Transcript
00:00:00 you could be the seventh best player in the whole world,
00:00:02 like literally seventh best player.
00:00:03 But if you’re playing with the other six, you’re the sucker.
00:00:07 You are like the worst player in the game, right?
00:00:10 So like there’s a lot of players, for example,
00:00:13 like the Dan Blazarians of the world, right?
00:00:15 He’s not a top level player,
00:00:17 like these guys you see on TV,
00:00:19 but he probably makes more money than they do
00:00:21 because he plays with people
00:00:23 that are far below his skill level.
00:00:24 So part of the skill of being a poker player
00:00:27 is finding situations where you’re profitable,
00:00:30 regardless of your skill level.
00:00:34 The following is a conversation with Daniel Negrano,
00:00:37 one of the greatest poker players of all time.
00:00:40 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:00:42 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:00:44 in the description.
00:00:45 And now, dear friends, here’s Daniel Negrano.
00:00:50 Everything everyone does at the poker table
00:00:52 conveys information.
00:00:53 So let me ask sort of the big overview question.
00:00:56 What are the various sources of information
00:00:59 that you project and others project at the table
00:01:02 that convey information?
00:01:03 Well, there’s several different things.
00:01:05 There’s the ones that are conscious
00:01:06 and then there’s the ones that are subconscious, right?
00:01:08 Like on the conscious level,
00:01:09 it might be something someone says, right?
00:01:11 You know, you ask them a question and they say,
00:01:13 oh, you know, you shouldn’t call me here, you should.
00:01:15 So there’s the verbal tells.
00:01:17 There’s also the more, you know, subconscious stuff,
00:01:20 body posture, right?
00:01:21 The eyes, the throat, the pulse,
00:01:24 various things that are, you know, less controllable.
00:01:27 I find I use a combination of both
00:01:30 to try to gain information,
00:01:31 but generally when I have somebody more comfortable,
00:01:34 they give off more.
00:01:36 Like everyone has a different approach.
00:01:37 Phil Ivey likes to intimidate.
00:01:39 I go the other way.
00:01:40 I want my opponents to be relaxed
00:01:42 so that they’ll give me more in that regard.
00:01:44 So Phil Ivey likes to perturb the system,
00:01:47 like mess with it to see what comes out.
00:01:50 I think Phil has an aura about him
00:01:52 where he wants you to know that he’s watching you,
00:01:55 be afraid, be uncomfortable,
00:01:58 because when you’re uncomfortable, I got you, right?
00:02:00 And that’s sort of his shtick where he, you know,
00:02:03 and people do, like when you sit at a table with Phil Ivey,
00:02:05 it’s intimidating.
00:02:06 He likes to rule by fear
00:02:07 and you like to rule by, what is it, love?
00:02:10 That’s a really good way to put it.
00:02:11 I never had anyone put it like that,
00:02:12 but it makes a lot of sense.
00:02:13 Yeah, you know, fear Phil Ivey,
00:02:15 and then with me, it’s fine, don’t worry,
00:02:17 I’ll take your money, but you’re gonna enjoy it.
00:02:18 It’s great.
00:02:19 So that’s what the talking at the table is about,
00:02:21 is getting to be relaxed and get some of that gray area
00:02:26 between the conscious and the subconscious
00:02:28 to reveal something.
00:02:29 Yeah, there’s that too, and also just, you know,
00:02:31 and this is just part of who I am anyway,
00:02:32 like I like to talk to people,
00:02:34 but one of the byproducts is the more I know about you,
00:02:36 the more I likely know about how you think
00:02:38 about different situations, right?
00:02:39 So what do you do for a living?
00:02:40 Oh, I’m a lawyer, I defend criminals.
00:02:42 Okay, so this guy probably spends a lot of his time
00:02:45 twisting the truth, trying to find, you know,
00:02:47 and then, so then, you know, you already have a mindset
00:02:50 of like, this guy might be more likely to bluff
00:02:52 or he’s probably comfortable doing that.
00:02:53 Very subtle things like that.
00:02:55 And you start to pick up cues on what nervousness looks like
00:03:00 for this person, what the nervousness communicates,
00:03:02 all that kind of stuff.
00:03:03 So we’re talking about physical tells here.
00:03:05 Yeah, physical tells is a secondary thing.
00:03:07 I was more specific like player profiling, right?
00:03:10 And sort of understanding the type of mind
00:03:12 that I’m dealing with, right?
00:03:14 So again, somebody who’s a lawyer is used to trying,
00:03:17 is fine with being deceptive as part of a game, right?
00:03:21 Whereas maybe somebody who’s a Sunday school teacher
00:03:23 and, you know, they don’t feel comfortable,
00:03:25 maybe they think bluffing might be dishonest, right?
00:03:28 So they’re less likely to try some shenanigans against you.
00:03:31 So, and then the other thing too is,
00:03:33 what type of person is this in terms of their, you know,
00:03:38 like view on life, right?
00:03:40 Are they positive?
00:03:40 Do they feel like things go their way or they’re not, right?
00:03:44 There’s those people that always, well, of course I lost,
00:03:46 I always lose with this hand.
00:03:47 And those types of people you can manipulate
00:03:50 because when a card comes,
00:03:52 that you don’t have them beat, right?
00:03:54 But you can pretend because they’ll believe it.
00:03:56 Like, of course you beat me.
00:03:57 So you bet all your chips against them,
00:03:59 knowing that you can scare them
00:04:00 because they already feel like they’re gonna lose.
00:04:03 The inherent, like the cynicism.
00:04:05 Exactly.
00:04:06 Cynicism is easier to play against
00:04:08 because you can convince them that their cards suck.
00:04:10 Yeah, when somebody believes that they’re a loser
00:04:12 or they’re unlucky, right?
00:04:14 And that bad things happen to them always
00:04:16 and they never catch a break.
00:04:17 Well, you know, you can just help them make it true.
00:04:21 What do you think about the rounders Teddy KGB
00:04:24 when he does the Oreo tell?
00:04:26 Do players at the high level communicate that kind of stuff?
00:04:30 Do you think it’s realistic to be able to have a tell
00:04:31 like this that’s partially subconscious?
00:04:34 So first of all, I love Brian Koppelman who made the film.
00:04:37 And I think what they were going for
00:04:39 is something obvious to the general public, right?
00:04:41 Like, okay, it’s very clear, you know, he eats the cookie,
00:04:44 he doesn’t eat the cookie and it means one or the other.
00:04:46 At the highest levels, something that, you know, blatant,
00:04:50 you’re not gonna find.
00:04:51 You’re gonna find a lot more subtle things,
00:04:52 maybe with posture or timing or, you know,
00:04:55 different things like that.
00:04:56 But at the lower levels, you know, you might see some,
00:05:00 you might see, you know, with a lot of people
00:05:02 when they’re in a hand and they’ve bet,
00:05:03 whether they drink water in the hand
00:05:06 is going to tell you something generally speaking.
00:05:08 It’s such an intimate part of the human experience
00:05:09 that I feel like if you have food,
00:05:11 you’re gonna reveal something about yourself
00:05:13 through the way you eat.
00:05:14 I feel like that’s a dangerous thing
00:05:15 to have at the table.
00:05:16 Well, the thing is, generally speaking,
00:05:18 people don’t eat food in the middle of a hand.
00:05:20 Like they’re not gonna bet and then just like grab a burger.
00:05:23 What they will do though is, you know,
00:05:24 they bet and it’s up to you and then they’re,
00:05:26 whether they’re, you know, uncomfortable
00:05:28 or they do it unconsciously,
00:05:29 they just want to do something
00:05:30 to make themselves look relaxed or whatever.
00:05:32 And then, you know, they grab a water
00:05:34 where they don’t really need it in that moment,
00:05:35 but they’re trying to take your mind off of the situation.
00:05:39 So they, in the movie, wanted to show a simplistic version
00:05:43 of something that does happen,
00:05:45 something that’s visually sort of clear.
00:05:48 Yeah, because I think one of the things Rounders got right
00:05:50 is that it’s a poker movie, right?
00:05:52 But you don’t have to be great at poker
00:05:54 or really understand poker to enjoy the movie.
00:05:56 And that, you know, Oreo cookie tale,
00:05:58 like everyone gets that.
00:05:59 They’re like, okay, that’s simple.
00:06:01 If he would have went with something more subtle,
00:06:03 you know, like licking your lips or looking to the right,
00:06:06 or I think it might’ve been lost on the audience.
00:06:09 And they didn’t actually explicitly say
00:06:12 that that was a tell, I don’t think.
00:06:14 I thought they did everything to let you know, right?
00:06:17 With the music and slow motion and he’s staring at it
00:06:21 and he’s like, aha.
00:06:22 Yeah, but they didn’t actually say,
00:06:25 you know, this is an obvious tell,
00:06:26 like Matt Damon’s character didn’t talk.
00:06:28 At the very end of it, you know,
00:06:29 after he says, how the fuck did you lay that down?
00:06:33 The monster, right?
00:06:34 And he’s like, he’s like, you’re not hungry?
00:06:37 Not hungry, KGB?
00:06:38 He’s like, I keep on, but you, you know,
00:06:40 so he sort of references it and then he takes the cookies.
00:06:42 He notices, he’s like, ah, he got me.
00:06:44 And he breaks the, you know, the rack of cookies.
00:06:46 Well, probably if you had that kind of tell on him,
00:06:48 you wouldn’t, and Matt Damon’s character would not reveal.
00:06:51 Well, he says in the movie, he says,
00:06:53 normally I wouldn’t reveal a tell,
00:06:54 but I don’t have that much time.
00:06:56 Like I’ve got to rattle him some way.
00:06:58 So that was one way to do that.
00:07:00 How hard is it to do that to, in a KGB accent,
00:07:05 to lay down a monster in those situations?
00:07:08 In general, how hard is it to lay down
00:07:10 a really strong hand, just psychologically?
00:07:13 Yeah, no, I mean, I think it’s incredibly difficult
00:07:15 for the vast majority of people.
00:07:16 You know, part of what makes professionals
00:07:18 really, really good is recognizing a situation
00:07:20 that’s very, very dangerous and they need to, you know,
00:07:22 jump ship.
00:07:23 Like what happens to a lot of players
00:07:25 is you get married to a hand.
00:07:26 Let’s say you have pocket aces,
00:07:27 which is the best possible hand, right?
00:07:29 But the board runs out where it’s seven, eight, nine,
00:07:32 and then there’s a jack and then there’s a six.
00:07:34 It’s like, you have a great hand to start,
00:07:36 but you don’t anymore.
00:07:37 So one of the difficult things for the average player is,
00:07:41 you know, once they’ve put money in, cutting their losses
00:07:44 and saying, okay, let’s move on to the next hand.
00:07:46 It’s a very, very difficult thing for a lot of people.
00:07:48 At every stage of like pre flop all the way through,
00:07:52 be able to just make a decision at that moment.
00:07:55 So yeah, essentially not being attached.
00:07:57 Okay, I’ve already put in $40,000 in this pot
00:08:00 and this guy’s bet another 20.
00:08:02 Well, I mean, I gotta get my 40 back, right?
00:08:04 Except, you know, in some cases you have to reassess
00:08:07 individually this situation and realize,
00:08:09 all right, well, this is a bad investment.
00:08:11 So I got to cut my losses.
00:08:12 By the way, I should mention that you have,
00:08:15 you have an incredible YouTube channel
00:08:17 where you explain a lot of stuff.
00:08:18 You do a podcast, you do a lot of really awesome stuff.
00:08:21 My probably favorite thing that you’ve done
00:08:23 is your masterclass that people should definitely check out,
00:08:27 masterclass.com slash Lux.
00:08:29 There you go.
00:08:31 No, but it really is one of my favorite masterclass courses,
00:08:35 but also just a great introduction overview of poker.
