Daniel Negreanu: Poker | Lex Fridman Podcast #324

you could be the seventh best player in the whole world like literally seven best player but if you're playing with the other six you're the sucker you are you are the like the worst player in the game right so like there's a lot of players for example like the Dan bilzerians of the world right he's not a top level player like you know these guys you see on TV but he probably makes more money than they do because he plays with people that are far below his skill level so part of the part of the skill of being a poker player is finding situations where you're profitable you know regardless of your skill level the following is a conversation with Daniel negrano one of the greatest poker players of all time this is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Daniel negrono everything everyone does at the poker table conveys information so let me ask sort of the big overview question what are the various sources of information that you project and others project at the table that convey information well there's several different things there's the ones that are conscious and then there's the ones that are subconscious right like on the conscious level it might be something someone says right you know you ask them a question and they say oh you know you shouldn't call me here you should so there's the verbal tells there's also the more you know subconscious stuff body posture right the eyes the throat the pulse um various things that are you know less controllable I find I use a combination of both to try to gain information but generally when I have somebody more comfortable they give off more when like everyone has a different approach Phil Ivey likes to intimidate I go the other way I want my opponents to be relaxed so that they'll give me more in that regard so Phil Ivey likes to perturb the system like mess with it to see what comes out I think Phil has an aura about him where he wants you to know that he's watching you be afraid be uncomfortable because when you're uncomfortable I got you right and that's sort of his shtick where he you know and people do like when you sit at a table with Phil Ivey it's it's intimidating he likes to rule by fear and you like to rule by uh what is it love that's a really good way to put it I never had anyone put it like that but it makes a lot of sense yeah you know fear Phil Ivy and then with me it's fine don't worry I'll take your money but you're gonna enjoy it it's great so that's what the talking at the table is about us get him to be relaxed and get some of that gray area between the Consciousness and the subconscious to reveal something yeah there's that too and also just you know and this is just part of who I am anyway like I like to talk to people but one of the byproducts is the more I know about you the more I likely know about how you think about different situations right so what do you do for a living oh I'm a lawyer I defend criminals okay so this guy probably spends a lot of his time twisting the truth trying to find you know and then so then you know you already have a mindset of like this guy might be more likely to Bluff or he's probably comfortable doing that very subtle things like that and you start to uh pick up cues on what nervousness looks like for this person what the nervousness communicates all that kind of stuff so we're talking about physical test here the secondary thing though I was more specific like player profiling right instead of understanding the type of mind that I'm dealing with right um so again somebody who's a lawyer is is used to trying is is fine with being deceptive as part of a game right whereas maybe somebody's a Sunday school teacher and you know they don't feel comfortable they maybe they think bluffing might be dishonest right so they're less likely to try some Shenanigans against you so and then the other thing too is what type of person is this in terms of their um you know out like view on life right are they positive do they feel like things go their way or they're not right there's those people that always well of course I lost I always lose with this hand and those types of people you can manipulate because when a card comes that you don't you don't have them beat right but you can pretend because they'll believe it like of course you beat me so you bet all your chips against them knowing that you can scare them because they're they they already feel like they're gonna lose the inherent like the cynicism exact cynicism is easier to play against because you can convince them that their cards suck yeah when somebody believes that they're a loser or they're unlucky right and that bad things happen to them always and they never catch a break well you know you can just help them make it true what do you think about the rounders Teddy KGB when he does the Oreo tell do players at the high level communicate that kind of stuff do you think it's realistic to be able to have a tell like this that's partially subconscious so first of all I love Brian koppelman who made the film and uh I think what they were going for is something obvious to the general visually right like okay it's very clear you know he eats the cookie he doesn't eat the cookie and it means one or the other at the highest levels something that you know blatant you're not gonna find you're going to find a lot more subtle things maybe with posture or or timing or you know different things like that but at the lower levels you know you know you might see some you might see you know with a lot of people when they're in a hand and they've bet whether they drink water in the hand is going to tell you something generally speaking it's such an intimate part of the human experience that I feel like if you have food you're going to reveal something about yourself through the way you eat I feel like that's a dangerous thing to have with the table well the thing is generally speaking people don't eat food in the middle of a hand like they're not gonna bet and then just like I need a burger right what they will do though is you know they bet and it's up to you and then they're whether they're on you know uncomfortable or they do it unconsciously they just want to do something to make themselves look relaxed or whatever and you know they grab a water where they don't really need it in that moment but they're trying to take your mind off of the situation so they in the movie wanted to show a simplistic version of something that does happen something that's visually sort of uh clear yeah because I think one of the things rounders got right is that it's a poker movie right but you don't have to be great at poker really understand poker to enjoy the movie and that you know Oreo cookie tell like everyone gets that like okay that's simple if he would have went with something more subtle you know like licking your lips or looking to the right and I think it might have been lost on the audience and they didn't actually explicitly say that that was a tell I don't think they thought they did everything to let you know right with the music and slow motion and he's staring at it and he's like aha yeah but they didn't actually say you know this is an obvious tell like uh my famous characters at the very end of it yeah you know after he he says how the fuck did you lay that down monster right and he's like he's he's like he's like you're not hungry not hungry KGB he's like I keep on you know he sort of references it and then he takes the cookies he notices he's like ah he got me and he breaks the you know the racket well probably if you had that kind of tell on him you wouldn't in Matt Damon's character would not reveal well he says in the movie he says normally I wouldn't reveal a tale but I don't have that much time like I've got to Rattle him some way yeah so that that was one way to do that how hard is it to do that to uh in the KGB accent uh to lay down a monster in those situations in general how hard is it to lay down a really strong hand just psychologically yeah no I mean I think it's incredibly difficult for the vast majority of people you know part of what makes professionals really really good is recognizing a situation that's very very dangerous and they need to you know jump ship like what happens to a lot of players is you get married to a hand let's say you have pocket aces which is the best possible hand right but the board runs out where it's seven eight nine and then there's a Jack and then there's a six it's like you have a great hand to start but you don't anymore so one of the difficult things for the average player is you know once they've put money in cutting their losses and saying okay let's move on to the next hand it's very very difficult thing for a lot of people at every stage of like pre-flop all the way through be able to just make a decision on at that point so yeah essentially not being attached okay I've already put in forty thousand dollars in this pot and this guy's bet another 20. well I mean I got to get my 40 back right except you know in some cases you have to reassess individually this situation and realize all right well this is a bad investment so I got to cut my losses by the way I should I should mention that you have you have an incredible YouTube channel where you explain a lot of stuff you do a podcast you do a lot of really awesome stuff my probably favorite thing that you've done is your master class uh that people should definitely check out masterclass.com Lux there you go uh no but it really is one of my favorite Master Class courses but also just a great introduction overview of Poker it's great for people that like me who are beginners essentially but it's probably really good for intermediate people too I mean there's a lot of really good detail there anyway what are hand ranges and uh how do you begin to estimate the range of hands that your opponents have yeah so I actually speaking to YouTube I did a video on specifically this yeah familiar with Rangers and essentially you know back in my day the old days we didn't talk about poker that way we're like I think he's got this or I think he's got that right uh nobody thought of like the range of hands a player can have so I guess the best example is Imagine like all the potential hands as being a part of a grid right so the first player to act they could have any one of those hands right anyone randomly dealt right but let's say now that that player raised to three thousand dollars okay well you can eliminate now from this grid a whole bunch of hands that this player can no longer have because if they had a two and a three they wouldn't do that so you can say okay he probably has a big pair he has Ace King you know you've you've narrowed the range of hands down right now through every action on the Flop on the turn and on the river based on the decisions they make you narrow it down even further so the range of hands is the whole uh the entirety of all the possibilities that this player you believe could have and sometimes they fool you or they have a hand that you don't expect them to have in their range and you know maybe a little bit uh unorthodox doing some things you don't expect to throw you off but a range is essentially all the possibilities and it Narrows as by the time before the Flop it's endless player raises okay it's minimized and now a player bets the Flop okay it's minimized further and then by the river you know you can narrow down the entire range to you know just maybe even a few hands is it always shrinking or is there sort of as you get surprised I mean it's always just an estimate so is does it ever expand based on sort of chaotic unpredicted surprising behavior of the players it really should never expand the range of hands should always get smaller right like again we start with with the the full the full scope and then you should factor in like okay these are all the possible hands you can have on the Flop now right we can't have new hands on the turn and if you if you get to that point where you think oh well maybe he has this hand then you then you sort of misjudged his range prior so you're not thinking clearly it should always shrink from the full scope to you know hopefully just a couple well in that video you'll also talk about it used to be that you would play your hand but now you're playing a range that you're representing a range you're not even just playing your hand so what does it mean to represent a certain range yeah so that's another big thing that's different about poker from you know my day to today is that back in our day we would like put people on one hand like you probably have King nine or you have jax or something like that now people are cognizant of the idea that you could have an entire range of hands so then you ask yourself in situations all right I know what I have but what I could have in his mind or my opponent's mind is any one of these hands what would I do with the entirety of the these hands and so a lot of people that are trying to play optimally you know game three optimal they think in terms of what their range of hands would do rather than their very specific hand so as is bluffing in that context essentially misrepresenting the range of hands that you have no is that how you think about it not exactly because so an optimal range like if I bet the river if I'm playing game three optimal a portion of my range is going to be I have it I got I got the best hand and a portion of my range is going to be Bluffs and they'll be balanced so in theory no matter what you do okay no matter what you do if you call or you fold in theory it's just you're printing a zero as we say you're not you're not getting gaining or losing any EV if you were to do it that way what's EV Eevee is expected value right so every play that you make you know it either is going to in the long run you know make you some money or it's it's just a losing play and as a professional you try to make the fewest amount of minor CV plays you can and the only reason you would make these minor CV plays is potentially if you're trying to set up your opponent for something later right so I might make some minor CV plays right so that I can exploit you later right so you're building up building up an image a player profile that's false in some way something that I'm gonna I'm gonna plant seeds in your mind so that I can exploit them later so for example why would players like show a big Bluff yeah like what would be the reason for that they show a big Bluff so that you know they're capable of it but maybe in their mind they're never going to do that again but now they think you know he bluffed me last time maybe he's doing it again but that's a what we call like a level a leveling War because it you know you can go back and forth with whether or not okay this guy might know that like he showed a bluff because he's never going to Bluff me again so that that's where it gets a little so that's a little bit different though when we're talking about hand Rangers that's different than building up a mental model of what your opponents what your opponents think of you and what your opponents think that you think of them and and so on so forth are you trying to construct those kinds of method models and is that separate from the hand ranges they go hand in hand right so if any given in a given situation right my range has this many value hands and this many Bluffs okay so in theory if I want to be balanced you know this is my range and this is what it looks like I'll bet this 50 of the time bet this 50 time however if I know that you think that I Bluff too much right then I'm not going to Bluff as much I'm going to start instead of betting these hands that I would 50 50. now what I'll do is I'll do like 70 30 where I'm basically value betting most of the time against you you know or vice versa if I know you always fold because you think I have it I'm going to Veer the other way and instead of bluffing fifty percent I left 70 80 percent of the time to take advantage of your perception of me so to be successful do you have to construct a solid model of all the players in the game or can you ignore them I think it's really important like when I play I have in my phone I have a player profile of everyone that I play with whenever I pick up whether it's physical tells or Tendencies they like to you know that they have um and overall that's just gonna you know that's gonna allow you to exploit more right so like if I played with somebody I've never played before I'm probably just going to play optimally or at least as optimal as I know how until I start to you know gain some information on that player so that I can start to exploit them so what's the when you say optimally what does optimally mean versus so Game Theory optimal versus um exploitative yeah so that's like sort of the big debate in poker we call it for short GTO Game Theory optimal versus exploitative play so GTO Game Theory optimal is the idea that no it like I'm gonna set up my play so that no matter what you do you cannot exploit me so essentially that's playing rock paper scissors right and throwing 33 of each every time right nothing you do can beat that nothing you'll never be able to beat that right exploitative play is starting to notice that okay well you know what this guy loves Rock he loves playing Rock so I'm gonna go pay for a little more so I'm going to take advantage of them so I won't be through but now all of a sudden when I do that I'm no longer playing optimal because if you knew that I was making that adjustment now you can exploit me so that's where the sort of what we call the leveling War happens where people Veer from you know the optimal line of okay 33 each for each one you can't beat that but you also can't win with that either so you're always trying to be at the at the cutting at the Leading Edge of sub-optimal play You're yeah you're going back and forth and listen at the highest levels like online that these guys play like they're trying to play pretty close to like Game Theory optimal because it's very difficult to do first of all no human being will ever be able to compute at the level that computers can it's just never going to happen so that's where like the human mind has to come into play and say all right well you know if I was playing against the robot I would do X but I'm not I'm playing against U so I have to adjust so this game theory optimal only look at the the betting and the hands in the current hand or does it look at the history so if you were to play optimally optimally would you need to look at the history of the individual players or just every hand is taken afresh see that's why I love playing exploitatively for the most part because with GTO it anything that's happened in the past has no bearing on this situation it's simply based on what is the optimal play in a vacuum in this spot whereas exploitatively okay this guy Bluffs way too much in these spots so now I can make an adjustment and call more you know based on past information GTO doesn't take into account history at all so like in a tournament how quickly can you construct a player profile that you've never played before depends on the level of the buy-in really right so