The Best In The Business

[EvilPie]

Amazing attention to detail Pads in your business.  No wonder it is a success compared to numerous other staking 'enterprises' which were run on the back of a postage stamp effectively.  Lovely read that was.  thanks for posting.  Enjoyed it.

Yeah if I'd realised you were going to do it properly I probably wouldn't have said you were an idiot for doing it.

If you'd stuck solely to playing poker on your own with no interaction with other poker players where do you think you would've been now? Do you think you would be more or less successful in your poker playing career? Do you think you would've made more money if you'd stuck to playing rather than shifting some focus to staking and other ventures? Obviously you would've had fewer friends / associates but what about the Mrs? Would you still have met her?

[nirvana]

Good read all that, thanks and seems like you have a great model

[youthnkzR]

Asked this question..

6000 runners in last weeks Sunday million

How many:

Virgins
Murderers
People who think they are genuinely the best player in the tournament
People who think they are genuinely in top 100 in field
Haven't showered that day


Interested what Blonde thinks too!

250
2
25
700
1800

[pleno1]

Well, month is over

Click to see full-size image.

Obviously its not good enough in terms of our $5m goal. We did however have an undisclosed 6 figure live cash so it is a little bit better than it looks. We were in a really nice trend and then horror last 5k games, last 10k games is basically breakeven and I'm almost sure the roi overall should be 30+. Guess that shows what variance is too though, most professional mtt players don't play 5k games/year online, so seeing that last 10k games must be kinda demoralising for people who play tournaments for a living. And even more so for people like me that probably play less than 3000 games/year.

Year to date

Click to see full-size image.

Some big months coming up.. I just saw the pokerfest schedule for May and ... WOW:D SCOOP too, going to be a wild month with wild swings.

GL March!

[pleno1]

thx Arb/Booder

Amazing attention to detail Pads in your business.  No wonder it is a success compared to numerous other staking 'enterprises' which were run on the back of a postage stamp effectively.  Lovely read that was.  thanks for posting.  Enjoyed it.

Yeah if I'd realised you were going to do it properly I probably wouldn't have said you were an idiot for doing it.

If you'd stuck solely to playing poker on your own with no interaction with other poker players where do you think you would've been now? Do you think you would be more or less successful in your poker playing career? Do you think you would've made more money if you'd stuck to playing rather than shifting some focus to staking and other ventures? Obviously you would've had fewer friends / associates but what about the Mrs? Would you still have met her?

If I isolated myself from friendships/relationships then I'd 99% just be travelling around doing the live super high roller / high roller scene, seeing more of the world, playing very big buy ins, trying to run it up like Fedor did. I've basically stopped playing live poker now, I wen't somewhat hard last year and had great runs etc, but now, at least long term it wont be a priority. I've said this probably 10+ times now, but I think that I'm 100% suited to playing live poker compared to online poker and would say if you took like the top 200 online guys roi expectation in the sunday million and the top 200 live guys expectation in the wsop main, I would be ranked way higher in the wsop main/ept main than the sunday million.

In 2016 I made $600k ish from playing poker, and that was with sacrificing a lot of the time to doing business stuff, but then again, I ran good in some spots etc too.

There is a good chance that I could have $5m in the bank and a good chance I could be stone broke if I went on that live circuit/grinding route. I know that deep down, somewhere I have one really destructive and degenerate blood cell just waiting to pop. Fortunately I haven't really come too close to huge disaster like people like Ben Warrington, Marc Wright etc did but I would be lying if I said it was 0% something like that could happen to me. I think one of the luckiest things that has happened in my poker career is I've never once been overly degenerate at all and have always had pretty good self control, but again, I'd put that down to my support groups, parents, gf, friends that keep me somewhat down to earth. If I was travelling between Macau/Monaco/Vegas and staying up 24 hours a day on drugs etc then its very possible I could have made some decent life mistake.