00:08:38 It’s great for people like me who are beginners essentially,
00:08:42 but it’s probably really good for intermediate people too.
00:08:44 I mean, there’s a lot of really good detail there.
00:08:46 Anyway, what are hand ranges
00:08:48 and how do you begin to estimate the range of hands
00:08:51 that your opponents have?
00:08:52 Yeah, so I actually did, speaking to YouTube,
00:08:54 I did a video on specifically this.
00:08:55 Yes.
00:08:56 Getting familiar with Rangers and essentially,
00:08:57 you know, back in my day, the old days,
00:08:58 we didn’t talk about poker that way.
00:09:00 We’re like, I think he’s got this
00:09:01 or I think he’s got that, right?
00:09:03 Nobody thought of like the range of hands
00:09:06 a player can have.
00:09:06 So I guess the best example is,
00:09:08 imagine like all the potential hands
00:09:09 as being a part of a grid, right?
00:09:11 So the first player to act,
00:09:13 they could have any one of those hands, right?
00:09:16 Anyone randomly dealt, right?
00:09:18 But let’s say now that that player raised to $3,000.
00:09:22 Okay, well you can eliminate now from this grid,
00:09:24 a whole bunch of hands that this player can no longer have
00:09:27 because if they had a two and a three,
00:09:28 they wouldn’t do that.
00:09:29 So you can say, okay, he probably has a big pair.
00:09:32 He has ace king.
00:09:33 You know, you’ve narrowed the range of hands down, right?
00:09:36 Now through every action on the flop,
00:09:38 on the turn and on the river,
00:09:40 based on the decisions they make,
00:09:41 you narrow it down even further.
00:09:43 So the range of hands is the whole,
00:09:46 the entirety of all the possibilities
00:09:48 that this player you believe could have.
00:09:50 And sometimes they fool you
00:09:51 or they have a hand that you don’t expect them
00:09:53 to have in their range.
00:09:54 And you know, maybe a little bit unorthodox
00:09:56 doing some things you don’t expect to throw you off,
00:09:59 but a range is essentially all the possibilities
00:10:01 and it narrows as by the time,
00:10:03 before the flop it’s endless,
00:10:05 player raises, okay, it’s minimized.
00:10:07 You know, a player bets the flop,
00:10:08 okay, it’s minimized further.
00:10:09 And then by the river, you know,
00:10:11 you can narrow down the entire range to, you know,
00:10:13 just maybe even a few hands.
00:10:15 Is it always shrinking or is there sort of,
00:10:17 as you get surprised?
00:10:19 I mean, it’s always just an estimate.
00:10:21 So does it ever expand based on sort of chaotic,
00:10:24 unpredicted surprising behavior of the players?
00:10:29 It really should never expand.
00:10:30 The range of hands should always get smaller, right?
00:10:32 Like again, we start with the full scope
00:10:35 and then you should factor in like, okay,
00:10:37 these are all the possible hands
00:10:37 you can have on the flop now, right?
00:10:39 We can’t have new hands on the turn.
00:10:41 And if you get to that point where you think,
00:10:44 oh, well, maybe he has this hand,
00:10:45 then you sort of misjudged his range prior.
00:10:49 So you’re not thinking clearly.
00:10:50 It should always shrink from the full scope to, you know,
00:10:54 hopefully just a couple.
00:10:55 Well, in that video, you also talk about,
00:10:57 it used to be that you would play your hand,
00:10:59 but now you’re playing a range
00:11:02 that you’re representing a range.
00:11:03 You’re not even just playing your hand.
00:11:05 So what does it mean to represent a certain range?
00:11:08 Yeah, so that’s another big thing
00:11:09 that’s different about poker from, you know,
00:11:11 my day to today is that back in our day,
00:11:13 we would like put people on one hand.
00:11:15 I’m like, you probably have king nine
00:11:17 or you have jacks or something like that.
00:11:19 Now people are cognizant of the idea
00:11:21 that you could have an entire range of hands.
00:11:23 So then you ask yourself in situations,
00:11:24 all right, I know what I have,
00:11:26 but what I could have in his mind
00:11:29 or my opponent’s mind is any one of these hands.
00:11:31 What would I do with the entirety of these hands?
00:11:34 And so a lot of people that are trying to play optimally,
00:11:36 you know, game theory optimal,
00:11:37 they think in terms of what their range of hands would do
00:11:41 rather than their very specific hand.
00:11:43 So is bluffing in that context
00:11:46 essentially misrepresenting the range of hands that you have?
00:11:49 No. Is that how you think about it?
00:11:51 Not exactly, because so an optimal range,
00:11:53 like if I bet the river,
00:11:54 if I’m playing game theory optimal,
00:11:56 a portion of my range is going to be, I have it.
00:11:59 I got the best hand.
00:12:00 And a portion of my range is going to be bluffs
00:12:01 and they’ll be balanced.
00:12:03 So in theory, no matter what you do,
00:12:05 no matter what you do, if you call or you fold,
00:12:08 in theory, it’s just, you’re printing a zero, as we say,
00:12:11 you’re not gaining or losing any EV,
00:12:14 if you were to do it that way.
00:12:15 What’s EV?
00:12:16 EV is expected value, right?
00:12:18 So every play that you make,
00:12:19 you know, it either is going to in the long run,
00:12:21 you know, make you some money,
00:12:22 or it’s just a losing play.
00:12:24 And as a professional,
00:12:25 you try to make the fewest amount of minus EV plays you can.
00:12:29 And the only reason you would make these minus EV plays
00:12:31 is potentially if you were trying to set up your opponent
00:12:34 for something later, right?
00:12:35 So I might make some minus EV plays, right?
00:12:38 So that I can exploit you later, right?
00:12:40 So you’re building up an image,
00:12:42 a player profile that’s false in some way.
00:12:45 Something that I’m going to,
00:12:46 I’m going to plant seeds in your mind
00:12:48 so that I can exploit them later.
00:12:49 So for example, why would players like show a big bluff?
00:12:53 Like what would be the reason for that?
00:12:54 They show a big bluff
00:12:55 so that you know that they’re capable of it.
00:12:57 But maybe in their mind,
00:12:58 you’re never going to do that again.
00:12:59 But now they think, you know, he bluffed me last time.
00:13:02 Maybe he’s doing it again.
00:13:03 But that’s a, what we call like a level, a leveling war.
00:13:06 Because it, you know, you can go back and forth
00:13:09 with whether or not, okay, this guy might know that.
00:13:11 Like he showed a bluff
00:13:12 because he’s never going to bluff me again.
00:13:14 So that that’s where it gets a little.
00:13:15 So that’s a little bit different.
00:13:17 The, when we’re talking about hand rangers,
00:13:19 that’s different than building up a mental model
00:13:23 of what your opponents,
00:13:24 what your opponents think of you
00:13:26 and what your opponents think that you think of them
00:13:30 and so on and so forth.
00:13:32 Are you trying to construct those kinds of mental models?
00:13:35 And is that separate from the hand rangers?
00:13:37 They go hand in hand, right?
00:13:39 So if any given, in a given situation, right?
00:13:41 My range has this many value hands and this many bluffs.
00:13:45 Okay?
00:13:46 So in theory, if I want to be balanced, you know,
00:13:48 this is my range and this is what it looks like.
00:13:49 I’ll bet this 50% of the time, bet this 50% of the time.
00:13:52 However, if I know that you think that I bluff too much,
00:13:57 right, then I’m not going to bluff as much.
00:13:59 I’m going to start,
00:13:59 instead of betting these hands that I would 50, 50,
00:14:02 now what I’ll do is I’ll do like 70, 30,
00:14:04 where I’m basically value betting
00:14:06 most of the time against you, you know, or vice versa.
00:14:08 If I know you always fold because you think I have it,
00:14:11 I’m going to veer the other way.
00:14:12 And instead of bluffing 50%,
00:14:13 I’ll bluff 70, 80% of the time
00:14:15 to take advantage of your perception of me.
00:14:17 So to be successful,
00:14:19 do you have to construct a solid model of all the players
00:14:23 in the game or can you ignore them?
00:14:26 I think it’s really important.
00:14:27 Like when I play, I have in my phone,
00:14:29 I have a player profile of everyone that I play with.
00:14:32 Whenever I pick up, whether it’s physical tells
00:14:34 or tendencies they like to, you know, that they have.
00:14:38 And overall, that’s just going to, you know,
00:14:41 that’s going to allow you to exploit more, right?
00:14:43 So like if I played with somebody I’ve never played before,
00:14:46 I’m probably just going to play optimally
00:14:48 or at least as optimal as I know how until I start to,
00:14:51 you know, gain some information on that player
00:14:53 so that I can start to exploit them.
00:14:55 So what’s the, when you say optimally,
00:14:57 what does optimally mean versus,
00:14:59 so game theory optimal versus exploitative?
00:15:04 Yeah, so that’s like sort of the big debate in poker.
00:15:06 We call it for short,
00:15:07 GTO game theory optimal versus exploitative play.
00:15:11 So GTO game theory optimal is the idea that no,
00:15:15 like I’m going to set up my play
00:15:16 so that no matter what you do, you cannot exploit me.
00:15:20 So essentially that’s playing rock, paper, scissors, right?
00:15:23 And throwing 33% of each every time, right?
00:15:27 Nothing you do can beat that, nothing.
00:15:29 You’ll never be able to beat that, right?
00:15:31 Exploitative play is starting to notice that, okay,
00:15:34 well, you know what?
00:15:35 This guy loves rock.
00:15:36 He loves playing rock.
00:15:37 So I’m going to go paper a little more.
00:15:39 So I’m going to take advantage of them.
00:15:40 So I won’t be through, but now all of a sudden,
00:15:42 when I do that, I’m no longer playing optimal
00:15:44 because if you knew that I was making that adjustment,
00:15:46 now you can exploit me.
00:15:47 So that’s where the sort of what we call
00:15:49 the leveling war happens, where people veer from,
00:15:52 you know, the optimal line of, okay, 33% each for each one.
00:15:56 You can’t beat that, but you also can’t win with that either.
00:16:00 So you’re always trying to be at the cutting,
00:16:03 at the leading edge of suboptimal play.
00:16:06 Yeah, you’re going back and forth.
00:16:07 And listen, at the highest levels,
00:16:09 like online that these guys play,
00:16:11 like they’re trying to play pretty close
00:16:13 to like game theory optimal
00:16:15 because it’s very difficult to do first of all.
00:16:16 No human being will ever be able to compute
00:16:20 at the level that computers can.
00:16:21 It’s just never going to happen.
00:16:23 So that’s where like the human mind has to come into play
00:16:26 and say, all right, well, you know,
00:16:28 if I was playing against the robot, I would do X,
00:16:30 but I’m not, I’m playing against you.
00:16:31 So I have to adjust.
00:16:32 So does game theory optimal only look at the betting
00:16:36 and the hands in the current hand
00:16:40 or does it look at the history?
00:16:42 So if you were to play optimally, optimally,
00:16:44 would you need to look at the history
00:16:46 of the individual players
00:16:47 or just every hand is taken afresh?
00:16:49 See, that’s why I love playing exploitatively
00:16:52 for the most part, because with GTO,
00:16:54 anything that’s happened in the past
00:16:56 has no bearing on this situation.
00:16:58 It’s simply based on what is the optimal play
00:17:00 in a vacuum in this spot.
00:17:02 Whereas exploitatively, okay,
00:17:03 this guy bluffs way too much in these spots.
00:17:06 So now I can make an adjustment and call more, you know,
00:17:08 based on past information.
00:17:11 GTO doesn’t take into account history at all.
00:17:14 So like in a tournament,
00:17:15 how quickly can you construct a player profile
00:17:17 that you’ve never played before?
00:17:19 Depends on the level of the buy in really, right?