the higher the buy-in generally speaking you can assume if they're professionals that they're going to have pretty similar profiles because you know everyone's playing you know if you're playing this game well it looks similar right at the lower levels you know playing say in a 1 000 or 1500 buying or less you know within a half an hour an hour I have an idea of all right just by seeing how some players played a few hands that you know so here's the thing with pokers like I can see one clue of what he did and it tells me so much about what he'll do in a vast number of scenarios and you're saying at the high level people don't give too many Clues I mean well at the highest level is people are so much more similar in terms of their style of play they try to find some kind of balance between the GTO and now with all that we've seen on TV right like people get to watch streams and whatever so you get to watch all the top players play so if you want to learn how to play better guess what you do you copy what they're doing essentially like oh he's only raising this much I'm gonna do the same they're betting this much I'm gonna do the same so as a result what you end up having is sort of uh you know every everyone deciding like I guess it's similar in chess with openings right people figure out okay this is an opening this is what you do and that's it you know and then everyone's similar to that and then you have of course the outliers who try to do things a little differently and confuse people it seems like the outliers like we talked offline the Magnus in order to win Magnus Carlsen has to play sub-optimally in the openings to to take it take his opponents out of the comfort zone so he can he can play what he calls Pure Chess as quickly as possible was just both short and deep calculations purely you're looking at the board versus memorized openings and memorized lines is it the case that the best poker players are the ones that are able to at the right time play really sub-optimally or really um an orthod or unorthodox yeah specifically there's one guy who last year sort of took the poker World by storm and his name is Michael Adamo and he was doing things like I said you know most of the top pros play very similarly with the way that they you know construct ranges and their bet sizing and all these kind of things he was doing some crazy things that nobody else was doing so he studied you know sort of a different form of Poker and it it was unorthodox and it you know it throws people off because he's in his comfort zone with these bet sizes and different things whereas everyone else they're they're not well studied in those spots so as a result of him being unorthodox he became like a monster and very difficult to play against because he really knew what he was doing with it in tournament or cash games it was tournaments yeah he was crushing tournaments he was going against the norm in terms of what is like you know this is what you should do as a poker player in the spot he wasn't doing that he was doing what he thought was best and he was doing things outside the norm that again in a vacuum you could look at that and you go that that's incorrect that he should not do that is a clear-cut mistake even you know the solvers or the computers or Game Theory would say this is wrong what he's doing but it's not wrong if he's doing it in a way that he's exploiting other players tendencies so for example with him say he's playing far too aggressively okay that's not good unless your opponents are playing way too passively so if your opponents are playing passively the answer is to be more aggressive with them and that's I think one of the you know biggest advantages he had was he was willing to do that so in a spot where somebody would make it a thousand he's he's making it twenty two thousand like what what is this this makes no sense and then people kind of know he has nothing but they they're too afraid to uh call him on it well and then sometimes what happens is this is where the leveling comes in you're like man this guy's crazy he's bluffing like nuts then he bets to 22 000. and you say ah I'm taking my stand I call and then he shows you like you know four of a kind or something like that yeah so he gets people out of their comfort zone and I really enjoy watching him play he's probably my favorite player to watch um today watching a guy like that what aspect of his play have you been able to incorporate into your own like what do you learn from that because you're constantly learning you're constantly adjusting yeah well no and I love it and as I said so I think a lot of players sort of come to the same conclusions about this is how you play the spot but he doesn't and I love watching and thinking in terms of like why he's doing this and one specific thing for example is he's willing to really go for it so in a spot where let's say he bets 2 000 he knows he'll get you call 2000 right but he wants it all he wants it all so he says you know what I'll give up the 2000 that's guaranteed and I'll bet 50 000. and maybe if you call that now you know so listen you lose the two thousand seven eight times but if I get called for the 50 just once you know I'm profiting from that and it also sets the uh you know the template for you to really sort of be a player that people are afraid to play against he he knocked me out in a tournament very early on in a huge event and he had he was so far ahead he was one step ahead of my thought process in hand and he did something that makes no sense whatsoever I looked it up on the computer huge mistake if you will but not a mistake because he was taking advantage of my tendency do you remember the cars is it an example I remember the whole thing yeah I remember like this yesterday can you take it like through an example hand that sure really demonstrates it so I'll explain the hand here so I uh I'm on the button and I have Ace King which is a very good hand and I raise and he calls from the big blind the Flop is nine seven five so I have nothing really here he checks I check behind the turn card's an ace he checks I bet half the pot there were six thousand there I bet three thousand okay now this is not a typical thing you see people do but he raised me to 36 000. massive raise bigger than the size of the pot what was the Flop again so nine seven five okay turn an ace what is he representing exactly well he could have a straight he could have three three of a kind he could have you know aces up he could have a whole bunch of hands so he check raises me big to thirty six thousand I call the bet so now there's something like 75 000. the river is a five so the board pairs okay he thinks for a while and he bets all of it which is three times the pot he bets 225 000. there's only 75 000 now right and in theory he should never ever have a hand that can do that right so he confused me and I was like okay well this guy's aggressive he likes to Bluff and all this kind of stuff so I made the call with the Ace King and he turned over six eight so we had a straight but here's the thing in theory that River card is bad for him when I call the turn I have a lot of the time three of a kind two pair that just made a full house so he was risking that and the reason he did it was because he thought I would perceive him to be bluffing a lot so he just went for it and it worked he was able to double up right away and knock me out of the tournament like an hour in do you think he thought you might fold like what I think specific I think it was it came down to this it's as simple as this he was cognizant of His Image as being a wild aggressive lover right and he was fully taking advantage of me knowing that my tendency in these spots is to be curious and I want to call and I want to see it so he was fully taking advantage of the fact that he thought I would call too often because otherwise his play makes no sense a small bet a medium-sized bet those make sense but the bet that he made in theory is indefensible it's just like clearly a mistake but that's why poker's so fascinating because he makes this play and it wasn't a mistake it was Above the Rim that's what it was do you think he put you on Ace something I think exactly what he thought I had was Ace King or something like that you know oh that is so fun that is so fun that the two players at such a high level were able to mess with each other's mind how how old is he he's young he's in his 20s I feel like that takes a lot of guts to uh take risks like that well that's what's great about him he certainly never accused of not having the guts to put it in and that's scary to play against right the easiest opponent to play against is one who's just straightforward passive you know not wild and crazy playing against him he's going to put you in the blender as we say uh how can you control what you're perceived as representing what hand you're perceived of as representing so if we're if the game of modern poker is others are representing certain hands through the information they convey and you're representing a certain hand range sorry uh through your play how can you control that or is that not is that the wrong way to think about it but it isn't but laughing in bed sizing and all that kind of stuff essentially controlling what others perceive as the hand range you have ultimately in terms of like controlling people's perception of you you can't fully control it but you can do things to um sway it right as I said earlier showing Bluffs and things like that you know leads your opponent to think maybe you do this more often than you're supposed to or whatever the case may be but in terms of like controlling um you know what your opponent can think about your hands in certain spots I don't really think it equates that way it doesn't really you know I think what people do when they're playing a hand is they think in terms of all right what does my range look like here okay so my range has value so you you look at what you know the actual hand you have secondarily so you say okay well I could have this I could have this I actually have this right but I could have all these hands so my opponent if he's thinking on a high level he knows I could have all these hands and I have this one so what do I do with this one right in the bigger scope of things I guess I'm trying to understand if you're betting isn't a bet pre-flop your bet doesn't that narrow the hand ranges doesn't matter what you have absolutely Narrows the the end absolutely and if you bet big combined with the perception of you at the table doesn't that represent the hand range uh-huh absolutely so like you can with betting essentially control what people estimate you to have sure so that makes it easy so yeah so that's that's true so for example one of the most extreme examples is we have uh we do there's like there's there's spots where there's a bit that's considered polarizing right so let's say there's a thousand in the pot and you bet ten thousand which is crazy big right that's saying one of two things I either have the absolute best possible hand or absolutely nothing because any of the hands in the middle I wouldn't do that with so I'm essentially telling you when I bet that I'm like I either got it or you know I got I don't have a mediocre hand like just a pair of nines or a pair of tens I have a royal flush or I have nine high so with my bet sizing I can control how my opponent is perceiving what my range is going to be so for example you know similarly if I bet small right well that could be a lot of hands right that can represent a big part of my range the bigger the bet the more uh the narrower the range apparently the more polarized it is yeah yeah uh how far could you get without looking at your cards do you think how well could you do it depends on who I'm playing with right so if I was playing in a tournament with mediocre or weak players I think I could probably do pretty well but even like world class world class I don't think you'd have much of a chance really I mean the question is trying to get at like how important is it the actual hands you have versus the the the hands you're representing right so that's the question of essentially if you're not looking at your hand pre-flop you're basically giving up in a fundamental Advantage right where you're you're going to be playing way sub-optimally in terms of your hand selection right because you don't look at your hand you might have a two and a three that's not good but now you're playing it so you've invested whatever two three thousand bucks with absolute garbage and it's very difficult to climb that hill right so it's much better to actually look at your cards and go okay I'll throw away the two and three and I'll play the ace King speaking of garbage uh you're you've said that 10-7 is your favorite poker hand to place that's still the case and what aspect of it is that you enjoy yeah so it's one of those viewer discretion is advised like 10-7 I've just noticed throughout my life you know it's a tendency thing that I've been lucky with it so so that's just sort of but it's not like I'm gonna look at 10 7 and go oh wow you know I'm gonna call it all in or anything like that I'll play it in situations where it makes sense but you know it's rare because it's not a very good hand but is there some aspect of belief in the magic of this hand manifests quality of play so here's the thing it's you know poker players some have said it's unlucky to be superstitious but we're all a little bit superstitious a little bit you know and so I don't know maybe it is a case where when I have 10-7 I feel somehow energetically that you know I'm more likely to catch something which may actually make me more apt to be aggressive and confident in the hand but but you really shouldn't let yourself do that like you're not supposed to fall in love with any specific hands yeah but you know uncertainty is ruthless and so you know the the fact that it's uh um a game of Statistics it it can be too painful for the human psychology so maybe you have to hold on to certain superstitions because you know I mean there's there's a cold absurdity to the fact that you can play up you can play extremely well and still lose I mean the actually this year you've played uh what it what is it 50 days of World Series of Poker and it seems like at least from the perspective of me looking at it through the internet it seems like there's a lot of hands that you were like 70 30 80 20 uh all in hands that you just did not we're not going your way that can sort of break you mentally absolutely yeah one of the hardest things especially about playing because cash games and tournaments are different one of the most difficult things about you know being a tournament player is resilience because more often than not like so if there's a tournament with a thousand people to win the tournament you have to get all of the chips that means there's one winner and 999 losers so it's very rare that you actually like win all the chips so you're essentially at some point in every tournament you play gonna deal with like really bad luck and disappointment and sometimes those streaks can have you question yourself and be introspective about okay so I think I'm 47 now I think I've gotten better as time went on between distinguishing okay am I losing right now because of bad luck or is it fundamentally decisions I'm making are not very good right and that's one of the hardest things for anyone who plays poker to get to right why am I losing am I losing because of my opponents being better I'm not playing well or am I losing just because of luck and because there's so much variance in poker a lot of players can be confused with on both sides of the coin one guy's winning and he thinks he's great he's really not wait till the cards break even as we say you know I think there's a lot of parallels to life as well you don't if you get screwed over over and over it's hard to know if you're doing something wrong or if it's just bad luck yeah I think they did a study I remember there was like a study it was supposed to be related to gambling but it was mice and they put them in a little maze and they'd go down these three tubes and they go down this one tube and there'd be cheese right and then they'd go down again cheese three times in a row there was cheese there right the next time there was an electric shock there not cheese the rat went you know the mouse went to to get zapped he got zapped okay came back he kept going back to get zapped until he died like he kept going because he found cheese there he has one there so he continued to go chase that win despite it being you know now all of a sudden not worthwhile till uh till they died and essentially what they said was that is essentially how they uh compared it to like you know the gambling brain and how people think about gambling you're chasing the wins you learn too much you sort of over generalized the lessons learned from the times you've won so yeah like beginner's luck can be detrimental if you if you have some early luck and you believe that this is just the way it's supposed to be forever you know it can put you in a delusional state where you know you you feel like I'm I'm just great but no you're not you were just lucky in the beginning I actually played poker once in Vegas it was a uh it wasn't a tournament but it was a kind of tournament-like style I already forgot what it was but what I do remember is I had four of a kind so the last hand I've ever played in poker was I got a four of a kind and there was uh a couple of others with really strong hands so everybody went all in and I think you get some kind of bonus for getting four of a kind bad beat jackpot yeah so something like this I apologize if I don't know the details but I just remember winning a lot of money and I walked away from the table I said I'm not playing poker again this is great because I started to feel like this is your I started to think even though I haven't really played poker at all that I'm I'm good and I was a really dangerous feeling and everybody was really mad for walking away from the table one of the other things is I think it's interesting about poker 2 is good is relative right yeah so you could be the seventh best player in the whole world like literally seven best player but if you're playing with the other six you're the sucker you are you are the like the worst player in the game right so like there's a lot of players for example like the Dan bilzerians of the world right he's not a top level player like you know these guys you see on TV but he probably makes more money than they do because he plays with people that are far below his skill level so part of the part of the skill of being a poker player is finding situations where you're profitable you know regardless of your skill level another connection to life uh do you think Dan balzarian is telling the truth about having made what is it 50 100 million dollars just a huge amount of money playing poker considering what I know about the private games and the types of players who play in these private games and the stakes that they play I absolutely believe you know Dan has made I don't know how many millions but I you