Transcription
I want to tell you why you don't want to be lucky, or at least not in the way that you think. There were two specific experiences that really made me rethink the way that luck works and made me ask myself, "What does it really mean to be lucky?" It may seem that you're lucky at first, but actually, things may work out very differently in the end. I will narrow down these experiences to the course of a few years, and they are my experiences in learning No-Limit Hold'em and Pot-Limit Omaha. They're the opposite sorts of experiences.
In No-Limit Hold'em, when I first started playing, I got my ass kicked. I got cheated, I got made fun of, I sucked, I ran really bad, and I got cooler. It seemed like I couldn't win no matter what. But guess what? I was playing what I thought was kind of high stakes, and I lost a few thousand dollars over the course of a few months. I even got a job at McDonald's, by the way, and made $1,000 in a month. I was getting my ass kicked; it was not a fun time, basically.
But slowly, things got better. I was happy to win just a few hundred at first. I was like, "Oh my God, I won $300!" I turned up a deposit online, and I was happy to play small stakes. I ran it up to $350, had my account locked for a few months, and then after a few months, it was unleashed. When I was 18, I was slowly grinding up more, and things were getting better and better. I got to about $2,000 or $3,000. I won my money back, and I realized, "Wow, after six months, I just won my money back."
I was reading about Annie Duke and Donnie Stern and how their rises were so meteoric and so fast. They won tournaments so quickly, and I thought, "Man, I don't think I can really compare to these guys." Shortly after that, I won a tournament for $5,000, and as an act of destiny, it seemed, I won it with what was my favorite hand at the time: King-Four offsuit. From there, this was 2007, I believe, until 2010. My rise was meteoric and even surpassed Donnie's and even surpassed the coaches I learned from. Right after I got that money, I deposited it on CardRunners.com and learned more and more from all those coaches, the best coaches in the world. I beat all of them, surpassed all of them, and became basically the top player with the biggest bankroll in full ring, beating all the world legends at No-Limit Hold'em.
Now, let's contrast this with Pot-Limit Omaha. When it came to PLO, I had a bit of the opposite experience. I was already on top of the world, and I was learning PLO. I was prudent enough to decide to learn at quote-unquote small stakes: $10/$20 and $25/$50 buy-ins. You can easily lose $20,000 by comparison. I didn't really know that much of what I was doing. I got some coaching and realized that I sucked, but I was winning. I was winning quite a lot, as a matter of fact. I ran between $1 million and $1.5 million up and beat many of the best in the world at PLO: Ryan Townsen, Cole South, those guys at the time, Brian Hastings, and Patrik Antonius. I was beating them, but like I said, I was running way over EV. It definitely felt like I was winning.
Then 2011 rolled around, and I played Gus Hansen at $500/$1,000 and Phil Ivey at $50/$100 cap. I lost millions—about a million-ish—in a downswing. My all-in EV was catching up to me, and one day, I also lost a million dollars playing Phil Ivey on Full Tilt at the $50/$100 cap. I got completely smashed. That was a terrible day, and my EV was catching up to me, like I said. Over the next several months, I had a $5 million roll or whatever, and it slowly dripped down to $3.5 million or $3.8 million. I had many horrible days, actually. I had a day where I lost like $400,000 at $25/$50, and this was kind of close to the end when Black Friday happened. It looked like I just wasn't as good as I thought I was. I was ultra-stressed. Even though things began really great in the beginning, my leaks had caught up to me, and I slowly paid for them as time went on.
So you can see two very different experiences: one where all my leaks hit me right at the beginning, and a lot of unfortunate stuff happened in the beginning. Unfortunate, by definition, means that it's not going to last forever. So when things ended up being more and more fortunate, my experience got better and better. Then, when I played Pot-Limit Omaha, I was up here at the top, and things were going pretty great for a long time. I wasn't getting punished for my leaks; I was running over EV, and nothing bad was happening. Then I just started losing, and at some point, I started getting smashed and crushed again, with lots of bad things happening. I was just grinding it out, trying to get out of the downswing, battling my ass off, and then I realized, "Wow, I wasn't as good as I thought I was."
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Now, you can see the whole point of this is that in the beginning, my luck seemed like it was terrible. But this idea of things getting better and better versus worse and worse actually has loads of parallels in real life as well. Think about people who get rich because they're lucky or get rich because they made all their money in the first place, or even the people who were born into wealth. Think about the experience of those people. Who cares if you're really rich if your life sucks? Or what if you're really poor and everything seems like a blessing? If things are constantly getting better, that's a far superior situation than the vice versa, where you're really rich and things get worse and worse. There are loads of stresses, and this seems to be a proper way of looking at things. It champions the idea that you want to make money the right way versus making money in stupid ways or ways that try to get lucky in the beginning because you will pay for those eventually. The leaks will always catch up to you, and you have to pay for them at some point or another.
You should even be thankful for them because without those leaks, without those negative things, there will never be an upside. If you think about it, the only reason there's an upside is because there's a downside. These concepts are reminiscent of what Machiavelli describes in the book "The Prince." He describes that it's much better to be the person in power who acquires their power the right way, learns all the lessons in the beginning, and figures out how to actually do things versus the guy who's born into power and has to lose it. It's very hard to retain it when you're just born into it and you don't know what you're doing. It's hard to see what the right decision is because you have no experience, and there's a very high likelihood of a downward trajectory.
So the bottom line is that appearances can be deceiving, and you're going to pay for your leaks one way or another—in poker, in life. It's best to work on fixing them sooner rather than later so that you can reap the benefits and not have such a terrible experience. Pretty much, that's it. The experience is really the true currency of what you're looking for. The nature of the experience matters. What really matters is how good you feel and the kinds of things that you've experienced as you've done so.
The best possible experience, by the way, personally fascinates me as I started to contemplate the EV—not just of my poker decisions, but the EV beyond the meta of those decisions and the EV of my life decisions. It's actually an unpredictably positive experience, one that gradually goes up, but zigzags in some kind of way. There's an element of randomness. You don't want to know exactly what happens all the time; otherwise, the element of surprise or the feeling of being surprised in a good way can no longer exist. This means you do have to deal with the negative downsides of being surprised, but that experience needs uncertainty in order for things to happen.
So it turns out, by the way, you don't want to know everything because if you did, you wouldn't have so much fun. In his book "Elements of Poker," Tommy Angelo describes a game called "Bad Times," where basically the worst possible things happen at unpredictable frequencies. Just the nature of randomness. You don't want to play "Bad Times" too much. Maybe you're curious for a little bit, but that's not what we're aiming for.
If you think about it, poker, if you play it right, can be the best possible experience. The same is true with real life. If you're a jerk in real life, you're going to get messed up, and it may also happen at random intervals that you can't predict. Things will just get worse and worse. But if you take care of yourself and have healthy habits, things can get better and better unpredictably, at least in theory.
So let's aim for that. That's the goal: to create parabolic, positive, unpredictable experiences. That's what this channel is about, anyway, and that's why I made the channel. Let's hope it works!