00:17:22 So the higher the buy in, generally speaking,
00:17:25 you can assume if they’re professionals,
00:17:27 that they’re gonna have pretty similar profiles
00:17:29 because you know, everyone’s playing,
00:17:31 you know, if you’re playing this game well,
00:17:32 it looks similar, right?
00:17:34 At the lower levels, you know,
00:17:35 playing say in $1,000 or $1,500 buy in or less,
00:17:39 you know, within a half an hour or an hour,
00:17:41 I have an idea of all right,
00:17:43 just by seeing how some players played a few hands that,
00:17:46 you know, so here’s the thing with poker,
00:17:48 it’s like, I can see one clue of what he did.
00:17:50 And it tells me so much about what he’ll do
00:17:51 in a vast number of scenarios.
00:17:53 And you’re saying at the high level,
00:17:55 people don’t give too many clues.
00:17:56 I mean, then.
00:17:57 Well, at the highest level is,
00:17:59 people are so much more similar
00:18:00 in terms of their style of play.
00:18:02 They try to find some kind of balance between the GTO.
00:18:04 And now with all that we’ve seen on TV, right?
00:18:07 Like people get to watch streams and whatever.
00:18:08 So you get to watch all the top players play.
00:18:10 So if you wanna learn how to play better,
00:18:11 guess what you do?
00:18:12 You copy what they’re doing, essentially.
00:18:14 Like, oh, he’s only raising this much.
00:18:16 I’m gonna do the same.
00:18:17 They’re betting this much.
00:18:18 I’m gonna do the same.
00:18:19 So as a result,
00:18:21 what you end up having is sort of,
00:18:25 you know, everyone deciding.
00:18:26 Like, I guess it’s similar in chess with openings, right?
00:18:28 People figure out, okay, this is an opening.
00:18:29 This is what you do.
00:18:30 And that’s it, you know?
00:18:31 And then everyone’s similar to that.
00:18:33 And then you have, of course, the outliers
00:18:35 who try to do things a little differently
00:18:36 and confuse people.
00:18:38 It seems like the outliers,
00:18:39 like we talked offline that Magnus,
00:18:41 in order to win Magnus Carlsen,
00:18:43 has to play suboptimally in the openings
00:18:45 to take his opponents out of the comfort zone
00:18:49 so he can play what he calls pure chess
00:18:51 as quickly as possible,
00:18:52 which is just both short and deep calculations.
00:18:56 Purely, you’re looking at the board
00:18:57 versus memorized openings and memorized lines.
00:19:01 Is it the case that the best poker players
00:19:05 are the ones that are able to, at the right time,
00:19:09 play really suboptimally or really unorthodox?
00:19:15 Yeah, specifically there’s one guy
00:19:17 who last year sort of took the poker world by storm,
00:19:19 and his name was Michael Adamo.
00:19:21 And he was doing things, like I said,
00:19:22 you know, most of the top pros play very similarly
00:19:25 with the way that they construct ranges
00:19:27 and their bet sizing and all these kinds of things.
00:19:28 He was doing some crazy things
00:19:30 that nobody else was doing.
00:19:32 So he studied sort of a different form of poker
00:19:36 and it was unorthodox.
00:19:38 And it, you know, it throws people off
00:19:40 because he’s in his comfort zone
00:19:41 with these bet sizes and different things,
00:19:43 whereas everyone else,
00:19:44 they’re not well studied in those spots.
00:19:46 So as a result of him being unorthodox,
00:19:49 he became like a monster and very difficult to play against
00:19:51 because he really knew what he was doing with it.
00:19:53 In tournament or cash games?
00:19:54 It was tournaments, yeah.
00:19:55 He was crushing tournaments.
00:19:56 He was going against the norm
00:19:58 in terms of what is like, you know,
00:20:00 this is what you should do as a poker player in this spot.
00:20:02 He wasn’t doing that.
00:20:04 He was doing what he thought was best
00:20:05 and he was doing things outside the norm
00:20:07 that again, in a vacuum, you could look at that
00:20:08 and you go, that’s incorrect.
00:20:10 That he should not do.
00:20:11 That is a clear cut mistake.
00:20:13 Even, you know, the solvers or the computers
00:20:16 or game theory would say, this is wrong what he’s doing.
00:20:18 But it’s not wrong if he’s doing it in a way
00:20:21 that he’s exploiting other players tendencies.
00:20:24 So for example, with him,
00:20:26 say he’s playing far too aggressively, okay?
00:20:28 That’s not good unless your opponents
00:20:31 are playing way too passively.
00:20:33 So if your opponents are playing passively,
00:20:34 the answer is to be more aggressive with them.
00:20:36 And that’s, I think one of the, you know,
00:20:38 biggest advantages he had was he was willing to do that.
00:20:40 So bet huge, big, big pots bluffing.
00:20:44 Huge.
00:20:45 So in a spot where somebody would make it a thousand,
00:20:47 he’s making it 22,000.
00:20:49 Like what?
00:20:50 What is this?
00:20:51 This makes no sense.
00:20:52 And then people kind of know he has nothing,
00:20:53 but they’re too afraid to call him on it.
00:20:56 Well, and then sometimes what happens is
00:20:58 this is where the leveling comes in.
00:20:59 You’re like, man, this guy’s crazy.
00:21:00 He’s bluffing like nuts.
00:21:01 Then he bets the 22,000 and you say,
00:21:04 ah, I’m taking my stand.
00:21:05 I call, and then he shows you like, you know,
00:21:07 four of a kind or something like that.
00:21:09 So he gets people out of their comfort zone.
00:21:11 And I really enjoy watching him play.
00:21:12 He’s probably my favorite player to watch today.
00:21:15 Watching a guy like that,
00:21:16 what aspect of his play have you been able
00:21:19 to incorporate into your own?
00:21:20 Like, what do you learn from that?
00:21:22 Cause you’re constantly learning,
00:21:23 you’re constantly adjusting.
00:21:23 Yeah.
00:21:24 Well, no, and I love it.
00:21:25 And as I said, so I think a lot of players
00:21:27 sort of come to the same conclusions about
00:21:28 this is how you play the spot, but he doesn’t.
00:21:30 And I love watching and thinking in terms of like,
00:21:32 why he’s doing this.
00:21:33 And one specific thing, for example,
00:21:35 is he’s willing to really go for it.
00:21:38 So in a spot where let’s say he bets 2000,
00:21:40 he knows he’ll get you to call 2000, right?
00:21:43 But he wants it all.
00:21:45 He wants it all.
00:21:46 So he says, you know what?
00:21:47 I’ll give up the 2000 that’s guaranteed
00:21:50 and I’ll bet 50,000.
00:21:52 And maybe if you call that now, you know,
00:21:54 so listen, you lose the 2007, eight times,
00:21:57 but if I get called for the 50 just once,
00:21:59 you know, I’m profiting from that.
00:22:01 And it also sets the, you know, the template for you
00:22:05 to really sort of be a player
00:22:07 that people are afraid to play against.
00:22:08 He knocked me out in a tournament very early on
00:22:11 in a huge event.
00:22:12 And he had, he was so far ahead.
00:22:14 He was one step ahead of my thought process in hand.
00:22:17 And he did something that makes no sense whatsoever.
00:22:19 I looked it up on the computer.
00:22:21 Huge mistake, if you will, but not a mistake
00:22:24 because he was taking advantage of my tendency.
00:22:25 Do you remember the cars?
00:22:26 Is there an example?
00:22:27 I remember the whole thing.
00:22:28 Yeah.
00:22:29 I remember it like it was yesterday.
00:22:30 Can you take it like through an example hand
00:22:33 that really demonstrates it?
00:22:34 So I’ll explain the hand here.
00:22:36 So I’m on the button and I have ace king,
00:22:39 which is a very good hand.
00:22:40 And I raise and he calls from the big blind.
00:22:43 The flop is nine, seven, five.
00:22:45 So I have nothing really here.
00:22:47 He checks, I check behind.
00:22:49 The turn card’s an ace.
00:22:51 He checks, I bet half the pot.
00:22:53 There were 6,000 there, I bet 3,000, okay?
00:22:56 Now this is not a typical thing you see people do,
00:22:59 but he raised me to 36,000.
00:23:01 Massive raise, bigger than the size of the pot.
00:23:04 What was the flop again?
00:23:05 Nine, seven, five, turn an ace.
00:23:08 What is he representing exactly?
00:23:10 Well, he could have a straight,
00:23:10 he could have three, three of a kind.
00:23:12 He could have, you know, aces up.
00:23:13 He could have a whole bunch of hands.
00:23:14 So he check raises me big to 36,000.
00:23:16 I call the bet.
00:23:18 So now there’s something like 75,000.
00:23:20 The river is a five.
00:23:23 So the board pairs, okay?
00:23:26 He thinks for a while and he bets all of it,
00:23:29 which is three times the pot.
00:23:30 He bets 225,000.
00:23:32 There’s only 75,000 out there, right?
00:23:34 And in theory, he should never ever have a hand
00:23:36 that can do that, right?
00:23:38 So it confused me.
00:23:39 And I was like, okay, well, this guy’s aggressive.
00:23:41 He likes to bluff and all this kind of stuff.
00:23:43 So I made the call with the ace king
00:23:45 and he turned over six, eight.
00:23:47 So we had a straight, but here’s the thing.
00:23:49 In theory, that river card is bad for him.
00:23:52 When I call the turn, I have a lot of the time,
00:23:55 three of a kind, two pair that just made a full house.
00:23:58 So he was risking that.
00:23:59 And the reason he did it was
00:24:01 because he thought I would perceive him to be bluffing a lot.
00:24:05 So he just went for it and it worked.
00:24:07 He was able to double up right away
00:24:09 and knock me out of the tournament like an hour in.
00:24:11 Do you think he thought you might fold?
00:24:12 Like what is it?
00:24:13 I think specific, I think it was, it came down to this.
00:24:15 It’s as simple as this.
00:24:17 He was cognizant of his image
00:24:19 as being a wild, aggressive bluffer, right?
00:24:21 And he was fully taking advantage of me,
00:24:24 knowing that my tendency in these spots is to be curious.
00:24:27 And I want to call and I want to see it.
00:24:29 So he was fully taking advantage of the fact
00:24:31 that he thought I would call too often.
00:24:33 Because otherwise his play makes no sense.
00:24:35 A small bet, a medium sized bet, those make sense.
00:24:39 But the bet that he made in theory is indefensible.
00:24:42 It’s just like clearly a mistake.
00:24:45 But that’s why poker is so fascinating
00:24:47 because he makes this play and it wasn’t a mistake.
00:24:48 It was above the rim, is what it was.
00:24:50 Do you think he put you on ace something?
00:24:53 I think exactly what he thought I had,
00:24:54 was ace king or something like that.
00:24:57 You know?
00:24:58 That is so fun.
00:24:58 That is so fun that the two players at such a high level
00:25:01 were able to mess with each other’s mind.
00:25:03 How old is he?
00:25:04 Is he young?
00:25:05 He’s in his 20s, yeah.
00:25:06 I feel like that takes a lot of guts
00:25:07 to take risks like that.
00:25:10 Well, that’s what’s great about him.
00:25:11 He’s certainly never accused
00:25:12 of not having the guts to put it in.
00:25:13 And that’s scary to play against, right?
00:25:15 The easiest opponent to play against
00:25:17 is one who’s just straightforward,
00:25:18 passive, you know, not wild and crazy.
00:25:21 Playing against him,
00:25:23 he’s going to put you in the blender, as we say.
00:25:25 Yeah, how can you control
00:25:28 what you’re perceived as representing?
00:25:31 What hand you’re perceived of as representing?
00:25:34 So if we’re, if the game of modern poker is,
00:25:38 others are representing certain hands
00:25:40 through the information they convey,
00:25:42 and you’re representing a certain hand range, sorry,
00:25:45 through your play, how can you control that?