know whether it's 50 whatever but it wouldn't surprise me that if you play in these games within a year or you know you find the right businessman who has way too much Bitcoin money you know and you know in one night you take them for 20 million I absolutely could see it I don't see any reason why listen where he got his money initially you know that's up to interpretation from his father or whatever but what but has he made a bunch of money playing poker absolutely no question do you feel like as somebody who loves the game do you think there's something almost ethically wrong in playing people much worse than you so yeah that's a good question because you know part of the reason I played poker and wanted to become professional was like I want to be make my mother proud right and I don't think she would be proud of me taking like Grandma Betty's like last five dollars you know and again down the street you know sending her broke and taking her pension check so I play at the high stakes against people who can afford it they know who I am I'm not a hustler I'm not pretending I'm bad at poker to squeeze in like I was thinking about this just yesterday because I played in a game that if I played that sort of role where a lot of guys do Pros they sort of play down their skill level pretend they're just one of the guys these guys can make 20 30 million dollars in a year legitimately like I believe that like if I did that if I said you know what I'm gonna go down that path get into these games in La you know and travel and do all this kind of stuff I can make 20 million a year but it feels a little greasy right I don't like to kiss anyone's ass I don't like to ask it for anyone for a favor or things like that so but but yeah like I I feel listen a rich guy who wants to sit down with a million bucks and get drunk and lose it I have no empathy for that I'm like I don't have any moral qualms with that so if uh Grandma Betty is a billionaire uh okay give me send it send it right you know absolutely why not um well let me ask you about a tough uh period of your recent life you had a rough like we mentioned the World Series of Poker uh losing 1.1 million dollars over 48 days what were you going through mentally during that so here's the thing you know I do like you said I do a YouTube Vlog every day so I kind of share my thoughts and listen I can edit that thing and keep out the bad stuff but I think it's more authentic and genuine to show people the actual struggles and the pain that I go through you know without it and I'd say the one thing I'm most proud of throughout the entire thing is the resilience because there are moments you see me where I'm broken I'm just like I can't take it I broke a selfie stick this year like I was filming it because you know I do for my Vlog I smash the stick threw it in the corner right it's just that was my like hit rock bottom moment and then I put the camera on me and I was like all right I let people see it but mentally it was very difficult because there was a feeling of hopelessness where you can I was making good decisions like I genuinely felt like I'm playing really really well but every time my money went in and my opponent's money went in and say I was 60 70 80 for about a two week stretch I lost every one of those and you start to wonder you're like I can't win if I never win you know in these spots so it was difficult luckily I have you know 20 odd years of experience on how to deal with it and so as I said I wake up the next day ready to go it's as if nothing happened to a certain degree obviously you know the more the more it happens in the higher binds like the one where I broke the selfie stick I lost 500 000 in that tournament right and it was like the last card it was painful I think you lost yeah I think he lost I agree what led up to the uh selfies the gate like what you just lost your shit for a like 100 milliseconds like it was very brief you're just like what the world wasn't making any sense like how Mike do I keep losing kind of thing how did you why did you lose your shit you should never really think like this but part of me felt like I deserved to win this yes right so part of me was like listen I've lost so many in the last two weeks all right let you know the poker Gods be kind to me right now let me win this and it looked good yeah I was in a great situation on the Flop great situation on the turn I'm about to be a competitor I'm gonna be a contender in this tournament to win a big prize pool and turn the whole thing around it's all there for the taking and then boom the last card it just you know it was a couple weeks of frustration in the moment of filming that I just had you know sort of a visceral reaction you know and I smacked uh smack the selfie stick and then like I it was I see a corner it's safe I threw the selfie stick on the ground and of course social media blows up about how you know I I was a violent act yeah you know I mean it's like if you've never watched Sports have you never seen a guy on the golf course smack his club or throw their helmet like you know there was the there's a guy Justin bonimo who's a poker player yeah and he's a super for lack of a better work offended by everything and he was equating my throwing a stick on the ground to violence against women domestic abuse and the idea that like this makes women feel unsafe to play poker and so that was kind of a running joke for the last two weeks where every time I sat at a table the guys would be like oh I feel unsafe yeah can you take me through the hand do you remember what the hand was like what was the yeah so it was a you know the player on the button raised David Peters very aggressive player he went all in from the Blind and I had a pair of pocket tens so I went with my tens and he had Queen ten of Spades so I was good I have way the best hand and the Flop was like King nine three one Spade turn was like the eight of spades so now he has a flush draw and the river was another Spade so he caught Spade spade and he made he made a flush well but statistically you were winning the whole time yeah I was winning up until the last card what did he go all in on was it a bluff he made what's considered like a pretty standard play in modern poker where you know a guy raised and he was just trying to pick up you know what was there and he ran into a hand in the big blind and you know he got lucky so what was the throughout the strategy of preparation and strategy of play so you're playing so many days is are you trying to ignore the results and stick to a particular strategy yes for the most part you know what I'm trying to do is like if I formulate a strategy for the whole seven weeks because there's a very there's a varying degree of buy-ins too like you have small ones like 1500 then you got like 250 000 buy-in so I map out the seven weeks and right I'll give a little bit of mental energy to the 1500 which means I'll be on my phone I'm not gonna I don't care as much about this one but the 250k fully engaged fully focused you know up against obviously the higher the buy-in you know super top competition and you know as far as strategy goes focusing on each day playing the best I can not the result like because if you focus on the result you're you're focused in the wrong place your focus should be on the decisions you actually make right and if you're making good decisions consistently you have to continue to do that the frustrating part is this with poker unlike chess or other things making the best possible decision doesn't mean you win often you lose you don't chest well as a Magnus Carlson has also talked about that there's some non-deterministic thing about Chess too given a limited uh cognitive capacity of the human mind so he he says that the world championship should have 20 30 40 50 games not not the few that they have it's too low of a sample so in that sense the high stakes uh poker tournaments are very too low sample sure yeah well when you think of the World Series of Poker so you like as you said I lost about one million right in one tournament that was 500 000. yeah so then you know like a few others here of high buying tournaments so the sample or the amount was you know 40 50 total tournaments with you know High variants and if you don't run well or do well in the highest buy-ins you know you're going to have a losing summer so you did a podcast on the mental game a few years ago and that's just something you really care about so what aspects of the mental gaming poker is most difficult to master I think the most difficult thing for people is self-awareness right and resilience self-awareness to know okay so you know again is it am I am I not doing as well as I could be because of luck or is there things that I can learn and I always look to mistakes as opportunities I really do when I make a mistake in a poker hand right call it a breakdown or whatever that's where breakthroughs happen we're like oh you know what I could have done here I could have done this and that would have been really good and I'm going to do that going forward so I think like with anything um you know when you start out playing golf like your goal is to just hit the ball right then you try to hit it in the air then you're trying to hit it straight then you're trying to hit it on the green then you're trying to hit it closer to the green to the point where the pros get where you know they're so finite they're trying to hit it 63 yards and spin it back three yards they're in it's imperfect like they don't hit the perfect shot because the perfect shot for them is it goes in but they try and make the mistakes smaller and smaller and smaller poker is the same we all make mistakes consistently the goal is to minimize especially the big ones what was the lowest point for you psychologically in poker in general actually maybe it was this year maybe it was in general do you remember there was times in your life speaking of resilience that were extremely difficult to you mentally yeah so early on you know as basically as you know as a teenager I was playing Toronto and then in my early 20s I'm like I'm going to Vegas right and I thought I was the best 21 years old I'm like check me out right show up with three thousand dollars 24 hours later you know money's gone and I remember I remember the moment vividly it was at the Binion's Horseshoe it was about three in the morning I was playing with seven other people you know I lost my last chips I went to the bathroom washed up got out they all left and it was like a moment where I realized like okay in Toronto I was the big fish but here they were playing because of me I was the sucker I remembered every one of their faces and then I remember not having enough money to get back to Budget Suites where I was staying so I walked I didn't you know I walked and in that moment I was thinking about like is this something that I'll be able to do am I good enough you know what am I going to do now I'm in Vegas I don't know anybody and I have no money right so that was certainly like what felt like a low Point walking back behind paradise and Twain which is not a great part of town uh where did you find the the strength to answer yes to that question that you can you can still do good I think this has been sort of a pattern in my life where like in the evening after it happens like I don't have it you know I don't have that feeling of Hope or you know resilience if you will I'm allowing myself to experience despair which is exactly where I'm at but then a good night's sleep wake up the next morning and just within me I have that inner confidence to say you know what fuck it get back on the hobby horse find a way make it work right and I do but I do believe it's really therapeutic and worthwhile to allow yourself to feel and vent so many people today the Instagram culture world I call it it's like they want to act like they're perfect nothing bothers them bullshit right you're pissed off it's okay to show it emotions fine we all have it there's no reason you have to suppress it obviously you don't want to have guys throwing selfie sticks around the room every time they lose a pot right yeah but but you know a little make everybody feel unsafe yeah exactly that happens so you're saying there is a culture saying you know stay positive all this kind of stuff but you know when you feel despair don't resist it write it out because it doesn't go away right that feeling you know you think you put it away in the pit of your stomach and you think you know it's gone it's not it's still there let yourself go fuck yeah you know it's all right you know there's nothing wrong with being a little bit emotional because once you've experienced it you let it out now you can move past it yeah and I feel like as long as your brain chemistry can support it uh you can usually learn a good lesson from it like you become stronger you become more resilient through it it's really interesting and a good night's sleep could really help absolutely yeah so through 2022 and in general what is a perfect day in the life of Daniel in the ground will look like when you're like on a day when you have to play a big game big tournament game and so on so like what what time do you wake up what do you eat for breakfast so my life is twofold like one when I'm playing hardcore and one when I'm not and they look very different right so I'll give you a quick glimpse of like when I'm not up at 10 you know breakfast in the gym at noon you know the post-workout uh meal coffee uh walk like you know I try to get that's what I do for cardio you know it's very like home-bodied I don't leave the house it's very like boring and mundane right long distance walk so like what do you do when you're walking you're thinking about stuff well no honestly I just walk on the treadmill I try to get 15 000 steps a day and I just walk for basically like an hour while I watch a show or I'm on the computer or something like that you know I'm on the treadmill why walking not running yeah well I mean I think walking I mean I do a little bit of running but hardly any I don't enjoy it like I just like walking and frankly for fat loss when it's usually what I'm doing after big poker tournaments is getting back in shape that walking's ideal for it right so so essentially it's like the tale two during the World Series of Poker all my sort of structured life thrown out the window there's no walking there's very little walking there's very little working out there's very little anything I go into the World Series you know like this year I went in around 157 and I expected to gain about 10 pounds during the World Series not good pounds wasn't muscle but that's about what I did 165 and then I spent the next month trying to you know lose it but during the World Series when I'm playing the most important thing without question that I have to focus on and this is why I stopped focusing on working on all this stuff is sleep if I'm not rested I'm useless if I only get five six hours and I have to go back the next day and play 14 hours the chances of me being at my best very very slim so sleep is a priority what's the perfect amount of sleep for you on those days eight so eight hours is my go-to every night during the World Series of Poker it's just not possible because of the way that it's structured sometimes the tournaments end at 2 15 a.m I get home about three o'clock takes me 30 minutes 40 minutes to get to sleep so let's say I'm in bed by four well the tournament said you know two so I have to get up and whatever so it's very difficult to get exactly eight a lot of the time you know and also get back there in time is there any hacks to uh quiet the mind because you're going on a pretty intense roller coaster mentally when you're playing was is there any tricks to getting to sleep given up I've been very lucky like I'm blessed I don't know if it's because of diet or what but I've always been a very good sleeper you just shut off I get to sleep and I sleep like a baby you know and I also nap really well like during the World Series sometimes what'll happen is let's say I get knocked out of one event at 4 P.M and there's another one that I can jump in instead of jumping right into it I'll go into like a private room and take 45 minute nap and you know and give me enough energy to to continue and sort of reset my mind yeah and it solves a lot of problems with the nap too it does yeah I feel like the nap is is a magical trick in life what else diet wise what do you uh your your mind is going you know uh pretty intensely all day yeah so during like like I said when I'm not playing I'm super regimented you know I have I literally measure everything you know I count calories I count macros I follow it to a t pretty balanced diet or any I'm a vegan vegan so it's you know a vegan diet like what balance in terms of carbs yeah yeah no I mean I eat a healthy amount I'm doing probably 150 grams of protein and uh like 60 grams of fat 50 and then about and try to measure it all out I do yeah basically I created a meal plan so what I did for myself is because I'm really anal and nerd I made a spreadsheet with like a day's food and I have six different ones so I just follow it like I don't it actually makes my life so much easier when I don't have to think about what I'm gonna eat for lunch or what I mean for dinner I already know what I'm gonna eat I already wrote it down and it doesn't get boring because I'm switching it up every day you know every six days and again occasionally I'll you know splurge and do something different during the World Series of Poker I eat whatever the fuck I want to eat damn like it's at 2 A.M I don't crave like a broccoli carrot salad like I want chocolate candy and chips so I'll just do it so you listen to the Cravings yeah I realized like surprising because like you're so regimented yeah outside of that it's really difficult like I've done it before where I played the World Series of Poker and I made it a point to work out every day but what that did was it sacrificed sleep yeah so then I found like at 1am I would be more tired you know because I've spending more energy than I would otherwise so I essentially like look at the World Series the six seven weeks where my body's just gonna take a beating not like a UFC fighter yeah like a different kind of beating and that's okay because I have so much confidence that within six weeks of just like eating right and working out I can get back to where I was it was just hilarious to me that you'd be eating chocolate but eating chocolate in bed as you're trying to get to sleep is this like literally a bag of like chips or chocolate yeah like on my way home and before bed you know just whatever this is what the professional athlete does at the uh it's the highest most difficult event of his career okay so um what else is there in terms of mental preparation and uh focus and meditation those kinds of things leading up to the games is there anything you like to like any rituals you you like to follow so yeah I have dabbled in the past with like meditation and different things like that and I know that there's health benefits to it and I and I understand that a lot of people get a lot from it and I've done it