The Best In The Business

[GreekStein]

Update please Patrick.

[pleno1]

Ha, Hello!

Long time. What a crazy couple of decades, it’s crazy to think I’ve been playing poker almost 20 years now. I turn 37 in a few months.

The journey on blonde.. quite a wild one. I think initially I considered myself fairly misunderstood, I think, well no, I know I wanted to be respected, wanted to be seen as good at poker, I thought that achieving success in poker would make me happy. I would have money, I would have “respect” I would have what I wanted, the “dream” life of a high stakes poker player, around all the other ballers, I honestly worked very hard for it, 12 hour days every day for years and years, then I got there. I was #1 ranked in the world (debatable how much that means these days, but at the time it was big) I’d made 7 figures and in my final week in vegas I won 2 25ks and the 10k Bellagio cup within 5/6 days and I finally had the “respect” of people. But really as soon as I got there it was the opposite of what I wanted or expected. It didn’t bring happiness, it wasn’t the dream life. People’s respect? Why didn’t they respect me when I was doing the hard yards?

I realised quickly that the dream life for me was not playing necessarily the highest stakes game in the world so that I could get “respect”  i didn’t like the “high rollers” who all wanted the same thing. Outside validation. Respect from people they didn’t know. It was basically a room full of insecure people who all were scared to be vulnerable. The people I once wanted to share rooms, jokes and aeroplanes with I now pitied. They were as unhappy and as soulless as me. Their entire happiness was built on how well they ran in the short term, not for their financial situation but because how it would look externally. If they’d be doubted or praised. And really it’s all just down to if they won a flip or not (in the short term at least) their/my/our happieness was built on what somebody outside would mistakenly judge us after a deck of cards decided if it was our time to be the chosen one of the month or not.

My dream was always to get to this point and then go all in, “play the circuit” all epts, wsops, Aussie millions, PCAs blah blah. But as soon as I got to that point I realised that happiness for me was different to this. The dream life was different  to this.  The respect I wanted, I didn’t want it from these people. The “ballers” weren’t people I wanted to spend time with. Success to me quickly became to have different metrics. I realised success would be built on two things

1) longevity. I love poker, I really do. I should have been a professional footballer really, but I let that slip. I didn’t want that to happen again, but success initially being framed in my mind of having a good “week” “month” or “year” to have outside validation, I quickly realised was a) dumb, b) unhealthy and 3) unsustianable, instead success would be if I was still around in 10 years. I saw so many talented people on blonde who were at the top just fall off for different reasons. Degeneracy? Control? Love for the game?  Lots of reasons and we all know probably 50 different examples on here of people who had just as much talent, in most cases a lot more than me, but just fell off. I realised success isn’t talent, it isn’t “playing sick” in one tournament. It isn’t making the sickest river bluff and it isn’t writing a good reply to PHA!  If you want to be successful in poker it’s if you’re around after x years.  I shake my whole year every year around future longevity. I study a lot, not to be great today or tomorrow at the fame, but because it gives me structure and discipline to push through the tough periods. There’s less self doubt when you’re prepared, when you have a bad run you have less self hate, when you’re busy it’s tougher to be degenerate

2) the opinions of others. Sounds strange right when I said that was my biggest leak? Well I found my tribe, a very small tribe, two other players, both Finnish guys, we have worked together for the last 10+ years. Both are incredible humans, they have all the discipline/structure that I aspire to have. They don’t play live really, they work very hard and they’ve made 15m+ during these times. I care what they think. I care if they think I played well. I care if they think I’m lazy. I care if they think I’m a bad human. I care if they think I’m not professional. I care if they think I have a big ego. I care if they think I’m arrogant. And I think likewise they care what I think too.  They are two of my best friends in life, have taught me so much in life, being a man, being a friend and of course being a tournament poker player.

I’m in Vancouver and it’s midnight, I have to be up in 6 hours for a Sunday session, I should already be sleeping. I’ll continue next week.

[typhoon13]

Honesty, I like it, well done

[booder]

 

[tikay]

Tremendous post Patrick, tremendous.

Not all good or even great poker players ENJOY the game. To me, at whatever level we play, however much or little talent we have, that's the key. Win or lose, enjoying the game, & conducting oneself with dignity at the table.

[RED-DOG]

Fantastic post Patrick. Genuine respect.

[Marky147]

Two BoB posts in a week   



What a time to be alive

[Pokerpops]

I have nothing but respect and awe for the thoughts expressed, for the honesty of expressing them and for the clarity of their expression.
Well played Sir.