00:25:47 Or is that not, is that the wrong way to think about it?
00:25:50 But isn’t bluffing and bet sizing
00:25:54 and all of that kind of stuff essentially controlling
00:25:57 what others perceive as the hand range you have?
00:26:01 Ultimately, in terms of like controlling
00:26:04 people’s perception of you, you can’t fully control it,
00:26:06 but you can do things to sway it, right?
00:26:10 As I said earlier, showing bluffs and things like that,
00:26:12 you know, leads your opponent to think
00:26:14 maybe you do this more often than you’re supposed to
00:26:16 or whatever the case may be.
00:26:17 But in terms of like controlling, you know,
00:26:21 what your opponent can think about your hands
00:26:24 in certain spots, I don’t really think it equates that way.
00:26:26 It doesn’t really, you know, I think what people do
00:26:28 when they’re playing a hand is they think in terms of,
00:26:29 all right, what does my range look like here?
00:26:33 Okay, so my range has value.
00:26:35 So you look at, you know,
00:26:36 the actual hand you have secondarily.
00:26:38 So you say, okay, well, I could have this,
00:26:41 I could have this, I actually have this, right?
00:26:43 But I could have all these hands.
00:26:44 So my opponent, if he’s thinking on a high level,
00:26:46 he knows I could have all these hands and I have this one.
00:26:49 So what do I do with this one, right, in the bigger scope
00:26:51 of things?
00:26:52 I guess I’m trying to understand if your betting
00:26:55 isn’t a bet, preflop, your bet,
00:26:58 doesn’t that narrow the hand ranges?
00:27:01 Doesn’t matter what you have, it narrows the end.
00:27:04 Absolutely.
00:27:05 And if you bet big combined with the perception of you
00:27:11 at the table, doesn’t that represent the hand range?
00:27:14 Uh huh, absolutely.
00:27:16 So like you can, with betting essentially control
00:27:18 what people estimate you to have.
00:27:20 Sure, so that makes it, so yeah, so that’s true.
00:27:23 So for example, one of the most extreme examples is,
00:27:26 we have, there’s spots where there’s a bet
00:27:29 that’s considered polarizing, right?
00:27:31 So let’s say there’s a thousand in the pot
00:27:34 and you bet 10,000, which is crazy big, right?
00:27:37 That’s saying one of two things.
00:27:38 I either have the absolute best possible hand
00:27:41 or absolutely nothing,
00:27:42 because any of the hands in the middle,
00:27:44 I wouldn’t do that with.
00:27:45 So I’m essentially telling you when I bet that,
00:27:47 I’m like, I either got it or I got,
00:27:51 I don’t have a mediocre hand,
00:27:52 like just a pair of nines or a pair of tens.
00:27:54 I have a royal flush or have nine high.
00:27:57 So with my bet sizing,
00:27:59 I can control how my opponent is perceiving
00:28:02 what my range is gonna be.
00:28:03 So for example, similarly, if I bet small, right?
00:28:07 Well, that could be a lot of hands, right?
00:28:09 That could represent a big part of my range.
00:28:12 The bigger the bet, the more, the narrower the range.
00:28:14 Apparently the more polarized it is.
00:28:16 Yeah, how far could you get
00:28:19 without looking at your cards?
00:28:20 Do you think how well could you do?
00:28:22 It depends on who I’m playing with, right?
00:28:24 So if I was playing in a tournament
00:28:26 with mediocre or weak players,
00:28:28 I think I could probably do pretty well.
00:28:30 But even like world class.
00:28:32 World class, I don’t think you’d have much of a chance,
00:28:34 really, I mean.
00:28:35 The question is trying to get at like,
00:28:36 how important is it that the actual hands you have
00:28:39 versus the hands you’re representing?
00:28:41 Right, so that’s the question of essentially,
00:28:43 if you’re not looking at your hand preflop,
00:28:45 you’re basically giving up a fundamental advantage, right?
00:28:48 Where you’re gonna be playing way suboptimally
00:28:50 in terms of your hand selection, right?
00:28:52 Cause if you don’t look at your hand,
00:28:53 you might have a two and a three.
00:28:54 That’s not good, but now you’re playing it.
00:28:56 So you’ve invested whatever, two, 3000 bucks
00:28:59 with absolute garbage,
00:29:01 and it’s very difficult to climb that hill, right?
00:29:03 So it’s much better to actually look at your cards
00:29:05 and go, okay, I’ll throw away the two and three
00:29:07 and I’ll play the ace king.
00:29:08 Speaking of garbage, you’ve said that 10, seven
00:29:12 is your favorite poker hand to play.
00:29:13 Is that still the case and what aspect of it
00:29:16 is that you enjoy?
00:29:18 Yeah, so it’s one of those viewer discretion is advised.
00:29:21 Like 10, seven, I’ve just noticed throughout my life,
00:29:24 you know, it’s a tendency thing that I’ve been lucky with it.
00:29:27 So that’s just sort of,
00:29:28 but it’s not like I’m gonna look at 10, seven and go,
00:29:30 oh, wow, you know, I’m gonna call it all in
00:29:32 or anything like that.
00:29:33 I’ll play it in situations where it makes sense,
00:29:35 but you know, it’s rare cause it’s not a very good hand.
00:29:38 But is there some aspect of belief
00:29:42 in the magic of this hand manifests quality of play?
00:29:47 Or is that a little?
00:29:47 There should be.
00:29:48 So here’s the thing, it’s, you know,
00:29:49 poker players, some have said
00:29:51 it’s unlucky to be superstitious,
00:29:53 but we’re all a little bit superstitious, a little bit.
00:29:55 You know, and so I don’t know,
00:29:57 maybe it is a case where when I have 10, seven,
00:29:59 I feel somehow energetically that, you know,
00:30:01 I’m more likely to catch something,
00:30:03 which may actually make me more apt to be aggressive
00:30:06 and confident in the hand.
00:30:07 But you really shouldn’t let yourself do that.
00:30:10 Like you’re not supposed to fall in love
00:30:11 with any specific hands.
00:30:12 Yeah, but you know, uncertainty is ruthless.
00:30:18 It’s, you know, the fact that it’s a game of statistics,
00:30:23 it can be too painful for the human psychology.
00:30:26 So maybe you have to hold on to certain superstitions.
00:30:30 Because, you know, I mean, there’s a cold absurdity
00:30:34 to the fact that you can play extremely well and still lose.
00:30:38 I mean, actually this year you’ve played the,
00:30:43 what is it, 50 days of World Series of Poker.
00:30:47 And it seems like, at least from the perspective
00:30:50 of me looking at it through the internet,
00:30:53 it seems like there’s a lot of hands
00:30:54 that you were like 70, 30, 80, 20, all in hands
00:30:59 that you just did not, were not going your way.
00:31:02 That can sort of break you mentally.
00:31:04 Absolutely.
00:31:05 Yeah, one of the hardest things, especially about playing,
00:31:07 because cash games and tournaments are different.
00:31:09 One of the most difficult things about, you know,
00:31:11 being a tournament player is resilience.
00:31:13 Because more often than not, like,
00:31:14 so if there’s a tournament with a thousand people,
00:31:17 to win the tournament, you have to get all of the chips.
00:31:19 That means there’s one winner and 999 losers.
00:31:22 So it’s very rare that you actually like win all the chips.
00:31:25 So you’re essentially at some point
00:31:27 in every tournament you play,
00:31:28 gonna deal with like really bad luck and disappointment.
00:31:31 And sometimes those streaks can have you question yourself
00:31:34 and be introspective about, okay,
00:31:35 so I think I’m 47 now.
00:31:38 I think I’ve gotten better as time went on
00:31:40 between distinguishing, okay,
00:31:42 am I losing right now because of bad luck?
00:31:44 Or is it fundamentally decisions I’m making
00:31:47 are not very good, right?
00:31:48 And that’s one of the hardest things
00:31:50 for anyone who plays poker to get to, right?
00:31:53 Why am I losing?
00:31:54 Am I losing because of my opponents being better?
00:31:57 I’m not playing well, or am I losing just because of luck?
00:31:59 And because there’s so much variance in poker,
00:32:02 a lot of players can be confused
00:32:04 on both sides of the coin.
00:32:06 One guy’s winning and he thinks he’s great.
00:32:07 He’s really not, wait till the cards break even as we say.
00:32:11 I think there’s a lot of parallels to life as well.
00:32:13 If you get screwed over, over and over,
00:32:15 it’s hard to know if you’re doing something wrong
00:32:17 or if it’s just bad luck.
00:32:19 I think they did a study.
00:32:20 I remember there was like a study
00:32:22 that was mostly related to gambling,
00:32:23 but it was mice and they put them in a little maze
00:32:25 and they go down these three tubes
00:32:27 and they go down this one tube and there’d be cheese, right?
00:32:30 And then they go down again, cheese.
00:32:32 Three times in a row there was cheese there, right?
00:32:34 The next time there was an electric shock there, not cheese.
00:32:39 The rat went, you know, the mouse went to get zapped.
00:32:42 He got zapped, okay, came back.
00:32:44 He kept going back to get zapped until he died.
00:32:47 Like he kept going because he found cheese there.
00:32:50 He has one there.
00:32:52 So he continued to go chase that win
00:32:54 despite it being, you know, now all of a sudden
00:32:57 not worthwhile till he died.
00:32:59 And essentially what they said was
00:33:01 that is essentially how they compared it
00:33:03 to like, you know, the gambling brain
00:33:04 and how people think about gambling.
00:33:06 You’re chasing the wins.
00:33:08 You learn too much.
00:33:09 You sort of overgeneralize the lessons learned
00:33:12 from the times you’ve won.
00:33:13 So yeah, like beginner’s luck can be detrimental.
00:33:15 If you have some early luck and you believe
00:33:17 that this is just the way it’s supposed to be forever,
00:33:20 you know, it can put you in a delusional state
00:33:23 where, you know, you feel like I’m just great,
00:33:26 but no, you’re not.
00:33:27 You were just lucky in the beginning.
00:33:28 I actually played poker once in Vegas.
00:33:31 It was a, it wasn’t a tournament,
00:33:34 but it was a kind of tournament like style.
00:33:37 I already forgot what it was.
00:33:39 But what I do remember is that I had four of a kind.
00:33:42 So the last hand I’ve ever played in poker was,
00:33:46 I got a four of a kind and there was a couple of others
00:33:50 with really strong hands.
00:33:51 So everybody went all in.
00:33:53 And I think you get some kind of bonus
00:33:54 for getting four of a kind.
00:33:55 Bad beat jackpot you were playing in.
00:33:56 Yeah, so something like this.
00:33:58 I apologize if I don’t know the details,
00:34:00 but I just remember winning a lot of money
00:34:02 and I walked away from the table.
00:34:04 I said, I’m not playing poker again.
00:34:05 This is great.
00:34:06 I’m gonna hit it up top.
00:34:07 Cause I started to feel like this is your,
00:34:09 I started to think,
00:34:10 even though I haven’t really played poker at all,
00:34:12 that I’m good.
00:34:13 And that was a really dangerous feeling.
00:34:15 And everybody was really mad for walking away
00:34:17 from the table.
00:34:18 One of the other things that I think is interesting
00:34:19 about poker too is good is relative, right?
00:34:21 So you could be the seventh best player in the whole world,
00:34:25 like literally seventh best player.
00:34:26 But if you’re playing with the other six,
00:34:29 you’re the sucker.
00:34:30 You are like the worst player in the game, right?
00:34:33 So like there’s a lot of players, for example,
00:34:36 like the Dan Blazarians of the world, right?
00:34:38 He’s not a top level player,
00:34:40 like these guys you see on TV,
00:34:42 but he probably makes more money than they do
00:34:44 because he plays with people
00:34:46 that are far below his skill level.