for good amount of time like long periods of time I found that for me I think it was predominantly Placebo like it it really wasn't doing anything yeah for me that I felt like it was it felt like I was doing something but I really I didn't see the any specific results from it so um so I don't really do that too much one thing that I will do for me is bleeding up is there so much footage now that I'll make it a point to like watch my opponents and then with like my phone I'll take notes and I'll keep track of different things that I'm seeing and that sort of and then what I'll do is I'll formulate a game plan like I'm playing the poker Masters coming up in about a week and I'll look to see the Tendencies of what my opponents are doing and then I'll come up with like some some things that I'm gonna do some tricks of the trade if you will not Game Theory optimal stuff stuff that I think oh they're making a mistake here that I can exploit and then I look to do that in different ways and always look to you know throw curveballs how hard is that that process uh do you enjoy it or is it like really hard work to analyze the players to try to understand what are the different holes what are the different mistakes what are the strengths to avoid and that kind of stuff I think the only thing that makes it harder is when you're young right you're in your 20s and you're trying to make your nest egg you're like you're trying to make your retirement money you're hungry right you're like Clubber Lang and you know the gym you're hungry whereas you know Rocky's in there take the pictures and smiling and doing commercials and stuff like that so I am 47 I'm financially okay I don't need to win I don't need to compete at the highest levels so I think it was a boxer I don't remember which one when I asked this he was asked the question um you know how do you get up in the morning you know still and and do those morning runs and he says you know what I'll be honest with you it's a lot more difficult doing the 4am run in silk pajamas right it just is right but I've always been self-motivated and I've always found a way so it's harder in the sense of like it's not a need I can still get by without it but so in that regard it does feel like a little bit of work we're like oh my God that's a lot of footage I got to get through and I don't know that I have the timer I don't know that I want to spend 10 hours of my day doing that when I could be doing other things I mean what do you still love about poker when you said when you enter like the times you catch yourself just uh being able to sort of take in the awe of it what aspects do you love I think that like for me I've always been really competitive but I was never going to be a professional athlete a professional snooker player I wasn't good enough at any of that stuff I didn't have the body type whatever um but poker it sort of levels a playing field right you're six five to forty big deal you know we're not we're not fighting here we're we're fighting a different type of War so the competitive aspect I also have always been fueled throughout my career by by doubters so this is probably unhealthy but every time people say like you're done you're washed up you can't win anymore it just makes me want to prove them wrong yeah right so I have a little bit of that in me which again you're reading the comments and all these kind of like I've been told many times throughout my career for the last 15 that I'm done I can't compete anymore and uh and I and I enjoy you know proven them wrong yeah uh the game has changed so much uh the the the greats of the past surely cannot be the grace of the present those that that that kind of commentary will continue for every sport and certainly for poker because poker really changed a lot over the past couple decades can you can you speak to how much has changed yeah because you've been at the top for so long yeah so complacency is a big issue for for people who make it if you will right so in my air of the poker boom around the early 2000s there was a group of players who were the big names the stars of the game well a lot of them had their egos out out of whack where they just felt like okay I'm the best that's it like no there's young guys learning there's new software there's solvers there's all these kind of things and if you're not keeping up then you'll get surpassed and I remember myself at a very early age saying I never want to be that guy and it was one of my first events in the late 90s I was the young buck playing with the Tom mcavois and Brad Dowdy the guys of the era right and I was doing things more aggressively and they were scoffing it all these young kids with their aggressive three and all this stuff and they're sort of mocking it you know and I thought never be that guy always have the humility to be introspective and always have the respect for your opponents that while while you're think you've got it all figured out they're learning new things and you can learn from them so I've always been willing to sort of swallow my pride and get coached by younger players who I might even be better than but they see blind spots that that I have that I might not and they you know they help me improve my game I've always been willing to sort of look every six months or a year and say is what I'm doing working and if not how do I make how do I get better but most people from my generation they they go the other way I don't know they just have this idea that they figured it all out once you feel like you've mastered it there's nothing left to learn that's the moment where everyone else starts to surpass you uh that's the moment where you lose the Mastery uh because it's always evolving how is the game changed so the game has changed in terms of the way people learn it right when I started out the only way to learn how to play poker was to sit your ass on the chair and play in person yes in person play maybe you jot down hands on a notepad we didn't even have cell phones back then right so write I would write notes I actually brought a notepad and then you know analyze it and sort of try to figure it out that way and think about you know maybe talking to friends and different players like when I grew up there was John juwanda Alan Cunningham and Phil Ivey and we would sort of create like a little bit of a masterminding well how would you play this hand what would you do here that was a scent that was the extent of it right we never had the correct answers we always had theories about what might be right not until about five six years ago where everything changed where you know artificial intelligence created solvers that will specifically say okay this is the optimal play this is the game three optimal play so now it introduced poker to a whole new group of like personality types in my day it was people that were dregs of society that didn't fit in not College goers with a degree these are people who were Street Hustlers playing pool they found poker you know they had these unique lives right yeah but now because poker can be studied much like you study you know University or college you had for example the German contingent who was literally analyzing data and coming up with strategies based on this and it's like what you know and the old guy ack you know got a play by feel or whatever and they're like they're learning so I guess the way that you describe it is like in the old days it required skill and talent a card sense right that was the only way to become good and today that's not the case good study habits a good work ethic in that regard can make you like a really good player even if you aren't all that talented or gifted part having a good work ethic is a talent right not necessarily card sense but if you're able if you're able to put in the work and and study from these solvers you essentially have the perfect study tool now that you know that we didn't have in my day so what do the solvers give you the do you start to memorize the optimal play for every single hand you you try your best so again the solvers are imperfect as well in terms of the way the humans uh utilize them right because you can give solvers a certain number of inputs in terms of what you want to solve but a solver can think on many many levels so for example the way that a typical player would do a solve is to say okay what does a solver think is the best play here but one third pot that two-thirds pot or bet one and a half times pot okay you give it three parameters it comes out with an output and it tells you what it what you should do with all the different hands you know you have however that's a simplified version of what a solver would really do because a solver might decide that seven times the pot is best 10 of the pot but but when you're putting in a solve you can only put in you know specific parameters so that's why frankly that's typically the number one-third two-third and one and a half times pot is what people often do so they sort of have a gate a vague idea of what a solver wants but again imperfect in terms of the uh implementation of it right and memorizing all the variables like that King jack off suit with the King of Diamonds is 13 to no no human bot brain can do that so what you do is you bucket it like you bucket it into say instead of 10 000 variables you have ten buckets and you say okay with these hands we do roughly this and we do roughly this and you try your best to you know stay within those lines but again what I love about live poker partly is that nobody will ever be able to master Game Theory you know and mimic a solver but you also have to incorporate your position where you are and uh obviously what cards you have but also the size of your stack how much money you have and also whether you have the ability or a desire to buy in all those kinds of things so you have to calculate all of that right so the you know so the solver will do that right and essentially you don't input your hand it tells you you'll look at you'll look at the grade and be like oh this is my hand and it tells you what it is but it tells you what you what you would do with any hand right it gives you the full output and that actually gives you a better idea because you're ultimately like you said playing a range of hands not not a hand and the solvers do things that are really interesting you've seen alphago I would imagine brilliant film right I thought and I thought what was interesting is there was you know accepted Theory from all the top go players that this is what you do but the AI was doing things way different and they're like this has to be wrong but really it wasn't so for example a solver may say this right you let's say you bet on the end and you bet a lot and a solver may say you should fold here with a pair of kings and a queen kicker which is you know a pair of kings but call with a pair of fours and an a squared so it's essentially telling you that you should fold this pan that is much better than this so it it begs the question why because what the solvers do is they use the information of your own cards to formulate all the possible hands your opponent can have so if your opponent is so basically if you had the king queen you know it may say um for lack of better nerdy term it blocks potential bluffing hands that your opponent can have so let's say if your opponent would Bluff with Queen Jack but you have a queen so there are less combinations of Queen Jack so it will find a better Bluff catcher if you will so that's what's really not intuitive to poker players poker players usually think like well this my hand is pretty good so I got a call but that's not how a solver would think solver uses you know Common Atrix and you know you know and sometimes it's tough to get the the good why answers you just did for why a solver thinks something is better or maybe in poker it's a little bit easier but in the case of go and chess it's not always obvious why because it's not going to explain stuff to you but I think what's the I think one of the best ways to learn poker is when you see a solver output and it tells you one of these things try to figure out why why does this solver do this why does it want you to call with this and fold this and try to think about it on a deeper level and you go aha probably because this card that I have here you know changes the range of my opponent's uh you know potential I'd love to give your opinion on on your relationship with solvers because for example Magnus doesn't use them his team uses them because he feels like he's going to rely on it too much and you can't use it when you're playing what you really want is to build up extremely strong intuition without the help of a solver is there some aspect of that that Rings true to you absolutely I totally can relate to what Magnus is saying first and foremost because when solvers was first introduced I didn't come from that world I didn't I was so intimidated because I didn't know how to use it I don't I don't know how to do an input so I had two guys one guy's a data scientist and you know and other guys like a you know poker Savant if you will and they coached me and they did it so today if I was in a tough spot you know and I'm like I don't know what would a solver do I will send them the hand and they'll run the solve for me and then sort of give me the parameters of what to do when I was playing you know regularly using solvers with them we were spending six to eight hours a day going over all these solves so intuitively I started to think and learn about what the solver would want but I sort of understand where Magnus is coming from in that you don't want to become a slave to the Sim as I say right there's one kid I know I joked with him his name is Landon Tice and uh you know he made a play that the Sim you know would say this is is a good play but I'm like it's a good play you know in a simulated World against the robot but it's not in practice against the human right you don't need to be doing that so if you become a slave to the sin and always do what the Sim says you you're you're handcuffed to a certain degree is there some at the highest level plays there's still a role for feel 100 ocean absolutely if you're not doing that because here's the thing right no human being plays perfectly balanced in game three optimal like a robot would they're they're not right so there are opportunities there to take advantage of the things that they do that are slightly too aggressive or less aggressive you know for example say most human beings don't Bluff enough in a certain spot so you don't have to call with the correct range of hands you don't have to because they're not bluffing at the optimal frequency so you don't have to call the optimal frequency you'd be making this mistake frankly if you did what's the difference between in-person and online play Given that context yeah well online poker and live poker it's the same game right same it's poker but it's different in so many levels right um I think playing online you have to focus far more on fundamentals you know on Game Theory you don't have the added bonus of looking across the table and getting any sense of whether your opponent is strong or weak they're bluffing whatever you know and and also because online poker those that play it you play far more hands like some of these guys are playing 10 20 tables at the same time yeah right so you're just you're hitting the long run really quickly and you're creating a database on your opponents right so let's have you know online I can see your data I'm like well this guy he's playing 40 of hands he's betting the river 80 of the time so now I can use that data and you know explain you that way when you play Live you don't have that do you enjoy playing online I enjoy so with online poker I enjoy the convenience of it because you know you can be on your couch in your underwear not leave your house do you also play multiple games at the same time you do try to play one game I typically like to play one or two but I can play up to four I find that past four uh it's hard for me to keep up and keep track of what's actually happening you know it's a different mindset required like a lot of these young guys they're accustomed to 20 tables at a time it feels like the purity of the game is gone it's much more robotic right so if you're playing 20 tables you're just making decisions based on like what you know you're not thinking about the the depth of the situation and what just happened 15 minutes ago you don't even know what happened because you can't pay attention to all that at once and some of the magic of Poker is the little sample I agree like for example in sorry to be bringing up Magnus so much but there's so much parallel between the two of you and the poker in the Chess World he hates Olympics and World Championships and all that kind of stuff because it's so low sample but to me that's part of the magic of it there's the World Series of Poker the main event there's a magic to it I agree yeah and I don't know what that is exactly because so much at stake is so rare so much drama and heartbreak leading up to it that all somehow uh yeah it it accumulates to that magical moment when somebody wins especially that event the World Series poker Main Event historically like that's it you know that's the Pinnacle that's where like mainstream watches that's where people are tuning in and the gravity of the moment you know it's so much bigger than people like everyone gets the opportunity to play armchair quarterback too right oh he should do this you're not there you're not under the lights you're not under the pressure you know it might seem easy for you at home to be like well yeah because you can see the whole cards you know they can't certainly the idea of the small sample with tournaments I like the idea that you don't have to worry about oh well if I do this now then in the future you know I won't be balanced I have to be balanced here or anything like that that's like really boring and lame right again that is kind of the way the younger generation learns how to play the game being balanced in every spot um and then randomizing you know like oh I'm supposed to do this 50 of time okay so if my left card is red I'll do it and if it's black I don't so you're not even making you're no longer making actual decisions for yourself you're just randomizing and that's way less fun for me than tailoring it to the situation and the final table at the main event there's none of that you have to I mean it's It's All or Nothing well you shouldn't be but there are like again I think a lot of the young guys they are thinking in that regard like oh randomization maybe at that table the final table at the main event uh what's a hand that stands out to you that was especially gutsy and Powerful or memorable for that you've seen in the history of Poker well for me the one that stands out and probably because I was so young and it was my first year like one of my well I won a bracelet that year was I was friends with Scotty Wynn the prince of Poker and he was heads up against the guy named Kevin McBride and I was on the rail you know I'm like wow he's gonna you know he's heads up and he was so cool like he