Anyway regarding the future and poker. I'm pretty happy to basically play 1 day a week, try and play well, try and get lucky and if I'm not lucky not be the end of the world. Kinda similar to how a proper businessman looks at it I guess. I want to do really well in the big series like SCOOP/WCOOP and Powerfest thats where my entire drive is currently. Playing outside of that I don't have the drive really, it means my sample size will be really small and it will come down to luck if I make money or lose money. I can't really be too disappointed and likewise can't think I'm the dogs bollocks if I win or lose $100k in 2017 playing poker. I'll go on runs like the 3 party ft's in the same day and likewise I'll go on runs where I play 4 sundays in a month and lose 5k each Sunday. I actually start playing on Sundays at 8pm these days instead of 2pm like back in the day. So my sample sizes are even smaller.

Because of my position in bitB, its very important I stay ahead of the curve though, luckily I have the best players in the world coaching every week and I get to see the results of study of 70 really hungry guys and use my experience to kinda put it all together and realise what works.

My big drive poker wise is May 7 - May 20. I wont take a day off, I will really enjoy waking up every day to play, thats probably my 2 favourite weeks of the year. I won't go to Vegas, I'll stay in Europe and focus on maximising profits for bitB.

I had huge pressure on myself previously to succeed. I cared so much how you guys thought of me, "wow pleno had a losing month? is he running bad or was he just running good" "wow have you seen pleno won this tournament? he must be up so much" these two different kind of things would be what really gave me motivation and drive for so long, now the motivation is for people to say "wow pleno's stable is the best in the world" and its easier in a way ton achieve that than playing poker which is revolved so much around variance.

My biggest challenge will be the first "post poker" challenge that I take on. I look forward to blogging about that too.

Sorry for overly long message Matt, was meant to be 1-2 paragraphs

[baldock92]

Is there a part of you that wants to go bracelet hunting this summer? Or do you reckon that part of you is completely behind you?

[pleno1]

No interest at all no. Kinda weirdly, no idea why not, just that part of me disappeared.  Possibly will go and play the main event, kinda looking forward to having a nice (hopefully!) summer in London.

[verndog158]

No interest at all no. Kinda weirdly, no idea why not, just that part of me disappeared.  Possibly will go and play the main event, kinda looking forward to having a nice (hopefully!) summer in London.

enjoying life in the big smoke? get into town much to play live?

[pleno1]

No interest at all no. Kinda weirdly, no idea why not, just that part of me disappeared.  Possibly will go and play the main event, kinda looking forward to having a nice (hopefully!) summer in London.

enjoying life in the big smoke? get into town much to play live?

I love it yeh. Will prefer in summer I'm sure, I've played 0 hands of live poker in London. There's been a few festivals too, haven't found the time yet, will like to though.

[verndog158]

No interest at all no. Kinda weirdly, no idea why not, just that part of me disappeared.  Possibly will go and play the main event, kinda looking forward to having a nice (hopefully!) summer in London.

enjoying life in the big smoke? get into town much to play live?

I love it yeh. Will prefer in summer I'm sure, I've played 0 hands of live poker in London. There's been a few festivals too, haven't found the time yet, will like to though.

yeah Bushy park is a great place, plenty of good space to get out and explore in the summer. Are you looking to extend the business side of things ie bars/ restaurants into the UK too?

[lucky_scrote]

It's very respectable that you can go from one success to another. Being successful in poker will introduce new and difficult challenges, even when you think you have cracked them all. This is definitely a very unrated aspect of being a professional poker player.

Do you go through waves of motivation in poker? I am not talking about wanting to grind one day and not the next, I mean do you feel yourself wanting to slip away and doing something else altogether? It's hard to not be in poker for the money, and when you have all the money you have to find new sources of motivation.

[pleno1]

It's very respectable that you can go from one success to another. Being successful in poker will introduce new and difficult challenges, even when you think you have cracked them all. This is definitely a very unrated aspect of being a professional poker player.