00:34:47 So part of the skill of being a poker player
00:34:50 is finding situations where you’re profitable,
00:34:53 regardless of your skill level.
00:34:55 Another connection to life.
00:34:57 Do you think Dan Blazarian is telling the truth
00:35:01 about having made, what is it, $50, $100 million?
00:35:04 Just a huge amount of money playing poker.
00:35:06 Considering what I know about the private games
00:35:09 and the types of players who play in these private games
00:35:11 and the stakes that they play,
00:35:12 I absolutely believe Dan has made,
00:35:14 I don’t know how many millions,
00:35:16 but whether it’s 50 or whatever,
00:35:17 but it wouldn’t surprise me
00:35:19 that if you play in these games within a year
00:35:21 or you find the right businessman
00:35:23 who has way too much Bitcoin money,
00:35:26 and in one night you take him for 20 million,
00:35:28 I absolutely could see it.
00:35:29 I don’t see any reason why.
00:35:30 Listen, where he got his money initially,
00:35:33 that’s up to interpretation from his father or whatever,
00:35:36 but has he made a bunch of money playing poker?
00:35:38 Absolutely, no question.
00:35:40 Do you feel, as somebody who loves the game,
00:35:43 do you think there’s something almost ethically wrong
00:35:46 in playing people much worse than you?
00:35:48 So yeah, that’s a good question
00:35:50 because part of the reason I played poker
00:35:53 and wanted to become professional
00:35:54 was I wanted to make my mother proud, right?
00:35:57 And I don’t think she would be proud of me
00:35:58 taking Grandma Betty’s last $5 and down the street,
00:36:03 sending her broke and taking her pension check.
00:36:05 So I play at the high stakes
00:36:06 against people who can afford it.
00:36:07 They know who I am.
00:36:08 I’m not a hustler.
00:36:09 I’m not pretending I’m bad at poker to squeeze in.
00:36:12 I was thinking about this just yesterday
00:36:13 because I played in a game
00:36:15 that if I played that sort of role
00:36:17 where a lot of guys do pros
00:36:19 that sort of play down their skill level,
00:36:21 pretend they’re just one of the guys,
00:36:23 these guys can make $20, $30 million in a year, legitimately.
00:36:27 Like I believe that like, if I did that,
00:36:29 if I just said, you know what, I’m gonna go down that path,
00:36:31 get into these games in LA, you know,
00:36:33 and travel and do all this kind of stuff,
00:36:34 I can make 20 million a year.
00:36:35 But it feels a little greasy, right?
00:36:38 I don’t like to kiss anyone’s ass.
00:36:39 I don’t like to ask anyone for a favor or things like that.
00:36:43 So, but yeah, like I feel, listen,
00:36:48 a rich guy who wants to sit down with a million bucks
00:36:51 and get drunk and lose it, I have no empathy for that.
00:36:53 I’m like, I don’t have any moral qualms with that.
00:36:55 So if a grandma Betty is a billionaire.
00:36:59 Send it, send it, right?
00:37:01 You know, absolutely, why not?
00:37:04 Well, let me ask you about a tough period
00:37:06 of your recent life.
00:37:08 You had a rough, like we mentioned,
00:37:10 the World Series of Poker losing $1.1 million over 48 days.
00:37:15 What were you going through mentally during that?
00:37:18 So here’s the thing, you know, I do, like you said,
00:37:20 I do a YouTube vlog every day.
00:37:21 So I kind of share my thoughts and listen,
00:37:23 I can edit that thing and keep out the bad stuff,
00:37:26 but I think it’s more authentic and genuine to show people
00:37:29 the actual struggles and the pain that I go through,
00:37:32 you know, without it.
00:37:32 And I’d say the one thing I’m most proud of
00:37:35 throughout the entire thing is the resilience
00:37:36 because there are moments you see me where I’m broken.
00:37:39 I’m just like, I can’t take it.
00:37:39 I broke a selfie stick this year.
00:37:41 Like I was filming it.
00:37:42 Cause you know, I do for my vlog,
00:37:43 I smashed the stick through it in the corner, right?
00:37:46 It’s just, that was my like hit rock bottom moment.
00:37:49 And then I put the camera on me and I was like, all right,
00:37:51 I’ll let people see it.
00:37:52 But mentally it was very difficult
00:37:53 because there was a feeling of hopelessness
00:37:56 where I was making good decisions.
00:38:00 Like I genuinely felt like I’m playing really, really well.
00:38:02 But every time my money went in and my opponent’s money
00:38:04 went in and say, I was 60%, 70%, 80%
00:38:08 for about a two week stretch, I lost every one of those.
00:38:11 And you start to wonder, you’re like,
00:38:13 I can’t win if I never win, you know, in these spots.
00:38:16 So it was difficult.
00:38:18 Luckily I have, you know, 20 odd years of experience
00:38:20 on how to deal with it.
00:38:21 And so, as I said, I wake up the next day, ready to go.
00:38:26 So as if nothing happened.
00:38:27 To a certain degree.
00:38:28 Obviously, you know, the more,
00:38:30 the more it happens in the higher vines,
00:38:32 like the one where I broke the selfie stick,
00:38:34 I lost 500,000 in that tournament, right?
00:38:37 And it was like the last card, it was painful.
00:38:38 I think you lost.
00:38:40 Yeah, that was great, that video.
00:38:43 I think he lost.
00:38:45 What led up to the selfie stick gate?
00:38:47 Like what, you just lost your shit
00:38:49 for a, like a hundred milliseconds.
00:38:53 Like it was very brief.
00:38:55 You’re just like, what, the world wasn’t making any sense.
00:38:58 Like, how do I keep losing kind of thing?
00:39:00 How did you, why did you lose your shit?
00:39:02 You should never really think like this,
00:39:03 but part of me felt like I deserved to win this, right?
00:39:06 So part of me was like, listen,
00:39:07 I’ve lost so many in the last two weeks, all right.
00:39:10 Let, you know, the poker gods be kind to me right now.
00:39:12 Let me win this.
00:39:13 And it looked good.
00:39:14 I was in a great situation on the flop,
00:39:17 great situation on the turn.
00:39:18 I’m about to be a competitor.
00:39:20 I’m going to be a contender in this tournament
00:39:21 to win a big prize pool and turn the whole thing around.
00:39:24 It’s all there for the taking.
00:39:26 And then boom, the last card, it just, you know,
00:39:29 it was a couple of weeks of frustration
00:39:31 in the moment of filming that I just had, you know,
00:39:33 sort of a visceral reaction, you know,
00:39:35 and I smacked the, smacked the selfie stick.
00:39:37 And then like, I, it was, I see a corner, it’s safe.
00:39:40 I threw the selfie stick on the ground.
00:39:41 And of course, social media blows up about how, you know,
00:39:45 it was a violent act, you know?
00:39:47 I mean, it’s like, have you never watched sports?
00:39:49 Have you never seen a guy on the golf course
00:39:51 smack his club or throw their helmet?
00:39:53 Like, you know, there was the,
00:39:55 there’s a guy, Justin Bonomo is a poker player.
00:39:57 And he’s a super, how to, for lack of a better word,
00:40:00 offended by everything.
00:40:02 And he was equating my throwing a stick on the ground
00:40:04 to violence against women, domestic abuse,
00:40:07 and the idea that like,
00:40:09 this makes women feel unsafe to play poker.
00:40:12 And so that was kind of a running joke
00:40:13 for the last two weeks where every time I sat at a table,
00:40:15 the guys would be like, oh, I feel unsafe, I feel unsafe.
00:40:19 Yeah.
00:40:20 Can you take me through the hand?
00:40:21 Do you remember what the hand was?
00:40:21 Like, what was the…
00:40:22 Yeah, so it was a, you know, a player on the button raised.
00:40:25 David Peters, very aggressive player.
00:40:27 He went all in from the blind
00:40:29 and I had a pair of pocket tens.
00:40:31 So I went with my tens and he had queen 10 of spades.
00:40:34 So I was good.
00:40:35 I have way the best hand.
00:40:37 And the flop was like king nine, three, one spade.
00:40:40 Turn was like the eight of spades.
00:40:42 So now he has a flush draw and the river was another spade.
00:40:45 So he caught spade, spade, and he made a flush.
00:40:47 Wow, but statistically you were winning the whole time.
00:40:50 Yeah, I was winning it up until the last card.
00:40:52 What did he go all in on?
00:40:53 Was it a bluff?
00:40:54 He made what’s considered like a pretty standard play
00:40:57 in modern poker where, you know, a guy raised
00:40:59 and he was just trying to pick up, you know, what was there.
00:41:01 And he ran into a hand in the big blind
00:41:03 and you know, he got lucky.
00:41:04 So what was the throughout the strategy of preparation,
00:41:08 the strategy of play?
00:41:09 So you’re playing so many days.
00:41:12 Are you trying to ignore the results
00:41:14 and stick to a particular strategy?
00:41:16 Yes, for the most part, you know,
00:41:19 what I’m trying to do is like,
00:41:21 I formulate a strategy for the whole seven weeks
00:41:23 cause there’s a varying degree of buy ins too.
00:41:25 Like you have small ones, like 1500,
00:41:28 then you’ve got like $250,000 buy in.
00:41:30 So I map out the seven weeks and right,
00:41:33 I’ll give a little bit of mental energy to the 1500,
00:41:36 which means I’ll be on my phone.
00:41:37 I’m not gonna, I don’t care as much about this one,
00:41:39 but the 250K fully engaged, fully focused, you know,
00:41:43 up against obviously the higher the buy in,
00:41:45 you know, super top competition.
00:41:48 And you know, as far as strategy goes,
00:41:50 focusing on each day, playing the best I can,
00:41:53 not the result.
00:41:55 Like, cause if you focus on the result,
00:41:57 you’re focusing in the wrong place.
00:41:58 Your focus should be on the decisions you actually make.
00:42:02 Right, and if you’re making good decisions consistently,
00:42:04 you have to continue to do that.
00:42:05 The frustrating part is this,
00:42:06 with poker, unlike chess or other things,
00:42:09 making the best possible decision doesn’t mean you win.
00:42:12 Often you lose, you don’t, chess.
00:42:15 Well, Magnus Carlsen has also talked about that.
00:42:20 There’s some non deterministic thing about chess too,
00:42:25 given the limited cognitive capacity of the human mind.
00:42:30 So he says that the world championship should have
00:42:33 20, 30, 40, 50 games, not the few that they have.
00:42:36 It’s too low of a sample.
00:42:38 So in that sense, the high stakes poker tournaments
00:42:41 are very too low sample.
00:42:44 Sure, yeah.
00:42:45 Well, when you think of the world series of poker,
00:42:47 so as you said, I lost about 1 million, right?
00:42:49 In one tournament, that was 500,000.
00:42:52 So then, you know, like a few others here
00:42:53 of high buying tournaments.
00:42:54 So the sample or the amount was, you know,
00:42:57 40, 50 total tournaments with, you know, high variance.
00:43:00 And if you don’t run well or do well in the highest buy ins,
00:43:03 you know, you’re gonna have a losing summer.
00:43:06 So you did a podcast on the mental game a few years ago,
00:43:08 but then that’s just something you really care about.
00:43:10 So what aspects of the mental game in poker
00:43:13 is most difficult to master?
00:43:15 I think the most difficult thing for people
00:43:16 is self awareness, right?
00:43:18 And resilience, self awareness to know, okay,
00:43:21 so, you know, again, is it, am I not doing as well
00:43:24 as I could be because of luck
00:43:26 or is there things that I can learn?
00:43:28 And I always look to mistakes as opportunities.
00:43:30 I really do.
00:43:31 When I make a mistake in a poker hand, right?
00:43:34 Call it a breakdown or whatever,
00:43:36 that’s where breakthroughs happen.
00:43:38 And I’m like, oh, you know what I could have done here?