had a mullet but it's perfect right he had the white shirt the black thing he's drinking a Michelob smoking a cigarette whatever you know all chill he bets it all in the river and the guy's thinking and he psychologically owned him and he said he goes with his beer he goes you call gonna be all over baby Ah that's right okay so this guy who was an amateur heard that and was like there's so much pressure in this moment right now I can't handle this pressure but Scotty just told me if I call here it's the pressure's gone I don't have to be under it anymore so he sort of hypnotized them into making the call you know and Scotty had it Scotty had you know the Full House and it was over for the guy you call gonna be all over baby it was I just I love that aspect sort of the table talk Dynamic which isn't as prevalent today as it was back then um but that one sticks out and probably because it was one of my first it's so uh the few words you say at the table can can completely affect a hand like that that's that's almost that's scary it was just so cool to me you know like just how he was so calm and I think that too added more pressure to the amateur and I think like Again part of it is even back then it was 1998 there's still a big rail of people and there's lights and they're you know they're filming and all this kind of stuff and it's a lot of pressure for a guy who's never been in this environment and now I'm telling you it can all be over soon it will all be over soon just call it's finished something about that accent too now you're a master at table talk as well do you have do you just kind of go with your gut with you flow with it or is there a deliberate strategy with this sometimes like there's usually some sort of strategy that I think about in terms of what I want to say and whatnot but a lot of the time I just go I go with it you know and the more you talk the more information you get yeah but in some cases against really good players you're just giving away information right like if I'm playing against Phil Ivy I'm not I'm engaging in anything because he can read through it he can sense based on what I'm saying you know the clues and where I'm trying to take him and he reads through he sees the tree through the forest or whatever you want to call it the forest through the trees and uh you know so then I would just be like allowing myself to be exploitable is some of it just for fun because at the end of the day if you're having fun you might be at the top of your game I've been thinking about this a lot lately actually it's funny you bring this up because I've been thinking about when I'm at my best and I think I'm at my best when I am comfortable like that right where I'm not so stiff yeah and worried about you know checking properly and worried about reading people I'm like no I'm me yeah all right I'm gonna play some book what do you want to do you want to call me call go ahead do what you want right because then I realized you know ultimately it's like I'm comfortable in that my opponents aren't as comfortable enough they're comfortable with this you know the robot thing but I thought more about that and how especially with some tournaments coming up I plan on really kind of sort of getting back to my roots in that regard I love it from a spectator perspective I love it but it's also interesting whenever you see a Daniel on the ground or quiet that's an interesting like um like it feels like a calm before a storm of sorts so I'm sure that's also part of it yeah like I've gone I've been flowed and like I said you know I took on some coaches and I was really learning game theory because I felt like it was important to always stick you know keep up with what's going on and then I do feel like to some degree it's sort of took away a little bit of my own um instinctual ideas in terms of what I should be doing right so I think like the most dangerous version of myself is a deep understanding of the game theory with my wisdom of many years of and comfort of just sort of like being myself at the table and being relaxed as relaxed letting your mind flow let me ask you the the greatest the goat question greatest of all time can you make the case for a few folks so first you you tweeted referring to Phil Ivey as the goat saying the goat doing goat things that's a recent tweet so uh can you make the case for Phil Phil Ivey or maybe who is the greatest poker player of all time would you put Phil for me until someone knocks him off the podium the king of Poker and the goat is Phil Ivey okay so and the reason I say that is I think of Poker as more than just one game right there's different variants you know this Holdem Omaha stud triple draw all these different types of games and Phil in every Arena has been dominant whether it was tournament poker dominated it mixed game high stakes poker in Bobby's room dominated online poker against all the Wizards dominated made millions in every Arena and you know he sort of took a few years away from poker with his legal troubles and things like that but he's back you know he's been playing in the High Roller series again and you know he comes from he's Cut From a Different Cloth but he has a tenacity and a focus that's unparalleled I think when he's in the zone I mean for lack and this has nothing to do with race it really has to do with mannerism but he does remind me of like a a combination of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods in the way that he approaches it he's very intense yeah and he outworks everybody you know and has I think frankly a lot of his mannerisms do come from them because he's young watching these guys on TV and a lot of his ways of being you know he's learned behavior I think probably from from people like people at the top of their Sport and people that are Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan aren't just at the top of their sport but they kind of dominate support there's some kind of aura that there's a uniqueness to them they're not built like us they're not you know they're not like I wish I I wish I could have the kind of focus that Phil Ivey has you know and see everything that he's saying I just that's not me you know I I don't have that and he he does he has that that Gene whatever it is but they also look like they're not having that much fun they're more uh focused on the Perfection like a dogged pursuit of perfection and you know that might even be true it might not be as fun you know I don't know like I have fun at the table when you look outwardly look at someone like maybe he is having a blast maybe that's just the way that he likes us like his Tiger Woods having fun when he's like on 17 about to win a major doesn't look like it theoretically well if you look at Michael Jordan I don't know about Tiger Woods but I think they're more focused on every single mistake they make yeah I think they're more obsessed about not making a mistake and hating every time they make a mistake that's probably like 99 of their mental uh I think that's part of what makes them great right they don't look past the mistake and just let it's whatever no they're like they they want to correct it and and yeah there's a tension almost like a trade-off I wonder if that's always the case between sort of greatness and and happiness I remember huxed who you know when I was a kid growing up he was like the poker Idol he won the world championship in 1996 and I was lucky enough to hang out with him a little bit and he would go through these streaks where he had an a game and he had an F game his a game was unparalleled nobody could beat him right but his F game was so terrible that he was just a fish you know he was playing terribly and I remember him saying and it was exactly what you're saying he'd make like one little mistake right and then he would go off and I was like why do you do that like you know your b game would be just fine he's like well if I'm gonna make a mistake what's the point what's the point right I'm trying like if you can't play Perfect there's no point in playing at all yeah so he was that he was extreme in that regard and the way that he viewed it and depending on the sport those folks like in chess certainly the case they that kind of mindset can destroy you absolutely no because a sequence of mistakes like the kind of year you had with the World Series of Poker can completely destroy a human being if if you're not able to see the bigger picture of it yeah uh you said that Phil Ivey is the hardest uh your toughest opponent the the toughest person to play against why is that and how do you beat him well because Phil Ivey's just he's seeing things that nobody else has seen really like subtle things where I'm putting my hands where I'm looking you know my pulse like stuff that I don't even know I'm giving off he's so engaged and so focused and has such a just a of he's Fearless right A lot of people you know they'll play poker and be like you know what I don't think this guy has it but do they have the guts do they have the cajones if you will to actually do anything about it right and stand up to this person he does you know I forgot the hand that you tweeted about the the goat doing goat things but that wasn't even that big of a goat hand but like there's hands where like there was a famous One in Australia where the Flop was like Jack Jack nine and Phil check raised the Flop with six seven nothing just absolutely nothing and the guy re-raised him right I feel just new he went all in with nothing if the guy calls he's done he's cooked but he was so tuned in that this guy's not strong that he just you know he did things like that and it's tough to play against a guy like that so uh he gets great reads and is able to execute on them has the guts to execute on him he's got experience he's got work ethic he he also I think one thing I'm underselling too is his strategic mind right like I believe that you know like I said the new age player they learn how to play through a very systematic approach okay let's look at the data the make up a game right now three cards we each get three cards Jacks Are Wild sixes are you know six of Hearts as well right just make up that game Phil will figure it out intuitively very very quickly right without having the answers for him right so that's like the difference between the players in my generation we had to figure this stuff out on our own today oh I want to know the answer I go ask the computer and the computer tells me so I really believe like if you created a game from scratch that Phil Ivey would be my horse that I want to play in it so he is in some sense in tune with some deeper thing he has what we would what we used to call card sense card sense can you try to make the case for some others like Doyle Brunson Phil Hellmuth uh Daniel negranu and maybe one of the modern guys like Justin bonamo or somebody sure oh so let's start with Doyle okay like what Doyle has going for him Above All Above and Beyond is twofold really longevity I mean he's eight in his late 80s and last time I played with him I was how is he getting better like I really felt like he was playing better than he had you know in the previous years um but also with Doyle like Doyle had to figure you know we talked about my generation having to figure it on her own I mean he they really had to figure it out like they didn't have any computer simulation to tell you if Ace King was a favorite over pocket sixes they didn't so we know how he did he would take a deck of cards and they would deal out sim and they with a notepad right okay Ace King one and then they would do like 100 of them be like all right ace King won like 53 so it must be a favorite and he did it manually you know and he did it in a time when it was very very difficult and he's seen poker evolve and change throughout the years now listen is he gonna be able to compete against the top players in the world today absolutely not you know but how many people he's the I'll carry he's the best 88 year old player in the world by a mile okay that's not even close and Doyle again he's another guy who plays all the games he's played high stakes cash tournaments you name it he's iconic you know he's The Godfather so but there's also an element to that so the iconic element like you're a personality in poker I mean not to romanticize this thing too much but poker is also a game of personalities I mean it's part of the greatness is like the uniqueness of the human being yeah I think also yeah I mean if you like looking at it from that perspective in terms of like goat like goat in terms of what you represent yeah Cowboy The Godfather you know he's been around you know he played in the 60s and stuff like that it's just something like incredibly cool like I I often think about if I could go back in time and like visit you know an era I'd love to go like to Vegas in the 70s and just like I'm proud I already like I can think of what it would smell like probably not ideal cigarettes and you know the leather jackets and just the vibe of what it must have been like with the mobsters and things like that you know he's lived through all that all the cool movies we've seen like Doyle talks about some of those films and he's like yeah that guy off he said he was going to stab me in my stomach you know he he knows these people it was he's like a a source of History really yeah when poker was uh a game for the mob and the the degenerates and all that kind of stuff before transitioning into professional sport yeah a professional game yeah so he was there through the whole thing he's been there through the whole transition he's seen it all yeah yeah and then to the online world so uh what about um I can't even say without smiling Phil Hellmuth okay so Phil here's the thing with Phil he takes it very personal when I say this and he doesn't hear the compliment he only hears the negativity because Phil wants to be considered the greatest of all time hashtag positive he wants to be the greatest of all kinds yes but I'm like Phil here's the facts you have the best absolute greatest resume at the World Series of Poker of anyone in the world is that not enough right that's what you have you have that right now do I think you're the best in the living holding player in the world today no do I think that you know you can play high stakes mixed games with the best players in the world today and win no right so he wouldn't get as much Flack on this topic if he wasn't so boastful and like you know demanding like you never hear Phil Ivey say I'm the best in the world like his peers do right but Phil wants to make the claim and I simply say I beg to differ right I beg to differ like I don't think you are the the best player in the world if we can Linger on the compliments so he can hear it uh what makes him so good because uh it seems like a lot of times his play is not optimal yeah he definitely has his own brand of and style of play right he does not adhere to he's never used a solver in his life he doesn't know he's not in that world right he Phil does Phil has a lot of faith and a lot of confidence in what he does and that he it will be successful and I think there's something to be said about that right he doesn't ever lack himself in belief that he can win and he finds a way to do it his way and frankly a lot of what he does is very effective against specific types of players who are intimidated by him but whether it's his resume or his demeanor or his attitude sometimes right like if you're an average player and then you know you you beat Phil in a hand you're going to hear it this idiot from northern Europe and beat me in this pot like and for some people they don't they don't like that so he can use that uh against them but I also think too like he cares so much right and that leads to trying really really hard like he sees these moments and he doesn't phone him in like whatever brand of Poker he plays he tries his best at all times to to succeed and to win and there's something to be even though like he's fundamentally flawed in a lot of things that he does compared to some of the bigger players his effort and will and like his determination to stick around is you know is is up there and he is somebody who seems to really hate losing yes yeah he like you know he he's he's got a this he feels like he deserves to win yeah right in all cases and if he loses it's you know it's not as he joked around that you and him might do an anger management uh of course um now this is tough because you're a humble guy uh but objectively speaking can you say what your strengths are you're often listed as one of if not the greatest player of all time so what what are the things that make you stand out so for me when I grew up I admired the big cash game players because that's what I was I love tournaments but I wanted to be well-rounded like in my day you couldn't make the poker Hall of Fame if you just played one game you had to jump into the high stakes games in Bobby's room as they say right and I was able to do that when I was in my early in my mid-20s I was playing four thousand eight thousand limits you know you could win or lose a million dollars in a day so I grinded it out like a lot of people think oh you know he's lucky he's had sponsorship otherwise he'd be broke he's like I built multi-million dollar bankrolls before any of that stuff existed and I did it the good old-fashioned way by sitting my butt on the table I think probably one of my biggest strengths is self-awareness and um in that regard a level of humility that always allows me to say okay well you know what in this case with these players they're better than me so what am I going to learn from them right rather than have this need to say I'm the best because of history and I'm always looking to guys and go wow he does this really well whether it's the adamos or the IVs or whoever it may be um so my willingness to adapt I think and stay relevant by learning what the young guys are learning something I've always done and I also pride myself on um again being well-rounded like playing all the games like I don't feel intimidated in any game you know whatever the format is so always being a scholar of the game as as the game evolves as the different games of all the different players of all the culture evolves always adjusting by being a scholar having the humility that's healthy respect for a healthy respect for the younger generation how they learn what they learn and what they can teach me rather than poo poo it and say oh these kids today because that's what a lot of people like the Mike Madison's and the philhealth music My Generation they just poo poo it because they don't understand it on a level of one to ten their level of understanding this is like a one maybe if I'm being generous by calling it one they really don't understand it so they poo poo it right it's easy to do that like oh that's not how I do it so that's wrong or that's stupid or whatever I don't take that approach I go well let me learn let me see what what what what there is to this but that said the crankiness that matters out and Phil Hellmuth have is is great to watch especially when they're on a table with you and uh oh I love it yeah it's a black and black you're