[pleno1]

So yeah, 2025 now, almost 2026, the years go so quickly. I’m turning 37 in December, over the last 5/6 years I’ve struggled a lot to remember my age. I say 35 when I’m 36, 32 when I’m 33 etc, but all the years kinda blend into one, in a way that’s how poker should be right? One long long session, determining success on a day/week/month or even yearly metric is pretty dumb to do in poker when there is so much variance.

My life has very little variance. I do the same thing basically every month of every year

January - April, I bootcamp study as if it’s the Olympics of poker. I usually go somewhere warm, Dubai (more recently Vegas) and then I head to vancouver at the end of April and play the online series for around 30 days. 20 tables, 8am-6pm every day and try and put everything into practice that I’ve spent the last 4 months doing. The day the series ends, wsop starts. I usually go for the 6 weeks.

Wsop ends in middle of July, I usually take 7-10 days to just couch potato and sleep. I’ve basically played high stakes poker for 12 hours every day for around 80 days, bunching my volume into one cluster in the middle of the year rather than evenly throughout the year.

Then I head to vancouver for a 1 month bootcamp, I analyse how May went in very big detail, then we play again for 30 days (WCOOP) where I go all out. The year for me is basically done then, I just stay in vancouver for a while and then I go and play in vegas for a few months at the tail end of the year. I say my year is done, realistically I can win or lose millions in these last months of the year in vegas, but I don’t really care about the success I have or not there. It isn’t tractable, isn’t “studyable” I basically just go and play as good as I can and try and put myself in some good situations.

The year ends and I do it again the next January.

I don’t think I’ve played more than 2 epts in the last 5 years, I’ve never played a wpt outside of vegas, never played a triton. I just have enjoyed my schedule, my routine and being able to compare myself as a player/person compared to last time.

bitB is going better than ever, I love our current model, our guys are so so so so good, pleasure to work with, we have around 150 guys atm I think and we barely add anybody new. We get a lot of applicants, but we add maybe 1 person every couple of months. The guys have the same routine as me, they play the same yearly schedule and I love

Yet there still seems to be something missing.. maybe this routine isn’t the ideal one?

[pleno1]

This will be seen as a brag, and personally during the times I was very proud of it, maybe arrogantly happy about it, but every month in my 20s I had more money than the month before. I never had a downswing financially that lasted a month, I just gradually increased my roll and then had big spikes at whatever times I ran really good. I always thought this was good, but looking back now it was a big mistake. 

My best friend in poker Sam had the complete opposite approach. He planted to play higher and higher and in tougher and tougher games. He would fire 6 bullets in a 25k and I’d write my other friends asking if we needed to do an intervention? He was doing things completely wrong in my eyes, he was exposing himself to huge risk and playing in games where the edges were tiny if existent at all. But there was so much hidden ev there, in my eyes ye was investing x, RISKING X, in his eyes he was playing vs the best in the world, learning so much every day. Playing final tables, high pressure moments against people and any tournament he would play in the future we would have been there, done that, money would impact decision main when “big spots came” and oh boy did they come lol he has won the biggest tournaments in the world, wcoop mains, scoop mains, gg massive massive tournaments, he’s. Known as the best ft player of all time, the best closer, people will sometimes consider him lucky, but they don’t see all those spots he put himself in to be ready for the future. I was so wrong about it and he was right next to me doing the right thing, my mentality was to question it, to judge it, to think I must know better, when in reality if I was just open minded the answer was right there infront of my eyes. I learned a lot from this.

Poker, well life is about adversity, facing it, dealing with it and growing. I always thought the phrase 1 step back, 2 step forwards was cringe. But from working with people, being friends with the best of the best of the best I’ve seen their growth come from losing and from adversity. I would often skip the toughest games out there. GG offered a lot of 10-25ks during covid, a lot of people won a lot and a lot of people lost a lot. But if 30 of the 40 best tournament players in the world played vs eachother for 1 year every day and I played vs let’s say the 200-500th best players in the world, then the growth of those 30 players is going to be so much higher than my growth. Their adversity will teach them a lot about themselves. I won’t really learn too much, I’m basically guaranteed to win somewhere between 50-500k. Their variance is going to be somewhere between -1m and +6m.  So they get better quicker as better players will expose holes in their own game and they will learn more about themselves to help them grow. They’ll have a level of confidence that when it goes bad, it’s ok, they’ve been there before, they’ve come through the other side. Wheras for me, if a bad stretch comes then I’ll potentially just say wow fuck this and stop, protect what I have. I think that’s what happened to a lot of people in poker, the huge adversity comes (and it will come to everybody) and then they either collapse and lose it all or get scared and run. I kinda saw that and acknowledged it, and decided internally that it would be better to have a little less success in the form of “ev” but guarantee success in an important metric for me, longevity. I think on reflection this was a cowardly way to approach it, but I understand why I did at the time.