00:43:40 I could have done this and that would have been really good
00:43:43 and I’m gonna do that going forward.
00:43:44 So I think like with anything, you know,
00:43:48 when you start out playing golf,
00:43:50 like your goal is to just hit the ball, right?
00:43:52 Then you try to hit it in the air,
00:43:54 then you’re trying to hit it straight,
00:43:56 then you’re trying to hit it on the green,
00:43:57 then you’re trying to hit it closer to the green
00:43:59 to the point where the pros get where, you know,
00:44:02 they’re so finite, they’re trying to hit it 63 yards
00:44:05 and spin it back three yards.
00:44:06 It’s imperfect.
00:44:08 Like they don’t hit the perfect shot
00:44:10 because the perfect shot for them is it goes in,
00:44:12 but they try and make the mistakes smaller
00:44:14 and smaller and smaller.
00:44:15 Poker is the same.
00:44:17 We all make mistakes consistently.
00:44:19 The goal is to minimize, especially the big ones.
00:44:23 What was the lowest point for you psychologically
00:44:27 in poker in general, actually?
00:44:28 Maybe it was this year, maybe it was in general.
00:44:31 Do you remember there was times in your life,
00:44:33 speaking of resilience,
00:44:34 that were extremely difficult to you mentally?
00:44:37 Yeah, so early on, you know, as basically as a teenager,
00:44:41 I was playing in Toronto and then in my early 20s,
00:44:43 I’m like, I’m going to Vegas, right?
00:44:44 And I thought I was the best.
00:44:46 I’m like 21 years old, I’m like, check me out, right?
00:44:49 Show up with $3,000, 24 hours later, you know, money’s gone.
00:44:54 And I remember the moment vividly.
00:44:58 It was at the Binion’s Horse,
00:44:59 it was about three in the morning.
00:45:00 I was playing with seven other people.
00:45:02 You know, I lost my last chips.
00:45:04 I went to the bathroom, washed up, got out.
00:45:08 They all left.
00:45:09 And it was like a moment where I realized like, okay,
00:45:11 in Toronto, I was the big fish.
00:45:12 But here, they were playing because of me.
00:45:15 I was the sucker.
00:45:16 I remembered every one of their faces.
00:45:17 And then I remember not having enough money
00:45:19 to get back to budget suites where I was staying.
00:45:22 So I walked, you know, I walked.
00:45:24 And in that moment I was thinking about like,
00:45:26 is this something that I’ll be able to do?
00:45:28 Am I good enough?
00:45:29 You know, what am I going to do now?
00:45:30 I’m in Vegas, I don’t know anybody and I have no money,
00:45:34 right?
00:45:34 So that was certainly like what felt like a low point,
00:45:37 walking back behind Paradise and Twain,
00:45:40 which is not a great part of town.
00:45:43 Where did you find the strength to answer yes
00:45:46 to that question that you can still do good?
00:45:48 I think this has been sort of a pattern in my life
00:45:51 where like in the evening after it happens,
00:45:53 like I don’t have it.
00:45:54 You know, I don’t have that feeling of hope or,
00:45:57 you know, resilience, if you will.
00:45:59 I’m allowing myself to experience despair,
00:46:02 which is exactly where I’m at.
00:46:04 But then a good night’s sleep, wake up the next morning
00:46:06 and just within me, I have that inner confidence to say,
00:46:10 you know what?
00:46:10 Fuck it, get back on the hobby horse,
00:46:13 find a way, make it work, right?
00:46:15 But I do believe it’s really therapeutic and worthwhile
00:46:19 to allow yourself to feel and vent.
00:46:21 So many people today, the Instagram culture world,
00:46:24 I call it, it’s like they want to act like they’re perfect.
00:46:26 Nothing bothers them, bullshit, right?
00:46:28 You’re pissed off, it’s okay to show it.
00:46:30 Emotion’s fine, we all have it.
00:46:32 There’s no reason you have to suppress it.
00:46:34 Obviously, you don’t want to have guys throwing selfie sticks
00:46:36 around the room every time they lose a pot, right?
00:46:39 But, you know, a little bit of…
00:46:40 You’re gonna make everybody feel unsafe.
00:46:42 Yeah, exactly.
00:46:43 That happens.
00:46:44 So you’re saying, there is a culture of saying,
00:46:46 you know, stay positive, all this kind of stuff,
00:46:48 but you know, when you feel despair, don’t resist it,
00:46:52 ride it out.
00:46:52 Because it doesn’t go away, right?
00:46:54 That feeling, you know, you think you put it away
00:46:56 in the pit of your stomach and you think, you know,
00:46:57 it’s gone, it’s not, it’s still there.
00:46:59 Let yourself go, fuck!
00:47:00 Yeah.
00:47:01 It’s all right.
00:47:02 You know, there’s nothing wrong with being
00:47:05 a little bit emotional, because once you’ve experienced it,
00:47:07 you let it out, now you can move past it.
00:47:10 Yeah, and I feel like, as long as your brain chemistry
00:47:12 can support it, you can usually learn a good lesson
00:47:16 from it, like you become stronger,
00:47:18 you become more resilient through it.
00:47:20 It’s really interesting.
00:47:21 And a good night’s sleep can really help.
00:47:23 Absolutely, yeah.
00:47:24 So through 2022, and in general, what is a perfect day
00:47:29 in the life of Daniel Negrano look like
00:47:31 when you’re, like on a day when you have to play
00:47:34 a big game, big tournament game and so on?
00:47:37 So like, what time do you wake up?
00:47:39 What do you eat for breakfast?
00:47:41 So my life is twofold.
00:47:43 Like one, when I’m playing hardcore, and one when I’m not.
00:47:47 And they look very different, right?
00:47:49 So I’ll give you a quick glimpse of like when I’m not,
00:47:51 up at 10, you know, breakfast, in the gym at noon,
00:47:55 you know, post workout,
00:47:58 meal, coffee, walk, like, you know, I try to get,
00:48:04 that’s what I do for cardio, you know,
00:48:06 and just very like home bodied.
00:48:07 I don’t leave the house.
00:48:08 It’s very like boring and mundane, right?
00:48:10 Long distance walks.
00:48:11 So like, what do you do when you’re walking?
00:48:13 You’re thinking about stuff?
00:48:14 Well, no, honestly, I just walk on the treadmill.
00:48:15 I try to get 15,000 steps a day.
00:48:17 And I just walk for basically like an hour
00:48:19 while I watch a show or I’m on the computer
00:48:21 or something like that, you know, I’m on the treadmill.
00:48:23 Why walk and not running?
00:48:25 Well, I mean, I think walking, I mean,
00:48:27 I do a little bit of running, but hardly any.
00:48:29 I don’t enjoy it.
00:48:30 Like, I just like walking.
00:48:31 And frankly, for fat loss,
00:48:33 when it’s usually what I’m doing after big poker tournaments
00:48:36 is getting back in shape, that walking’s ideal for it, right?
00:48:40 So essentially it’s like the tale of two.
00:48:41 During the World Series of Poker,
00:48:43 all my sort of structured life thrown out the window.
00:48:47 There’s no walking.
00:48:48 There’s very little walking.
00:48:50 There’s very little working out.
00:48:51 There’s very little anything.
00:48:52 I go into the World Series, you know,
00:48:54 like this year I went in around 157
00:48:57 and I expected to gain about 10 pounds
00:48:59 during the World Series.
00:49:00 Not good pounds, it wasn’t muscle,
00:49:01 but that’s about what I did, 165.
00:49:03 And then I spend the next month trying to, you know, lose it.
00:49:06 But during the World Series, when I’m playing,
00:49:08 the most important thing without question
00:49:10 that I have to focus on,
00:49:12 and this is why I stopped focusing
00:49:13 on working on all this stuff is sleep.
00:49:16 If I’m not rested, I’m useless.
00:49:18 If I only get five, six hours
00:49:20 and I have to go back the next day and play 14 hours,
00:49:23 the chances of me being at my best, very, very slim.
00:49:26 So sleep is a priority.
00:49:27 What’s the perfect amount of sleep for you on those days?
00:49:30 Eight, seven?
00:49:30 So eight hours is my go to every night.
00:49:33 During the World Series of Poker, it’s just not possible
00:49:36 because of the way that it’s structured.
00:49:37 Sometimes the tournaments end at 2.15 a.m.
00:49:40 I get home about three o clock.
00:49:44 Takes me 30 minutes, 40 minutes to get to sleep.
00:49:46 So now let’s say I’m in bed by four.
00:49:48 Well, the tournament’s at, you know, two.
00:49:51 So I have to get up and whatever.
00:49:53 So it’s very difficult to get exactly eight
00:49:55 a lot of the time.
00:49:56 You know, and also get back there in time.
00:49:57 Is there any hacks to quiet the mind?
00:50:01 Because you’re going on a pretty intense rollercoaster
00:50:04 mentally when you’re playing.
00:50:07 Is there any tricks to getting to sleep
00:50:10 given the rollercoaster?
00:50:10 I’ve been very lucky.
00:50:12 Like I’m blessed.
00:50:12 I don’t know if it’s because of diet or what,
00:50:14 but I’ve always been a very good sleeper.
00:50:16 You just shut off.
00:50:17 I get to sleep and I sleep like a baby, you know?
00:50:19 And I also nap really well.
00:50:21 Like during the World Series, sometimes what will happen
00:50:23 is let’s say I get knocked out of one event at 4 p.m.
00:50:26 And there’s another one that I can jump in.
00:50:28 Instead of jumping right into it,
00:50:30 I’ll go into like a private room and take 45 minute nap.
00:50:34 And you know, and give me enough energy to continue
00:50:36 and sort of reset my mind.
00:50:38 Yeah, and it solves a lot of problems with the nap too.
00:50:41 It does.
00:50:41 Yeah, I feel like the nap is a magical trick in life.
00:50:46 What else, diet wise?
00:50:47 What do you, your mind is going, you know,
00:50:52 pretty intensely all day.
00:50:53 Yeah, so during like, like I said,
00:50:55 when I’m not playing, I’m super regimented.
00:50:58 You know, I have, I literally measure everything.
00:51:01 You know, I count calories, I count macros,
00:51:04 I follow it to a T.
00:51:05 Pretty balanced diet or any?
00:51:07 I’m a vegan.
00:51:08 Vegan, yeah.
00:51:09 So it’s, you know, a vegan diet, like.
00:51:10 But balanced in terms of carbs and protein.
00:51:12 Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I eat a healthy amount.
00:51:13 I’m doing probably 150 grams of protein,
00:51:17 like 60 grams of fat, 50, and then about.
00:51:20 And try to measure it all out.
00:51:21 I do, yeah, I basically, I created a meal plan.
00:51:23 So what I did for myself is,
00:51:24 cause I’m really anal and I made a spreadsheet
00:51:26 with like a day’s food and I have six different ones.
00:51:29 So I just follow it.
00:51:30 Like I don’t, it actually makes my life so much easier
00:51:34 when I don’t have to think about what I’m going to eat
00:51:35 for lunch or what I’m going to eat for dinner.
00:51:37 I already know what I’m going to eat.
00:51:38 I already wrote it down and it doesn’t get boring
00:51:40 because I’m switching it up every day, you know,
00:51:42 every six days and occasionally I’ll, you know,
00:51:45 splurge or do something different.
00:51:46 During the World Series of Poker,
00:51:47 I eat whatever the fuck I want to eat.
00:51:50 Like it’s at 2 a.m. I don’t crave
00:51:52 like a broccoli carrot salad.
00:51:54 Like I want chocolate, candy and chips.
00:51:58 So I’ll just do it.
00:51:59 So you listen to the cravings.
00:52:01 Yeah, I realized like.
00:52:02 It’s surprising because like,
00:52:04 you’re so regimented outside of that.
00:52:06 It’s really difficult.