masterful of being able to get under this stuff uh what about somebody from the new school like Justin bonamo who's who's leading in terms of cash wins is there somebody like that that stands out to you as a potential uh goat status person yeah so there's two different ones but one is very so they're both just no limit right so I like again when I think of Poker I think of you know a variety of games but there's so many of the young guys that specialize Michael Adamo is one that I've mentioned several times and I love the way that he approached the game another one that's highly respected because of his online prowess and his his people have like looked and how close he is to Game Theory and they say he's about as perfect as you get and it's like a kid named Linus Linus uh line is Linus love online Linus linger so he just came second recently I believe in uh in the Triton huge Triton so he's primarily an online player yeah he's an online cash player for the most part but he plays him live and he's you know he's again and I respect the peers that I play with who say yeah he's he's tough as Nails there's another kid too um Russian kid named Timothy kuznetsov and he plays all the games and he's well respected um you know in that regard and same with a guy like uh Jungle Man Dan Cates who's a unique personality I mean this guy showed up won the poker players championship back-to-back years in a Randy Macho Man Savage costume and he was doing Macho Man the entire times oh yeah I'm gonna take all the chips like I did last year yeah bust them all and he was in character for the entirety of the terms just unique but uh yeah respect for a lot of those guys um is it gonna take time to figure out who um you know stands the test of time that's the thing right so a lot of these kids like there was a guy who beat me uh heads up in the uh million dollar one drop I got 8.7 he won 15 million dollars kid named Dan Coleman he was seen as like you know the next big thing in poker right he made his money just wasn't for him so he's moved on you know to doing what he's doing skiing in the Alps whatever he's you know we have nobody seen in from like five six years so that can happen right because there is a lot of burnout you know I think like I think it was actually uh Gotham chess who mentioned something about how difficult it is to like I think it's true in poker when you get really really good at something to get this much better takes takes so much work and a lot of people don't necessarily want to put in that kind of work in order to do that that's just even staying at the same level takes a huge amount of work yeah like so if you want to get better at chess you're already like really really good you're trying to get like one little bit better you have to study like in a ridiculous amount you know and again that's once you've already had I think the toughest thing for anybody once you've tasted success and you've already retrieved it staying hungry staying on the top reaching the top is much easier than it is to stay there yeah over years what's your training regimen in poker in terms of how you uh keep improving so you said you study games but that's mostly leading up to a particular uh tournament but is there kind of uh behind the scenes daily activity trying to do the kind of overtime keeps you sharp so for me now that I'm 47 and I feel like the predominant aspect of my poker game is going to be in terms of My Success is going to be my mental state right so I find it's really really important for me now at this age to have balance so when I'm not playing poker and I'm out of it poker's not even on my radar you're able to remove it from your mind doing my fantasy hockey play a little chess you know play some golf watch watch some hockey whatever the case may be outside of the game and then I start to get the itch like after the World Series of Poker the poker door was closed yeah it's all the time off all of August I didn't play any poker at all until just recent you know I started to get the itch again because I that's what's important for me is if I don't have the itch and I don't want to play poker then I'm not going to be at my best once I start getting the itch that's when I start to soak okay let's start watching some of these streams let's see what my opponents are up to lately and um you know let's look at some solvers and different things like that and uh you're doing pretty good you came back and doing pretty good yeah so far do you like being in front of the camera through the hell of the World Series of Poker this year you uh filmed every single day you did a vlog does that energize you is that exhausting because it's really beneficial to a huge amount of people it energizes the the poker Community but do you see it as a service or do you purely just love it I've been comfortable on camera since I was a kid when I was a kid I want to be an actor like really really young and uh it was always comfortable in that environment I think like that gives me a little bit of an advantage sometimes too with these filmed events because I'm comfortable with a mic on and on camera with the lights and I think a lot of people maybe aren't with the knowledge that other people are going to see what they're doing every day so it's been so comfortable and easy for me as far as the World Series goes and the Vlogs and all the shooting it's kind of therapeutic for me it is essentially these essentially my version of journaling right so there's a lot of value I think in like at the end of a day doing a brain dump where you just write out Journal but doing it on camera has a similar effect and it also you know when you when you make a mistake on your own you're held accountable to you but when I have to explain it to what others like here's what I did and this is the mistake I made or whatever the case may be um it actually I think that helps me you know yeah so you uh you're held responsible by a larger audience yeah I think it's like so like I said listen I'm 47 I'm my life is good I don't have to be in this term and if I'm over it I can just dump my chips off and go home yeah right but I can't when I'm doing the Vlog like I have to actually answer to that you know and keeps me in line how hard is it to win the main event of the World Series of Poker so the main event of the World Series of Poker is the hardest event to win simply because of the sheer size of it you know you're talking seven eight thousand players right and a lot of landmines and and frankly there are so many players you've not played with before too you play these high roller events like these super ones you get 30 40 people you know everybody right so you have an idea you sit at the main event there's you don't know have any idea this guy wearing a Philadelphia Eagles jersey and sunglasses and he just raised you big I don't know I don't know this guy I don't know what he's about so there's a lot of like it's grueling too in your seven eight days where you're you're in the blender as you as as you might say so so what's the structure says ten thousand dollar buy-in or something like that and there's a bunch of tables and you just keep playing as and you like when is it over for a single table so the way that it works is this so there's let's say 8 000 players and the way the main event Works unique to others is there's various day ones you can play right so Day One You're Gonna Play from noon to like midnight right if you if you're still in you bag up your chips and you'll come back for day two okay there's four different day ones right now they'll all combine essentially to plan a day too and at the end of the night they redraw the tables so you don't just win your table if players get knocked out tables break they continue to be replaced so you start with a thousand then you know after day one you've got six thousand then you do the same you play you know it's like 12-hour day and you slowly Whittle down day four day three day four you're in the money and then you continue to progress and then what they do now with the final table is they they because they were trying to do this for TV these final tables can take you know 12 hours to play and what we were finding was you know you start to think at 5 pm and it goes till 8 A.M and like nobody's watching anymore so they separate separated into three days now and so you're talking now it's like six seven days to get to the final table another three days to play it so you're under you know you're you're grinding for you know week and a half but most of the time you're playing against people you've never played against before especially early on yeah and then by the end like who knows you know rarely do you see 100 you usually see some notable names then in the last 27 you might see one maybe two final table maybe one but often it's gonna be you know some players you've never heard of before is there strategies that maximize your likelihood of having a chance yes absolutely like I think the World Series of Poker main event is a unique animal in that you know like we talk about Game Theory and all that kind of stuff if you're focused on that when you're playing you're really not playing well right you need to just exploit because you're going to have a lot of people who see this as a bucket list item you know they just want to play the main event in the World Series and they might be scared they might be nervous or whatever you don't have to worry about being balanced right oh you know I have to make sure that I'm about no you don't you might know you're playing with this guy now for three hours you might never see him again so just make the play that makes sense for you right so so yeah you're gonna I approach that event very differently than I would like playing against the High Roller players that I play with does that mean more aggressive essentially less actually so when you play against really good players you have to take small plus EV scenarios where you push the envelope and you're playing really aggressive you're bluffing off your stack you got to do this you gotta focus a little bit more on being balanced because otherwise you know you're not going to beat these guys whereas if you're playing with amateurs and you're playing with regular players for the most part risking all your chips on a bluff probably don't need to do that you don't need to do that nearly as much you can probably slowly but surely build your stack without taking you know those high risk High variant situations because you'll find better situations what uh mistakes do amateurs usually make in tournaments like that are they over bluffing well I think amateurs generally the biggest mistake they make is they think that Pros are bluffing more than they are so like a pro will bet all his chips on the end like I don't know I mean it's Phil Ivey maybe he's doing some crazy stuff he's like probably not yeah he's probably just got it you know and then they get lose all their money by calling or going all in as well um and so the right things to be more patient for so amateur is too impatient well also bad reads so all the amateurs are built different some of the amateurs are just too weak and passive they're just waiting for the nuts you know yeah and then you know the pros everyone notices that and then when they make their big hand they don't get paid anyway so in order to win the main event I mean you have to have some components of your game that are aggressive it's very unlikely to expect to just get the cards the whole way and just always have the best hand you're gonna have to find ways to win pots that you know where you don't have the best hand how do you win the Final Table the final table is unique now especially because you're talking about the way that poker Works in tournaments is that if there's seven people left and you have just you know you're very short on chips but if one other player goes out you just make like three hundred thousand dollars for folding like just for sitting out right the term for that that you know kids use is ICM independent you know chip model right where it talks about the value of each chip where what happens what we see now is let's say one guy has a big chip lead and there's another guy who's second in chips and there's a couple that are short these guys in the middle they just play super tight and they wait for the little guys to go while the big stack is just pounding them because he can afford to right he knows that people are handcuffed so let's say I had 10 million in chips and you have 9 million chips and these guys have little chips if I go all in on you are you gonna call me and risk like you know guaranteed pay jumps of like moving up a few spots so really the question comes down to like are you the type of guy who just wants to inch up or are you gonna go for it and you're gonna go for the win I think ultimately there's some value in being the guy who says you know I don't care if I come seventh I'm not worried about going from Seventh to fifth I'm here to win and so you're saying like the the guys that win will often be the ones that call there so like they're not just bullying the small Stacks they're well they're the ones no they're the ones that are willing to willing to risk it right so there are some people who you know if there's five left you know and they're third in chips and there's two guys very short and you you know they'll have Ace King and someone moves they'll just fold they fold the hand because they want to wait for those two other players to get broke and that way they let you know they make actual money so you I guess the thought process between winning first place and winning the most amount of money are different they're conflicting right because in order to like when the if you're just if your focus is only on winning the tournament you will make mistakes financially where you had guaranteed income for just folding right let's say a guy has one chip left you know one chip and me and you have good ships and I go all in with you and I lose now that guy you know got the guaranteed you know he got the pay jump that I wouldn't have got so there's some extremely stupid mistakes you can make from a financial perspective but it's often at odds with you know giving yourself the best chance to actually come first and in a tournament especially the main event especially the final table it's all about coming in first well I know because most of the people who make it so like you know when you play these high rollers these guys are accustomed to playing for a hundred thousand two they're accustomed to this kind of money so they're gonna play right for the mo but you're talking about guys who bought into a ten thousand dollar tournament maybe never had 100K cash in their life and now they're sitting there and it's like one million for fifth and 2 million for fourth so like they don't want to be fit they're just gonna sit there they'll be under more financial pressure because they're not like your typical high roller type player are you still able to uh find the guts to take big risks yeah see I'm trying to win like I think that gives me an advantage frankly where I might make decisions that are financially sub-optimal because I'm trying to win but there's also an inherent advantage to that like that again something I watched and learned from a guy like Michael Adamo where he takes advantage of these people playing so passively in these spots where he's like I don't I'm not trying to come I'm gonna win I'm just gonna bully bulldoze you because I'm not worried about you know the small Financial mistake of you know a page up what advice could you give to to a beginning poker players or actually at every level how to get better how to improve how to improve their game obviously as you said it's easiest to get better in the beginning but what advice would you give how to get better so one of the ways I mean I think way back to how I started right and there's so many resources and tools available right now to analyze hands but when you play right and you find yourself in a situation or a hand that you're not really sure about not because you had aces and went all in and you lost like that's not interesting but an interesting situation where you're not sure what you did jot that jot the hand down write it out and then either a you know use some of the tools whether it's the solvers if you're you know Advanced enough or ask your group you know like have a couple friends at your level and talk through the different decisions and start to learn that way right because those mistakes that you make or those tough those tough hands that's where the real learning comes from like so that so basically if you're because you're going to be in similar scenarios in poker you're rarely going to have the identical situation but you'll have situations that are similar you know you raised with Ace King someone three bet another guy goes all in okay well what do I do in that spot you know it's you're going to have similar situations in the future as well so figuring that out the more you can do that you chop away at um you know different strategical mistakes you know you you used to make that you no longer make are there resources like your master classes really is great are there books so there was a guy named Michael Acevedo this is my again for a little bit more advanced players but it's a book called uh modern poker Theory I think it's called um which sort of explains Game Theory right to the novice right so it's it's a little bit I think if you're new to Poker it's probably Above the Rim for you but once you start to get a little better and you want to understand how to do it it's probably a good resource for as far as books and there's also like tons of people who stream poker professional players and then you can get in there and you get in on the chat and you start talking you ask them you see people you know explaining their thought process and things like that there's so many free resources and of course my masterclass I think does a good job of sort of compartmentalizing like you know how to attack it on a deeper level and you know we get it I try to get into what's funny when I did the Master Class I asked them I was like well you know how high-end do you want this in terms of Poker and they're like we want really really high end and I was like oh are you sure then I started to explain really really highly like okay well maybe the one below that try to explain really complex um you know theory in a more palatable way in English if you will because some of these kids you hear them talk and you'll be like huh but you also which is really nice give uh example hands that really illustrate the point which is really nice um you also wrote a book I think 10 years ago power holding strategy it's interesting to think how much of the stuff in that book still applies how much doesn't listen I still think the book holds up to a certain degree obviously like you know it isn't optimal because there's like a more advanced strategies and if you played that way people will figure out a way to exploit you but if you're like an average player playing an average buy-ins like that's sort of what I coined like small ball approach absolutely