Do you go through waves of motivation in poker? I am not talking about wanting to grind one day and not the next, I mean do you feel yourself wanting to slip away and doing something else altogether? It's hard to not be in poker for the money, and when you have all the money you have to find new sources of motivation.

My motivation for doing staking is very similar to when I used to play poker a lot. Everyb3 months I look back and think wow I did that thing or this thing super bad, how I do it now is way better.

When I know there's a lot of fine tuning and different ways to perfect the business I find it very hard to think of anything else, if anything I fee completely full from it. I have no idea how my OcD will be when I do another project where I literally know 5% rather than 95% I think I'll probably struggle because I've been luckily enough to fall on my feet here rather than upside down with my underpants around my head like I'm sure I would be in a proper business.

Slipping away from poker for me or anybody else who sacrificed what they have previously to become a professional would imo be a really bad idea, working all that time playing low stakes etc this is the last few years to really milk the cow and I think that should be the motivation for most allowing more financial freedom in the future.

When we are working for £250/day (before tax!) and having to get up at 7am for the commute I'm sure we will regret not playing on a Wednesday or Friday from our house a few years previously.

I did listen to a podcast yesterday from Bryn where he spoke about how he plays poker so he doesn't have to have a job so if he works everyday then it makes his reasons for doing it somewhat hypocritical and means you have to think again abot what you really want and your motivations are.

[tonytats]

Is there a point moneywise - possibly a % of your net worth
That if all the graphs were going downhill and you were knocking it in big time personally n staking wise that you would think
Fk this I'm stopping n calming down n going on your own again - as in just you playing on your own dime ?

[SuuPRlim]

 

rather than upside down with my underpants around my head like I'm sure I would be in a proper business.

Don't want to blow smoke up you but you're defo selling yourself short here, a "proper" business? What is that exactly?

If you can run an enterprise that can generate enough legitimate revenue to pay i) all the staff, ii) all the costs of operation, iii) taxes (most important) iv) yourself a living wage AND then have profits left over. That's a proper business and it doesn't matter if you're selling oranges, trading stocks or building space rockets.

What makes people successful in business is persistence, work ethic and obviously a bit of luck. The differences between poker and the "real world" are in the attitudes of the people inside, not the nuts and bolts.  Don't let anyone put your achievements in your poker business down because its "just poker."

I think we both know that from a risk VS reward perspective high stakes poker is not the best thing to be doing as a sole source of income and I applaud your efforts to branch out. Diversifying in business (whether it's going from selling oranges to selling lemons and oranges, or going from running a poker stable to running a property company) is always difficult, and much more experienced and more resourced people than you and me have failed in the past, be cautious but don't be timid.  As Richard Branson once said...

Click to see full-size image.

I did listen to a podcast yesterday from Bryn where he spoke about how he plays poker so he doesn't have to have a job so if he works everyday then it makes his reasons for doing it somewhat hypocritical and means you have to think again abot what you really want and your motivations are.

Think this is really counter-intuitive, if your only reason for playing poker is so you "dont have to get a job" then that's pretty nagative IMO. If he's saying that if you spend a lot of time working on YOUR JOB then it makes you hypocritical I would suggest that picking a career just because you dont want to work is entirely different and perhaps he'd be more fulfilled if he spent his time doing something he actually wants to do and makes him happy. I think he's vastly under-estimating the personal gratification someone can get from applying themselves to something and enjoying the personal rewards from that, which is something that get strongly and really enjoy from your writing.

Perhaps Bryn is too rich to notice the difference between personal and financial rewards, or maybe he's just being cool, either way his advice comes from a position of extreme privilege and doesn't really relate to most people.

You enjoy your work, your committed to it and that's a big part of you, good on you. Keep going imo.

[pleno1]

Is there a point moneywise - possibly a % of your net worth
That if all the graphs were going downhill and you were knocking it in big time personally n staking wise that you would think
Fk this I'm stopping n calming down n going on your own again - as in just you playing on your own dime ?

Really tough one to answer without sounding like a prick, but it should be close to impossible to lose from this point.