00:52:07 Like I’ve done it before
00:52:08 where I played the World Series of Poker
00:52:10 and I made it a point to work out every day.
00:52:13 But what that did was it sacrificed sleep.
00:52:15 So then I found like at 1 a.m. I would be more tired,
00:52:18 you know, because I’ve expended more energy
00:52:20 than I would otherwise.
00:52:21 So I essentially like look at the World Series
00:52:23 is six, seven weeks where my body’s
00:52:25 just gonna take a beating, not like UFC fighter,
00:52:27 but like a different kind of beating.
00:52:29 And that’s okay because I have so much confidence
00:52:31 that within six weeks of just like eating right
00:52:34 and working out, I can get back to where I was.
00:52:36 But it’s just hilarious to me that you’d be eating chocolate.
00:52:39 What eating chocolate in bed
00:52:40 as you’re trying to get to sleep is this.
00:52:42 Like literally a bag of like chips or chocolate,
00:52:45 like on my way home and before bed,
00:52:48 you know, just whatever.
00:52:49 This is what the professional athlete does
00:52:51 at the highest, most difficult event of his career.
00:52:54 Okay, so what else is there in terms of mental preparation
00:52:58 and focus and meditation, those kinds of things
00:53:01 leading up to the games?
00:53:03 Is there anything you like to,
00:53:05 like any rituals you like to follow?
00:53:07 So yeah, I have dabbled in the past
00:53:10 with like meditation and different things like that.
00:53:11 And I know that there’s health benefits to it.
00:53:13 And I understand that a lot of people get a lot from it
00:53:16 and I’ve done it for a good amount of time,
00:53:18 like long periods of time.
00:53:20 I found that for me, I think it was predominantly placebo.
00:53:23 Like it really wasn’t doing anything for me
00:53:26 that I felt like it was, it felt like I was doing something,
00:53:28 but I really, I didn’t see any specific results from it.
00:53:31 So I don’t really do that too much.
00:53:33 One thing that I will do for me is leading up
00:53:37 is there’s so much footage now
00:53:39 that I’ll make it a point to like watch my opponents
00:53:42 and then with like my phone, I’ll take notes
00:53:45 and I’ll keep track of different things that I’m seeing.
00:53:47 And that sort of, and then what I’ll do
00:53:49 is I’ll formulate a game plan.
00:53:50 Like I’m playing the Poker Masters coming up
00:53:52 in about a week.
00:53:54 And I’ll look to see the tendencies
00:53:55 of what my opponents are doing.
00:53:56 And then I’ll come up with like some things
00:53:58 that I’m gonna do, some tricks of the trade, if you will.
00:54:00 Not game theory optimal stuff,
00:54:02 stuff that I think, oh, they’re making a mistake here
00:54:04 that I can exploit.
00:54:05 And then I look to do that in different ways
00:54:07 and always look to throw curve balls.
00:54:11 How hard is that process?
00:54:14 Do you enjoy it or is it like really hard work
00:54:16 to analyze the players to try to understand
00:54:18 what are the different holes?
00:54:20 What are the different mistakes?
00:54:21 What are the strengths to avoid and that kind of stuff?
00:54:23 I think the only thing that makes it harder
00:54:25 is when you’re young, right?
00:54:27 And you’re in your twenties
00:54:28 and you’re trying to make your nest egg.
00:54:29 You’re like, you’re trying to make your retirement money.
00:54:31 You’re hungry, right?
00:54:32 You’re like clubber Lang and you know the gym, you’re hungry.
00:54:35 Whereas, you know, Rocky’s in there taking pictures
00:54:37 and smiling and doing commercials and stuff like that.
00:54:39 So I am 47, I’m financially okay.
00:54:42 I don’t need to win.
00:54:44 I don’t need to compete at the highest levels.
00:54:46 So I think it was a boxer.
00:54:47 I don’t remember which one.
00:54:48 When asked this, he was asked the question,
00:54:51 how do you get up in the morning still
00:54:53 and do those morning runs?
00:54:54 And he says, you know what?
00:54:55 I’ll be honest with you.
00:54:56 It’s a lot more difficult doing the 4 a.m. run
00:54:58 in silk pajamas, right?
00:55:00 It just is, right?
00:55:02 But I’ve always been self motivated
00:55:05 and I’ve always found a way.
00:55:07 So it’s harder in the sense of like, it’s not a need.
00:55:10 I can still get by without it.
00:55:12 But so in that regard, it does feel like a little bit
00:55:15 of work where like, oh my God,
00:55:16 that’s a lot of footage I gotta get through.
00:55:18 And I don’t know that I have the time or I don’t know
00:55:20 that I wanna spend 10 hours of my day doing that
00:55:23 when I could be doing other things.
00:55:25 I mean, what do you still love about poker?
00:55:28 When you said, when you enter,
00:55:30 like the times you catch yourself just being able
00:55:34 to sort of take in the awe of it.
00:55:37 What aspects do you love?
00:55:39 I think that like for me,
00:55:40 I’ve always been really competitive,
00:55:42 but I was never gonna be a professional athlete
00:55:44 or a professional snooker player.
00:55:45 I wasn’t good enough at any of that stuff.
00:55:46 I didn’t have the body type, whatever.
00:55:49 But poker, it sort of levels the playing field, right?
00:55:51 You’re six, five, 240, big deal.
00:55:54 We’re not fighting here.
00:55:55 We’re fighting a different type of war.
00:55:57 So the competitive aspect,
00:55:58 I also have always been fueled throughout my career
00:56:02 by doubters.
00:56:04 So this is probably unhealthy,
00:56:05 but every time people say like, you’re done,
00:56:09 you’re washed up, you can’t win anymore,
00:56:10 it just makes me wanna prove them wrong, right?
00:56:13 So I have a little bit of that in me,
00:56:15 which again, you’re reading the comments
00:56:17 and all these kinds of,
00:56:17 like I’ve been told many times throughout my career
00:56:19 for the last 15 that I’m done.
00:56:21 I can’t compete anymore.
00:56:22 And I enjoy proving them wrong.
00:56:27 Yeah, the game has changed so much.
00:56:31 The greats of the past surely cannot be the greats
00:56:34 of the present.
00:56:35 That kind of commentary will continue for every sport.
00:56:38 And certainly for poker,
00:56:40 because poker really changed a lot
00:56:42 over the past couple of decades.
00:56:43 Can you speak to how much it has changed?
00:56:45 Yeah.
00:56:46 Because you’ve been at the top for so long.
00:56:47 Yeah, so complacency is a big issue
00:56:49 for people who make it, if you will, right?
00:56:51 So in my era of the poker boom, around the early 2000s,
00:56:54 there was a group of players who were the big names,
00:56:56 the stars of the game.
00:56:57 Well, a lot of them had their egos out of whack
00:57:01 where they just felt like, okay, I’m the best, that’s it.
00:57:03 Like, no, there’s young guys learning,
00:57:05 there’s new software, there’s solvers,
00:57:07 there’s all these kinds of things.
00:57:08 And if you’re not keeping up, then you’ll get surpassed.
00:57:11 And I remember myself at a very early age saying,
00:57:14 I never want to be that guy.
00:57:15 And it was one of my first events in the late 90s.
00:57:17 I was the young buck playing with the Tom McAvoy’s
00:57:21 and Brad Doughty, the guys of the era, right?
00:57:23 And I was doing things more aggressively
00:57:25 and they were scoffing at all these young kids
00:57:27 with their aggressive three and all this stuff.
00:57:29 And they were sort of mocking it, you know?
00:57:31 And I thought, never be that guy.
00:57:33 Always have the humility to be introspective
00:57:35 and always have the respect for your opponents
00:57:38 that while you think you’ve got it all figured out,
00:57:41 they’re learning new things and you can learn from them.
00:57:43 So I’ve always been willing to sort of swallow my pride
00:57:46 and get coached by younger players
00:57:48 who I might even be better than,
00:57:50 but they see blind spots that I have that I might not.
00:57:53 And they, you know, they helped me improve my game.
00:57:55 I’ve always been willing to sort of look every six months
00:57:57 or a year and say, is what I’m doing working?
00:57:59 And if not, how do I get better?
00:58:01 But most people from my generation, they go the other way.
00:58:06 I don’t know, they just have this idea
00:58:07 that they figured it all out.
00:58:08 Once you feel like you’ve mastered it,
00:58:10 there’s nothing left to learn.
00:58:10 That’s the moment where everyone else
00:58:12 starts to surpass you.
00:58:14 That’s the moment where you lose the mastery
00:58:17 because it’s always evolving.
00:58:18 How has the game changed?
00:58:20 So the game has changed
00:58:21 in terms of the way people learn it, right?
00:58:23 When I started out, the only way to learn how to play poker
00:58:25 was to sit your ass on the chair and play.
00:58:28 In person?
00:58:29 Yes, in person, play.
00:58:31 Maybe you jot down hands on a notepad.
00:58:32 We didn’t even have cell phones back then, right?
00:58:34 So I would write notes.
00:58:36 I actually brought a notepad.
00:58:37 And then you don’t analyze it
00:58:39 and sort of try to figure it out that way
00:58:41 and think about maybe talking to friends
00:58:44 and different players.
00:58:45 Like when I grew up, there was John Jawanda,
00:58:47 Alan Cunningham and Phil Ivey.
00:58:48 And we would sort of create
00:58:50 like a little bit of a mastermind.
00:58:52 Well, how would you play this hand?
00:58:53 What would you do here?
00:58:54 That was the extent of it, right?
00:58:56 We never had the correct answers.
00:58:57 We always had theories about what might be right.
00:59:00 Not until about five, six years ago
00:59:03 where everything changed.
00:59:04 Where artificial intelligence created solvers
00:59:07 that will specifically say, okay, this is the optimal play.
00:59:11 This is the game theory optimal play.
00:59:12 So now it introduced poker to a whole new group
00:59:16 of like personality types.
00:59:18 In my day, it was people that were dregs of society
00:59:21 that didn’t fit in, not college goers with a degree.
00:59:24 These are people who were street hustlers playing pool.
00:59:26 They found poker and they had these unique lives, right?
00:59:29 But now because poker can be studied,
00:59:32 much like you study university or college,
00:59:35 you had, for example, the German contingent
00:59:37 who was literally analyzing data
00:59:39 and coming up with strategies based on this.
00:59:41 And it’s like, what?
00:59:42 And the old guy, got to play by feel or whatever.
00:59:45 And they’re like, they’re learning.
00:59:47 So I guess the way that you describe it is like
00:59:49 in the old days, it required skill and talent,
00:59:52 a card sense, right?
00:59:53 That was the only way to become good.
00:59:55 And today that’s not the case.
00:59:56 Good study habits, a good work ethic in that regard
00:59:59 can make you like a really good player.
01:00:01 Even if you aren’t all that talented or gifted,
01:00:05 having a good work ethic is a talent, right?
01:00:07 Not necessarily card sense, but if you’re able to put
01:00:09 in the work and study from these solvers,
01:00:12 you essentially have the perfect study tool now
01:00:15 that we didn’t have in my day.
01:00:17 So what do the solvers give you?
01:00:19 Do you start to memorize the optimal play
01:00:22 for every single hand?
01:00:24 You try your best.
01:00:25 So again, solvers are imperfect as well,
01:00:28 in terms of the way the humans utilize them, right?
01:00:32 Because you can give solvers a certain number of inputs
01:00:36 in terms of what you want it to solve,
01:00:38 but a solver can think on many, many levels.
01:00:40 So for example, the way that a typical player
01:00:43 would do a solve is to say, okay,
01:00:45 what does a solver think is the best play here?
01:00:47 Bet one third pot, bet two thirds pot,
01:00:50 or bet one and a half times pot, okay?