will work you know at the highest level you have to add much more a lot more bluffing but overall I think it's still you know for the most part there's a lot of real especially with tournaments there's a lot of really good principles in the book what's the difference in the Dynamics if you could just comment on between uh heads up poker and when multiple people are in one hand what are interesting aspects to everything we've been talking about from uh Game Theory to exploitative strategies all that kind of stuff so the biggest difference when you play let's say nine-handed you know against eight other players and you know heads up is first of all just the the type of hands and the number of hands you're gonna have to play so the way that it works is if there's nine people two out of the nine hands you have to put in money and the other seven you could just fold for nothing okay when your head's up you're forced to put money in every single hand okay and there's only one other hand in front of you which means the ranges of hands that you play is way wider right so if you're nine-handed right and you're in first position you're like all right what do I need to play I'm like a good pair you know two high cards suited a big Ace you know stuff like that that's it right that's what you're gonna play right and you're going to fold all the rest when your head's up you look at a king and a two and you're like well I gotta play this you know you're gonna you're gonna you're forced to play a lot more hands and a lot more complex situations when you're playing um heads up because you're going to be playing much far weaker hands Queen five jack three all these types of hands and you're gonna see flops where you're you're not gonna have the luxury of being like I'm in there with a premium hand Queens Kings Aces those are easier to play right very very strong Holdings heads up you're forced to dance and fight a lot more you know you can't sit in the weeds and wait what do you enjoy more um heads up is very intense I like heads up but I think if you had to play heads up eight ten hours it's so mentally draining because your face with so many constant decisions each and every spot like you play nine-handed you look at a nine and a three you throw it away you hang out for a bit relax you're good you get a little break and you play hands up you're like it's like boom it's like you're in the ring you know you're in the octagon and you're facing like Haymakers Non-Stop since uh we talked about online a bit is it possible to cheat in poker especially online we're offline also talked about the the cheating controversy that's going on in the Chess World um is is it possible to use what is it a remotely connected anal beads to so much no uh is there is that a concern of uh cheating online so here's the thing it's kind of like romanticized from the old days like you know in the western stuff like people trying to cheat and have you ever killed a man because he cheated no I have not but I've used when I started out as a teenager I played in a game with a bunch of Italians and I knew they cheated and I didn't care because they were so bad that I could win anyway I was like I knew they would cheat but I knew how they were cheating so I was like okay you guys suck but so here's the thing anytime you're talking about large sums of money there will be people looking to take advantage whether that's live or online right and so it's like the job essentially of the you know the online operators or the you know live event staff to police it the best they can and the players themselves being on the lookout for it you know like a guy like Doyle brunson's a great resource because he's seen it all and he's seen all the tricks you know and so live you know he probably could spot a few things but online there's there's various ways people can try to cheat but there's also really good security measures in place to catch them you know and we've caught in like about two years ago there was a huge huge undertaking of like 500 accounts that were banned for doing different things and you know there's and again you can't go and they can't go into detail in terms of how they're doing it because otherwise you know then you're sort of giving the cheats the playbook in terms of how to take advantage but it's always going to be a concern for poker wherever you play right um but it's not something I'm worried about personally so it's the highest in person and by the way online there is really interesting algorithms that do some of the work in an automated way to detect to flag things that are weird but in person it's just not something at the highest level that you're super concerned about so it's not uh it didn't quite infiltrate the poker world to a degree where it's a huge concern yeah like so here's the thing I don't play in private games and whatever right right but in private games theoretically yeah you know you could be in if you don't trust the people you're playing with like I've heard stories of people where you know they have an ear piece in that you can't see right and they have uh you know like RFID on the cards or something like that and they have a phone reading it so they have somebody in a truck telling them you're gonna win this hand you're going to lose his hand like that happened in a private game you know and the guy what's often funny about some of these people who cheat is they're so greedy and blatantly obvious that they get caught where if they use this tool in a more subtle way they could probably continue to get away with it but again that's not something I worry about in a casino environment um you know in these tournaments and things like that but if I was playing in private games like if I came down to Texas and some guy I got cheated in a game by a guy named Blackie Blackburn and tex that's a red flag I was at the chemo Hotel I was a teenager and they saw me playing you know I was making good money as a teenager I had like a 13 000 bankroll you know and I went and played in this game with them in a private hotel room and found out later that the guy was a card mechanic you know he was dealing and he could you know deal your hands and he knew what you had and stuff like that so yeah I remember you know I lost the big number in that game and it was a good Learning lesson in terms of you know being wary of who you trust yeah so if the dealer is in on it that's one way you could cheat it's fascinating uh that's part of the reason that they cut so like you'll see like uh there's a burn card because what would happen you know maybe in the old days is like if you're sitting in the one seat I could lift the car and you could see it the next card coming right so what they do is they have a card on top of it that you burn that isn't the card and then the next card is the one that comes face up I just learned about the edge sorting uh thing that uh Phil Ivey maybe others were involved with I just reading it at first was super interesting to me that you can exploit the imperfections in the printing of cards yeah that was almost cool to me that that was that's almost not cheating because it's like that needs to be a movie yes yes what happened with Phil Ivey in that whole case is it's it's a catastrophe really yeah it is such a horrible precedent because here's what he did Phil Ivey shows up at the casino says I want to play this game they say okay all right I want to play with those decks they say okay they agree to everything that he says he never touches the cards he doesn't do anything outside of the fact that you cards that you supplied have imperfections on them and he can see them yeah okay so that increases his chances of winning he could still lose theoretically right probably not but he can lose in theory he just gives him a little bit of an edge and it's all stuff based on what you provided yeah so the idea that you offered a game I accepted I beat you and now you want to free roll me that's disgusting so for people who don't know maybe you can elaborate and it's just fascinating to me but you're exploiting the imperfections and card patterns on the back and then they look different if you rotate it and the the fascinating thing too when you Shuffle usually you don't rotate the cards so that you can see the in sort of detect which cards are the strong cards by marking them by through rotating them and the way you know they're rotate is because of the pattern imperfections yeah so some of the cards like you said like you know they have those like the that that pattern on it yeah and some of them this was faulty cards on there we're not cut properly yeah so like the eights and nines had the card cut differently and those are important cards in this game you know the eights and nines or whatever so you could essentially from looking at the back of the card discern you know what it's going to be you do nothing in terms of like cheating yourself you're not rigging the game all you're doing is taking advantage of the fact that you're playing you know you've offered me cards that yeah are faulty can I just say that of course it would be Phil Ivey who's who's the goat at the at the normal game it would be figure out this particular thing I mean that's what if you're into soccer this Diego Maradona has that famous hand of God in the World Cup where he scores a goal with his hand and uh so of course the the referee didn't see it they thought it was a header so I mean part of the part of the magic of the genius of the people at the top of the game is they're able to exploit all the flaws that are there it's that's a beautiful place you feel like Phil had you know in his Heyday he had he exploited weaknesses and casinos you know systems all over the country like in one night I don't know if you know the story and one night he would take a plane a private plane and fly to 30 different casinos all over the country because he would have these deals where they're like all right we got this Big Rich sucker who's going to come here and play craps and he's going to lose all our money so he'd have this deal with one of the casinos where they'd be like all right you get 20 back up to half a million right so if you lose half a million we'll give you back 100K okay so he'd go to one Casino in Tunica he'd play half a million win win or lose you know he would leave they think they're going to get him to stay they get him a big room whatever so let's say he goes to Tunica he lose half a million okay now he goes he flies to Atlantic City he wins half a million okay he lost half a million and one one half a million but he got a hundred thousand back so he's actually plus 100 000. do that at 10 casinos a night you're making a million dollars in free equity and they would give him promotional chips and all these kind of things and free flights and stuff like that so he took advantage of the image yeah you know that they're trying to exploit so this is why I don't have any empathy for these casinos because there's giving you free drinks they're giving you why do you think they're doing that kind of the kindness of their heart they're trying to exploit you so guess what you lost at your own game pay the piper and I think it was crazy because the judges in his case said he did not cheat but well we it's probably not right hold on yeah you just said he didn't cheat you know that that should be the end of the case and then the casinos do the funny thing I messaged you I was just at UFC and uh Dana White is a huge Gambler he's a blackjack Gambler and uh there's that famous situation where he got kicked out of a casino and the casinos do that kind of thing when you win too much so he he won some ridiculous amount of money he bets like I mean he plays like millions of dollars on hands of blackjack it's insane and so he won really big and he got kicked out was he was he counting no no he wasn't counting so counting in blackjack here in Las Vegas is like the only game where they actually can ask you not to play so like basically if you're counting cards yeah right you could potentially have an edge in blackjack and there are some professionals who do that but they get caught pretty quickly and then they say you can play craps you can play whatever you want but you can't play Blackjack here anymore no I think I don't think Dana White is counting I think he was winning a lot I guess they can uh claim that they believe your account because how do you really know if you're coming well they easily they they figure it out so basically they have an eye in the sky and they can see so if you're varying your bed size right so there's certain spots where based on the cards that are out let's say for example the a lot of the twos threes and fours and fives have been coming out so the rich is the deck is rich in face cards that's very good for the player right so imagine you were betting 500 bucks and then all of a sudden you up your bet to two thousand or five thousand when the deck is Rich they know when the deck is rich in high cards because they keep a counter themselves so if they notice a player increasing their bet sizes when the deck is good for them it's a Telltale sign interesting I don't think Danny White would be counting and so casinos don't kick you out if you don't often kick you out do they ever kick you out if you make too much money so you're playing millions of dollars that they unless they they would never kick you out for making too much money unless they suspect cheating because why would they they have an advantage they want the money back it's not like you go in there win 10 million you're like oh no that's enough for us what about if he was talking shit the whole time I wonder I don't think that would matter you know because in the long run they'll get the money back exactly wow uh you tweeted if you watched your uh Jersey Shore family vacation we would probably get along really well what is it about uh because I lived in Jersey for a while what is it about uh uh Jersey Shore characters that you love I just love that they're sort I love the debauchery I think Pauly D's a fun guy you know and just like it's just something like it's just it's it's what do you call it it's trash TV it's a guilty pleasure but you just watching Snooki get drunk and falling all over herself or whatever is that part do you love that part of Vegas as well not really like I don't go out and stuff but I kind of I just like the characters I like that they have you know unique personalities and I think like we live in a world now where people are more and more careful of what they say and afraid of backlash and all that stuff and it's kind of like an old school version of just like say what you feel it's okay as long as your intent is good and uh you know like they haven't been canceled if you will which is good but I feel like their type of behavior slowly but surely like because they got a lot of flack originally for misrepresenting like Italian Americans or something like that like there was a lot of backlash about this isn't how Italian Americans really are and blah blah blah so they sort of representing that group of people and you know they received some backlash back in the day I'm a huge supporter of diversity in all the beautiful forms that uh the human species is able to generate and that's certainly well one dimension what's the greatest Vegas movie would you say I don't know if that's a difficult question but fear fear of love in Las Vegas Leaving Las Vegas casino I watch because anytime casino's on randomly I always watch it such a great movie um it could be one of the Sharon Stone frankly Sharon Stone reminded me every time I would watch the movie reminded me of my wife Amanda it's like totally I would see like the character and I was like I'm the Robert De Niro character in the film it was I used to watch it through that lens you know um from like uh the depth of love that you have just kind of she was I remember that she was like she was like she like she lit up every room she does light up everyone she goes there everybody's attracted and Drawn to her and she was kind of when she was younger she was a little wild and crazy and whatnot so she reminded me of uh the Sharon Stone character and then the Robert De Niro character is trying to like have a stable life you know and be that now that was me it was the Joe Pesci in your in your life well there was a guy named there was a James Woods for sure who was the the Lester we called him we actually called him Lester a few of my friends call him Lester you know the greasy guy I tried to get back in and all that but yeah yeah one of my favorite scenes is when they meet out in the desert and it's like a 50 50 odds if you're gonna make it out alive and that I mean there yeah that there's an epicness to that portrayal of Vegas I love I mean it's just you know totally I mean it's obviously more corporate now and it's different but uh I love those movies I love all those movies just seeing that life and like I said if there was a period in time that I could go back to and just experience it it would be that you know right around then there'll be that we're playing with a mob and nothing I think of like these crime shows today like they're so unrealistic now because if they're in an error that is now like none of this stuff can happen because there's cameras everywhere yeah you can't like get away with these like killing somebody and jumping in a car and you're gonna get caught you know but in the 70s yeah you know that stuff across the line you die yes Lake Mead is recently like losing water and like every couple days they're finding more and more bodies from that era oh they really are yeah you're close with your mom what did you learn about life from your mom my mother was very generous my mother she was she experienced Joy through giving people food for the most part my dad would get him drinks and that was how she felt fulfilled right she felt good when she like would cook for you and like she'd be that person you'd come over you know they should be like you are you hungry and you said no no I'm okay she's gonna put 15 things in front of you and you'll eat you know you're gonna eat because everyone does that to be polite no no I'm good but you know they will start to eat and just her Hospitality in that regard and just being generous and like being a good host to people and things like that like um how did that Define like help Define who you are as a person that generosity yeah to rub off on you it made me think about in my life when it comes to like any sort of business deals or things like that I don't want to get the best of it in such a way where I screw the other person I genuinely don't I'd much rather you owe me than me owe you so if I hire people they get paid more than they're supposed to and I'd rather them do that and work towards it rather than feel underpaid because if they're underpaid they'll likely under deliver whereas if they feel overpaid then if I need them to do something special they're not gonna be like hey I don't get paid for that he's like yeah you do you really do so that's certainly like played out in my life where I set it up in such a way where I don't owe you know I'm owed but that's okay I'd rather because I can