Timelines are difficult for me, as I alluded to previously I forget how old I am! But at some point during my career for probably a 2 year stretch, probably due to a lot of the above, I went from being a very good reg to a pretty bad one, at least compared to my peers. The thing is there is no elo system where you can see it, results are massively skewed by variance, so you don’t know the day you turn from +20% to +19% etc etc but it hit me after a bunch of time that I was not as good as I was, at least relative to the field, people with solvers had gotten a lot better and my game was the same game it was years previously, which was enough to crush then, but as the field evolved I didn’t.

I decided to go lone wolf, the community I was around was incredible players, some of the best in the world, but they were very toxic. They were extremely toxic, and it’s hard to escape that environment, it’s hard to not be the same, to replicate, to copy, to become then. Another cringey phrase, you are the 6 people you spend more time with. It’s very real, but when you spend so much time online it is even more drastic. It’s easier for them to be the worst versions of themselves online, so you naturally fall into it too. I kept with Euro/Elmerixx and cut basically everybody else off


I made a new internal blog called “respect everybody, fear nobody”  I’d realised previously in this toxic environment I’d found myself in I was respecting nobody and fearing everybody deep down. I wanted to go full 360 on this.

So I went full rocky mode, luckily covid came at a similar time. I relearned the whole entire game tree, I spoke everything out loud, around 3-400 hours, everyone there was bullshit ok my logic I stopped myself and spoke the new version out.

The games online during covid were incredible. I was up around 1m and then I played my 7th (I think) 25k ever. I had won 2, came 5th in one, 7th in one and bricked a couple. This one during Covid was the biggest ever one online I think, it was peak peak Covid and at this point I had incredible confidence. I ended up coming 2nd for 1.6m and cashed it out the next day and traded it off into Bitcoin to a reg. I think Bitcoin then was 6k? I don’t think he has sold since, so lucky him that I had the score and maybe fool on me for not keeping it there!

Strangely after that I decided to move down, I stopped playing those kind of games and just really enjoyed being a good reg in very very very tough online 500-5k tournaments and have done that basically ever since online. I had the bankroll, I had what I now assumed was the skill, I had an amazingly positive group around me at this point, yet still I shyd away from the high variance route.

Shortly after triton came, triton suits me a lot. Previous live high roller were always filled with high stakes cash crushers. You’d play 100-200bb deep for hours, they had a big edge over mtt players, but triton was like average 15bbs and decisions worth houses were made on intricate icm stuff, my strongest skill and cash game players weakest skill. Yet still I decided against “testing” myself, “going for it”  and took the safer route of he toughest games online instead. I say the “safer route” the games we play are insanely insanely competitive and a lot tougher than tritons, I absolutely love it though, it’s intellectually stimulating to a degree I can’t explain. The smartest minds I’ve met all treating it like the Olympics and coming and playing vs eachother. For me it’s way more stimulating than taking donations and gifts vs amateurs in soft live tournaments. I don’t really enjoy that.

But yeah, maybe it’s time to change, maybe I should give it a go for a year, travel the world again, go to Monaco, go to Cyprus, go to Jeju, go to Montenegro, play the big wsop stuff. Somewhere deep down there’s fear, it’s not about if the games are too tough, I know I’m good enough, maybe it’s an ego thing, I know the luck built into these low sample stuff, the chances of failing are high. Being exposed publically running bad vs people who don’t understand variance maybe scares me in a way?  Of course in these games you have to sell action because the stakes are insane, maybe I don’t like the idea of a rich piece buyer not understanding the variance when the bad runs come? Again all of this is kind of illogical, and my favourite quote should dispel all of this

There is freedom waiting for you on the breezes of the sky, and you ask, “what if I fall” oh but my darling, what if you fly?

[tikay]

Goodness me.

Two absolutely stunning posts there Mr L.

Amazing stuff, & long may it last. 

[Karabiner]

Wow!

[booder]

Wow!

[RED-DOG]