, tricks, insights? I gotta up this sauna game to a respectable level.
Anybody still winning at poker?by Nitewin, March 06
I don't know if poker has gotten harder in the last 6 months or if I'm just burnt out. I played some crazy HU matches last year and swung almost 10 grand each way. Results were that my lack of care for money due to HU made me play recklessly in 6m throwing money around, which didn't end well. I took a few months off and now I can't get my groove going, lost 2 flips this session and not feeling good about my game or edge. Maybe it's my patience. I seem to be forcing plays rather than letting them come to me. There's still clearly fish but I can't seem to beat the games as of yet. What are your experiences 200NL+?
well. poker is getting boring so i've decided to open up a nail spa.
location is in florida, a lot of middle aged retired white women here that like to get their nails did.
i myself dont have any experience with nails but my wife is a nail tech and her sisters are and they want their own shop so why not.
Never opened a business before so going to try and use common sense as a guide and try our best.
Of course location of the store is the gonna be main focus/foundation of the business and we are looking hard for a good location.
Only thing that concerns my is they want to buy a previous nail salon so then it would be ready to move in already without having to do much renovations. this seems fairly common because it would be much more work to start from the ground up when starting a new business.
This means we are going have to rely on providing exceptional service because obv the owner before is not doing so well to be selling in the first place.
my wife and her sisters do exceptional work so if we can just get an upswing or heater then that would be great.
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