“I like to play blackjack. I’m not addicted to gambling. I’m addicted to sitting in a semi-circle.” — Mitch Hedberg When I was thirteen years old, I lost over two thousand dollars playing online cash games on Full Tilt Poker. The year was 2005, and my older brother was already playing poker semi-professionally. One night, he started a ten dollar buy-in tournament and had to leave for a party shortly after. He let me take over, and added that, if I cashed, then I could keep half of the profits. I caught some good cards, and I managed to finish in third place for over fourteen hundred do ..read more

  If you have followed my writing for some time, you might know that my favorite book is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow summarizes the research of economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and it shaped my entire poker career. It’s a complex book which isn’t easy to summarize. At the risk of oversimplifying, I consider it a book about decision making which shows how human beings are fundamentally irrational. The point of reading this book is not to get rid of your irrationality. That is impossible. The point of reading this book is to understand y ..read more

  Expected Value, Minimum Defense Frequency, and Optimal Bluffing Frequency. These are, in my opinion, the three most important concepts in poker theory, which is why I begin all of my poker courses with them; I consider them prerequisites for teaching my students virtually anything about poker strategy. In the era of solvers, it is possible to study poker and get better without truly understanding these concepts, but you will mostly be learning through memorization. If you only study solver outputs without understanding the fundamental reasoning behind them, you’ll have a very hard time ..read more

  One of the most surprising things about my experience as a poker coach is how poorly understood the power of variance is by the average poker player. As I’ve progressed in my career, I have transitioned from coaching mostly low-stakes players to coaching almost exclusively high-stakes and nosebleed players. And yet, shockingly, most of the elite poker players I coach now do not seem to have a much better understanding of variance than my former students did. On a weekly basis, I still get questions from students like these… “I’ve been breakeven over my last 100,000 hands. Can you check ..read more

  It's well known that there are many scenarios where c-betting your entire range on the flop for a small size is correct in theory, and is effectively unexploitable. For example, Single-Broadway-Low-Low boards (e.g. Q-6-2 rainbow) as the in-position preflop-raiser in a single-raised pot. Flop C-bet Strategy on Qc6s2d - Button vs. Big Blind There are other situations where PioSOLVER c-bets the majority of the time, but does a lot more mixing. A lot of Ace-Low-Low boards fall into this category (e.g. A-9-8 two-tone in the above scenario). Flop C-bet Strategy on As9c8s - Button vs. Big B ..read more

  Over a year ago, I wrote a post called The Reason You’re Losing at Low Stakes, which to this day is the most popular post I have written. In that article, I argued that players who are losing at low stakes are breaking down at the logistical level. As I mentioned in my most recent post, I’ve now had the opportunity to coach about one hundred students. I’ve had some students achieve incredible success, and many others achieve results that are more modest, but still respectable. At this point, I very rarely have students who completely fail, but I still see quite a few students hit ..read more

  PREREQUISITE READING: SELECTION BIAS IN VARIANCE CALCULATIONS In Phil Galfond's excellent article, Poker and Your Life, he writes about the skills that he thinks make a great poker player. I think most good poker blogs try to tackle this question at one point or another. Phil starts with a few hard skills: deductive logic, psychology, and math/statistics. I tend to agree with him on all these points. But then he goes on to list three additional soft skills: There are also three minor categories, which are less about predicting poker aptitude and potential, and more about predicting ho ..read more

  You can do all the mindset work you want. Nothing is going to prepare you for the biggest downswing of your life. It's sort of like being a surfer who has only surfed 10-foot waves. Then, one day, a 20-footer comes out of nowhere. Before you even have time to react, this massive thing is on top of you, and it's about to crash. There's no going over or under the wave. You can't go around it. You just have to ride the fucking wave, and it's really scary. But once you come out the other end and realize you survived, you're not as scared of 20-foot waves anymore. Maybe 30-footers are the n ..read more

  I want to share an important lesson that I learned the hard way while moving up to high stakes last year. So far I have only written about moving up in stakes. This article is going to be about the opposite. I want to talk about when it actually makes sense to move down. In order to illustrate the point, I’ll share my full graph to date below. To quickly recap my journey, I started playing full time at 200nl in 2019. Within about 6 months I made it to 2000nl and took a fairly epic shot that looked like this: I won about 34 buy ins in my first 12k hands, and then lost about 2 ..read more

COAUTHORED BY ROBERT WELLS   I am a huge fan of the PrimeDope variance calculator. In fact, one of my favorite pastimes is to go on a huge downswing, plug the downswing into the calculator, and then figure out exactly how unlucky I am. For a while, this was a very educational hobby (and also an expensive one). But eventually, I got the genius idea that something may be wrong with the way I was doing these calculations. The main reason I became suspicious was some of the answers I got just seemed ridiculous. Extremely improbable events, according to the calculator, were happening way too ..read more