handle taking the worst of it in spots I don't like being the person to uh you know feel like I'm indebted to others yeah in some way the karma of that tends to pay dividends in the long term somehow somehow there's a there's uh somebody uh up up there that's keeping track in some kind of way uh what advice would you give to young people today in high school and college how to um have a career that can be proud of or maybe how to have a life in general they can be proud of I would say like your 20s is a good opportunity to set yourself up for the rest of your life right so while the 20s are a period where you want to have fun and you want to experience youth it's also a good opportunity to start thinking about what do you want to what do you want to like what do you want your life to look like in your 30s and your 40s right so I feel like it's the best time to really put yourself out there and take risks and try to hit it you know whatever you know like to work really really hard to set yourself up because and I said this at a event I was speaking at when you're like with poker when your bankroll is very very small it's replenishable right you don't need to protect it as much as you do once you've got something right once you have a brand or you have money or you have something like that that's that's when you want to start protecting but in your 20s is an opportunity to just really sort of get a cut get you know to work really really hard to set yourself up you know for the future I am concerned a little bit like every time I talk to kids today I'm like what do you want to be they all want to be YouTubers or Instagram stars or rappers right like okay it's like that's cool but like there's only so many of those that you know that there can be so it might be worthwhile having a little bit of a backup plan I think it's easier to be successful on Instagram and social media if you do something else and uh I would say this too one other thing I would say is don't choose a profession or an idea because you think it'll make you rich yeah right pursue something that you actually love because if you love it you're you're way more likely to be coverage if you don't you do something that you don't actually enjoy now you're spending a lot of your life unhappy doing something you don't want and you're far and if you're not passionate about it you're probably not the chance of you being successful are much lower and also becoming rich and I've talked to a lot of rich people I hang out with a lot of rich people is not going to be as fulfilling as you imagine if you arrive there by not doing the thing that you love doing that's true ultimately the thing that you love doing is like that's what makes life worth there's another quote I can't remember who it was otherwise I would quote them but it says something to the effect of like um if we believe in the lie that more is always better then we can never truly arrive because wherever we are more is better right I've never understood and I've been around rich people like you know you said you know Bill I never got I can't I don't get it like if you have a billion dollars why do you give a shit about money at all like and they're still like oh we made this deal and I'm like you know we picked up 300 who cares like your life is set like there is that bell curve right where obviously being in poverty you know there's obviously a high rate of unhappiness but there's a certain amount of money where you reach you know we reach level of happiness and then too much you find the people that are searching for money to fulfill these holes it starts to go back down again well it the getting more money could become a game like a sport that's fun to play as long as you directly or indirectly acknowledge that what you love is the game of it uh versus the actual attainment and I think that's what it is right for me I've never cared about money that much I just never did otherwise I would have a lot more of it but it's always like it's always been strange to me how people that have that kind of money like are cheap in any way you know like they wouldn't donate 5 000 to a worthwhile charity because it's like buddy this like when it changes your life not and even like like small things like taxes like okay you have 20 billion dollars and you're worried about paying 33 30 31. I get it I get the I get the the point of it all but like it literally has no effect on your life whatsoever your life is unchanged whether it's 31 or 33. yeah that's that's the negative of a lot of money is if it corrupts the way you see the world you start to be protective and so on I mean part of the challenge of when you get a lot of money is people start to treat you differently and so navigating that correctly is is very challenging so don't change let's keep remain the same person you always were because if you change you start to I mean that's why power corrupts is you get a lot of power you get a lot of Fame you get a lot of money you start to distrust people and you start to push away people that are actually really close I think you develop some biases where you think like you're just this you know you think like it was all you and you're a genius and you're so great and all these other people who don't have it's just because they don't have what you have and like you just then you start to like view that group of people whether they're impoverished or whatever is like less than and that you're some like great Guru where you could have just got lucky and bought Bitcoins that you know could have done anything and then you became like super wealthy and then you have this like dunning-kruger effect where you think you know everything about everything and a lot of Poker people have that and I listen I'm probably guilty in some ways too you know thinking because you can figure out poker and be you know great at that that you could figure out anything so there's like it's true right I mean we sort of we genuinely feel like people that reach the highest levels of Poker feel like they are intelligent so they will look at problem solving and think that they have answers well you have to remind yourself that you're not it's best to see the world as you did just get lucky or at least from my perspective that you're not better than anybody I don't think there's anything wrong with like acknowledging that you worked hard to get where you were like there isn't but at the same time like it's not available to everybody in the same way you know right time right place like for me my poker career could have gone very differently you know if things didn't work out you know if I had some bad luck in the wrong times like who knows where I'd be so you said uh your brain crawl is pretty small in your 20s I'm sure you've been around a lot of people you care a lot about who've lost everything in poker what's that like what's those low points of losing everything I think because I've been there I have more empathy than I probably should for those people that really feel for them because I remember being in Vegas and being totally broke and like a guy loaning me 400 and me like turning that 400 into 20 000. 400 bucks and it was like eternally grateful of that so when I have friends who go through that like I always try to consult them obviously but they really need is money for the most part but I remember saying no to one friend because he didn't have a plan so I like to try to help them in that regard like my buddy's like can you stake me in this game and I was like all right well how much do then I was like let's break down the math bro you want me to stake you so you get 50 of the profit right so I said how much you think you can make in this game how much is the biggest biggest winners make it's like well I can probably you know I probably do like 20 000 a month in this game so okay so you get half of that because I get 10 right what is your monthly nut how much are you spending well I'm renting this thing for eight thousand you're spending 17 000 a month so like no matter what you're set up to fail like this isn't gonna work so I actually didn't give him the money and I was like what you need to do to earn more money is lower your monthly nut because it's too high it's just you know it just doesn't mathematically add up so trying to set them right in that regard is something that like I feel obliged to do especially if they're friends but what about the mental aspect of the struggle they're going through the struggle you were going through just uh I mean it's it's really rough to have no money it's not for everybody this really isn't like a lot of people might you know listen to this and think like oh I want to play poker it's like most people fail most people who want to play in the NFL they you know they they spend their college Years like they're they're most of them are not going to make it most of you who try to play poker professionally are going to fail and you're going to experience despair okay there are those like in anything that have the passion have the know-how have the luck and all that sort of stuff and it all pans out but you know they're the minority and so so for the low points if you remember what does it take to sort of overcome that overcome the um the mental struggle I mean you're making it sound like certain people are just genetically able to uncertain I do think some people are more apt to being able to deal with like adversity and having resilience and some people just can't hack it but like I generally what I would advise with you know people that are let's say a guy's playing you know really high Stakes or whatever you're doing badly is Step number one is take take a little bit of a break here let's re recalibrate and let's start small again let's you know let's restart and let's play smaller stakes and let's get our confidence back because in poker without confidence you cannot be successful it is incredibly important to have almost an inflated level of confidence in yourself because you're you're up against it right as I said the majority people fail so why are you special why are you different you have to be pretty confident about your you know yourself to think that you are one of the chosen ones and then uh don't resist the Despair and take a nap definitely take a nap listen it's okay to experience it like I said yeah you're gonna experience the spirit what what else what should you be feeling you know if things are going poorly and you just lost all your money excited stuff maybe like okay have your moment of grief allow yourself to experience it so that you can you know reassemble there's a fundamental way in which you haven't really lived life you ever if you haven't experienced periods of Despair you have a jaded view of the world right It's the weird thing about the human condition that the both the highs and the lows are important yeah uh what role does Love play in The Human Condition Daniel in the ground that's a good one world has love played in your life it's yeah that's you know you sort of talked about the ups and downs of uh of The Human Condition and love has been that for me right like I'm in a good place now but you know even with uh my now wife years ago you know she was young she was you know new to Poker and she wasn't ready to settle down I was like when I met her I think I was 31 she was 21. and I was ready to like lock her up if you will you know let's do this and I bought a ring way back when she was like not about that she was living the Hollywood Life she was living you know partying in L.A doing that kind of stuff and wasn't ready and we split and that one hit me hard so I didn't realize how much of a hit that had on my confidence in my in everything really in poker with other women it had me a little jaded about women too you know resentful you know um and it took a lot of like self-reture I did like a lot of personal growth work and workshops and things like that and then didn't see her for years and she came back to town I was a much different person it was you know four years ago or something like that and she was too went to dinner few months later we were married yeah it worked out so different because we both had to grow you know and become different people huh and that love was still there somehow yeah like she went through her relationships I went through mine you know we experienced life and I was married once before too you know called my starter marriage if you will um which yeah you know we just you don't know I think like until you do it until you get married and you know experience like the sacrifice not necessarily the sacrifices but your value systems if they don't align identically which they're not going to someone like me one of probably one of my one of my strengths in poker but my weaknesses in relationship is Judgment right when I play poker I need to judge you that's essentially what I'm doing I'm gauging who you are and what you're good at and what you're bad at and that can have repercussions because it leads that that's how I you know that's the lens I look at everyone with based on how you live your life I'm judging you this guy's this this guy's that this guy's that and that's not healthy so you have to shut that off you have to learn relationship and the thing I finally realized what love is frankly for me with her is no judgment right so like yeah so I have my way of being right if she wants to have cereal for dinner babe that's the best decision for I I was living in a framework of better and worse yeah the way that I do things is better and yours is worse do things more like I do that's that's a recipe for disaster true acceptance and true love is accepting someone like exactly as they are you know if she wants to do something different I'm going to support her whatever it is even if I disagree with it personally and like the way that I would do things learning to just realize that she's had a different journey and a different walk towards where she's at than I have so that's I can't pass my judgments on other people like that I believe it is ethically wrong and probably illegal to eat cereal for dinner listen if she wants it she wants it acceptance like when she goes to bed like all these little things about my regimented life she's not like our motto at our wedding was like you keep me wild I'll keep you safe you keep me wild I keep her safe she keeps me wild she's like not organized and anal and all those kind of things I am she helps me like let loose you know oh no I'm eating this this she's like have some popcorn I'm like all right let's do it you know she keeps me uh freed and accepting that embracing that the uh the difference is the chaos of it yeah that's that's what like I literally do think about with her how important it is and how much I try to like just come from neutral and like compassion and never judge because she's got other things that she deals with right that I don't she's bipolar right so with that I've studied and I've learned a lot about you know sort of mental health and what that means and um ways in which a lot of character characteristics about somebody is completely out of their control when they're bipolar right and they're swings like there's no there's no cocktail for for bipolar that solves the issue right so there's medications that work to you know level you out for periods of time but then they start to fade and they don't work as well so they constantly need Readjustment it's an unsolved mystery to a certain degree so in some sense You Know Her diagnosis made our relationship easier because I don't take anything personal right I realize that sometimes she's going to be in a mood and so you know I mean she's so good about communicating it though she tells me some morning she'll be like bad mood trying to get out of it babe I'm like okay did I leave her alone oh that's great that's that means she's grown to be able to communicate to understand to self-reflect understand what she is I have people in my life who I love who are bipolar it's a beautiful ride it is right yeah it's yeah the highs and the lows are like are there so but yeah like because I like I feel like protector for me I just want to be a rock right and that's part of the whole cereal thing if she wants to eat cereal don't make a wrong for anything she wants to do what have you learned from life from the song The Gambler by Kenny Rogers you gotta know when to hold them no one to fold them no one to walk away no one to run uh you never count your money when you're sitting at the table there'll be plenty time for counting when the dealing's done is that do you live by those words the first part of it for sure do what do they even mean because you got to know when hold no so basically it's like all right you know in life like you know we'll say let's let's use a whatever the market for example you bought a stock right or you bought Bitcoin and you're like that's gonna go to the Moon right it's like okay well maybe things have changed new scenario new circumstances new situation are you going down with the ship right or are you going to lay the hand on are you gonna fold it whether it's a relationship you know you're you're with this woman you're like all right I think it's time to fold this one I think you know I don't think that we're going to be able to make this this hand work right now when to fold them and when to run yeah so maybe every gamble knows that the secret to surviving is knowing what to throw away knowing what to keep because every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser that's like a stoic philosophy and the best thing you can hope for is to die in your sleep every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser what does that mean I like that one I like for me that's like the difference between victim and responsible like the way that I think about it right you can be a victim to circumstance or you can be responsible for everything in your life right so an event happens the event itself is neither good or bad until you assign it value right so like an event happens and can be traumatic it can be you know painful but you know how you respond to it is ultimately going to be up to you like you actually do have a choice and that's the thing you can control the fact that you Daniel underground took my commentary about the Gambler seriously it shows Once More that you're a beautiful human being thank you so thank you so much for being who you are for inspiring millions of people about poker about how to live life and thank you for giving me your valuable time today this is amazing thank you for talking man it's great to have the conversation thanks for listening to this conversation with Daniel negrano to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Doyle Bronson poker is war people pretend it is a game thank you for listening and hope to see you next time

Channel: Lex Fridman

Views: 2,379,658

Keywords: agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, cash, daniel negreanu, gambling, kenny rogers, lex ai, lex fridman, lex jre, lex mit, lex podcast, mit ai, online, poker, ranges, solvers, theory, tournament, wsop

Id: rKnoNfajUgM

Length: 141min 28sec (8488 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 27 2022