01:00:52 You give it three parameters, it comes out with an output
01:00:55 and it tells you what you should do
01:00:57 with all the different hands you have.
01:00:59 However, that’s a simplified version
01:01:01 of what a solver would really do,
01:01:02 because a solver might decide
01:01:04 that seven times the pot is best, 10% of the pot.
01:01:08 But when you’re putting in a solve,
01:01:09 you can only put in specific parameters.
01:01:12 So that’s why, frankly, that’s typically the number,
01:01:14 one third, two third, and one and a half times pot
01:01:17 is what people often do.
01:01:18 So they sort of have a vague idea of what a solver wants.
01:01:21 But again, imperfect in terms of the implementation of it.
01:01:26 And memorizing all the variables,
01:01:29 like that King Jack offsuit with the King of Diamonds
01:01:31 is 13%, no human brain can do that.
01:01:35 So what you do is you bucket it.
01:01:37 Like you bucket it into say, instead of 10,000 variables,
01:01:41 you have 10 buckets and you say, okay,
01:01:42 with these hands, we do roughly this,
01:01:44 and we do roughly this.
01:01:45 And you try your best to stay within those lines.
01:01:48 But again, what I love about live poker partly
01:01:50 is that nobody will ever be able to master game theory,
01:01:54 and mimic a solver.
01:01:57 But you also have to incorporate your position,
01:02:03 where you are, and obviously what cards you have,
01:02:06 but also the size of your stack,
01:02:08 how much money you have,
01:02:09 and also whether you have the ability
01:02:12 or desire to buy in, all those kinds of things.
01:02:15 So you have to calculate all of that, right?
01:02:17 So the solver will do that, right?
01:02:20 And essentially, you don’t input your hand.
01:02:23 It tells you, you’ll look at the grade,
01:02:25 and be like, all right, this is my hand,
01:02:27 and it tells you what it is.
01:02:28 But it tells you what you would do with any hand, right?
01:02:30 It gives you the full output.
01:02:32 And that actually gives you a better idea,
01:02:34 because you’re ultimately, like you said,
01:02:36 playing a range of hands, not a hand.
01:02:39 And the solvers do things that are really interesting.
01:02:41 You’ve seen AlphaGo, I would imagine.
01:02:43 Brilliant film, right, I thought.
01:02:44 And I thought what was interesting is there was,
01:02:46 you know, accepted theory from all the top Go players,
01:02:50 this is what you do.
01:02:51 But the AI was doing things way different,
01:02:54 and they’re like, this has to be wrong,
01:02:55 but really it wasn’t.
01:02:56 So for example, a solver may say this, right?
01:03:00 Let’s say you bet on the end, and you bet a lot,
01:03:04 and a solver may say, you should fold here
01:03:07 with a pair of kings and a queen kicker,
01:03:10 which is, you know, a pair of kings,
01:03:12 but call with a pair of fours and an ace kicker.
01:03:15 So it’s essentially telling you
01:03:16 that you should fold this hand
01:03:18 that is much better than this.
01:03:20 So it begs the question, why?
01:03:23 Because what the solvers do is they use the information
01:03:27 of your own cards to formulate all the possible hands
01:03:30 your opponent can have.
01:03:32 So if your opponent is,
01:03:34 so basically if you had the king, queen,
01:03:36 you know, it may say, for lack of a better nerdy term,
01:03:41 it blocks potential bluffing hands
01:03:43 that your opponent can have.
01:03:44 So let’s say if your opponent would bluff with queen, jack,
01:03:47 but you have a queen.
01:03:49 So there are less combinations of queen, jack.
01:03:51 So it will find a better bluff catcher, if you will.
01:03:54 So that’s what’s really not intuitive to poker players.
01:03:56 Poker players usually think like,
01:03:58 well, this, my hand is pretty good, so I got a call,
01:04:00 but that’s not how a solver would think.
01:04:02 Solver uses, you know, common matrix and, you know.
01:04:06 And sometimes it’s tough to get the good why answers
01:04:10 you just did for why a solver thinks something is better,
01:04:13 or maybe in poker it’s a little bit easier,
01:04:14 but in the case of go and chess, it’s not always obvious why,
01:04:18 because it’s not gonna explain stuff to you.
01:04:20 I think one of the best ways to learn poker
01:04:23 is when you see a solver output
01:04:25 and it tells you one of these things, try to figure out why.
01:04:28 Why does this solver do this?
01:04:30 Why does it want you to call with this and fold this?
01:04:32 And try to think about it on a deeper level.
01:04:34 And you go, aha, probably because this card
01:04:36 that I have here, you know, changes the range
01:04:39 of my opponent’s, you know, potential.
01:04:42 I’d love to get your opinion
01:04:43 on your relationship with solvers.
01:04:45 Because for example, Magnus doesn’t use them.
01:04:47 His team uses them.
01:04:49 Cause he feels like he’s going to rely on it too much.
01:04:54 And you can’t use it when you’re playing.
01:04:57 What you really want is to build up
01:04:58 an extremely strong intuition without the help of a solver.
01:05:02 Is there some aspect of that that rings true to you?
01:05:04 Absolutely.
01:05:05 I totally can relate to what Magnus is saying.
01:05:07 First and foremost, because when solvers
01:05:08 was first introduced, I didn’t come from that world.
01:05:11 I was so intimidated because I didn’t know how to use it.
01:05:13 I don’t know how to do an input.
01:05:15 So I had two guys, one guy’s a data scientist
01:05:17 and, you know, another guy’s like a poker savant,
01:05:20 if you will, and they coached me and they did it.
01:05:22 So today, if I was in a tough spot, you know,
01:05:25 and I’m like, I don’t know, what would a solver do?
01:05:27 I will send them the hand and they’ll run the solve for me.
01:05:30 And then sort of give me the parameters of what to do.
01:05:33 When I was playing, you know,
01:05:34 regularly using solvers with them,
01:05:36 we were spending six to eight hours a day
01:05:38 going over all these solves.
01:05:40 So intuitively I started to think and learn
01:05:42 about what the solver would want,
01:05:44 but I sort of understand where Magnus is coming from
01:05:46 in that you don’t want to become a slave to the sim,
01:05:48 as I say, right?
01:05:49 There’s one kid I know, I joked with him,
01:05:51 his name is Landon Tice.
01:05:53 And, you know, he made a play that the sim, you know,
01:05:56 would say, this is a good play.
01:05:57 But I’m like, it’s a good play, you know,
01:06:00 in a simulated world against the robot.
01:06:01 It’s not in practice against the human, right?
01:06:05 You don’t need to be doing that.
01:06:06 So if you become a slave to the sim
01:06:08 and always do what the sim says,
01:06:10 you’re handcuffed to a certain degree.
01:06:13 Is there some, at the highest level plays,
01:06:16 there’s still a role for feel and intuition?
01:06:19 Absolutely.
01:06:20 If you’re not doing that,
01:06:21 cause here’s the thing, right?
01:06:22 No human being plays perfectly balanced
01:06:25 in game three optimal like a robot would.
01:06:27 They’re not, right?
01:06:29 So there are opportunities there to take advantage
01:06:31 of the things that they do that are slightly too aggressive
01:06:34 or less aggressive.
01:06:35 You know, for example,
01:06:37 say most human beings don’t bluff enough in a certain spot.
01:06:41 So you don’t have to call with the correct range of hands.
01:06:44 You don’t have to,
01:06:45 because they’re not bluffing at the optimal frequency.
01:06:48 So you don’t have to call at the optimal frequency.
01:06:50 You’d be making this mistake, frankly, if you did.
01:06:53 What’s the difference between in person and online play,
01:06:58 given that context?
01:06:59 Yeah, well, online poker and live poker,
01:07:02 it’s the same game, right?
01:07:03 Same, it’s poker,
01:07:04 but it’s different in so many levels, right?
01:07:07 I think playing online,
01:07:08 you have to focus far more on fundamentals.
01:07:11 You know, on game theory,
01:07:12 you don’t have the added bonus of looking across the table
01:07:14 and getting any sense of whether your opponent
01:07:17 is strong or weak, they’re bluffing, whatever, you know.
01:07:20 And also because online poker, those that play it,
01:07:24 you play far more hands.
01:07:26 Like some of these guys are playing 10, 20 tables
01:07:28 at the same time, right?
01:07:30 So you’re just, you’re hitting the long run really quickly
01:07:32 and you’re creating a database on your opponents, right?
01:07:35 So let’s say, you know, online, I can see your data.
01:07:37 I’m like, well, this guy, he’s playing 40% of hands.
01:07:40 He’s betting the river 80% of the time.
01:07:43 So now I can use that data and, you know,
01:07:45 exploit you that way.
01:07:46 When you play live, you don’t have that.
01:07:49 Do you enjoy playing online?
01:07:51 I enjoy, so with online poker, I enjoy the convenience of it
01:07:54 because, you know, you can be on your couch
01:07:55 in your underwear, not leave your house.
01:07:57 Do you also play multiple games at the same time
01:08:00 or do you try to play one game?
01:08:01 I typically like to play one or two,
01:08:03 but I can play up to four.
01:08:05 I find that past four, it’s hard for me to keep up
01:08:09 and keep track of what’s actually happening.
01:08:11 You know, it’s a different mindset required.
01:08:13 Like a lot of these young guys,
01:08:14 they’re accustomed to 20 tables at a time.
01:08:17 It feels like the purity of the game is gone.
01:08:20 It’s much more robotic, right?
01:08:22 So if you’re playing 20 tables,
01:08:23 you’re just making decisions based on like what, you know,
01:08:27 you’re not thinking about the depth of the situation
01:08:30 and what just happened 15 minutes ago.
01:08:31 You don’t even know what happened
01:08:32 because you can’t pay attention to all that at once.
01:08:35 And some of the magic of poker is the low sample.
01:08:37 I agree.
01:08:38 For example, and sorry to be bringing up Magnus so much,
01:08:41 but there’s so much parallel between the two of you
01:08:42 and the poker and the chess world.
01:08:45 He hates Olympics and world championships
01:08:49 and all that kind of stuff because it’s so low sample.
01:08:51 But to me, that’s part of the magic of it.
01:08:53 There’s the World Series of Poker, the main event.
01:08:56 There’s a magic to it.
01:08:58 I agree, yeah.
01:08:59 And I don’t know what that is exactly
01:09:00 because so much of the stake is so rare,
01:09:03 so much drama and heartbreak leading up to it
01:09:07 that all somehow, yeah, it accumulates
01:09:12 to that magical moment when somebody wins.
01:09:15 Especially that event,
01:09:16 the World Series of Poker main event historically,
01:09:18 like that’s it, you know, that’s the pinnacle.
01:09:20 That’s where like mainstream watches,
01:09:21 that’s where people are tuning in
01:09:23 and the gravity of the moment, you know,
01:09:25 it’s so much bigger than people,
01:09:26 like everyone gets the opportunity
01:09:28 to play armchair quarterback too, right?
01:09:30 Oh, he should do this.
01:09:31 You’re not there.
01:09:32 You’re not under the lights.
01:09:33 You’re not under the pressure.
01:09:34 You know, it might seem easy for you at home to be like,
01:09:37 well, yeah, but you can see the whole cards.
01:09:39 You know, they can’t.
01:09:40 Certainly the idea of the small sample with tournaments,
01:09:44 I like the idea that you don’t have to worry about,
01:09:49 oh, well, if I do this now, then in the future,
01:09:52 you know, I won’t be balanced.
01:09:53 I have to be balanced here or anything like that.
01:09:55 That’s like really boring and lame, right?
01:09:57 Again, that is kind of the way the younger generation
01:10:00 learns how to play the game, being balanced in every spot
01:10:03 and then randomizing, you know, like, oh,
01:10:07 I’m supposed to do this 50% of the time.
01:10:09 Okay, so if my left card is red, I’ll do it.
01:10:12 And if it’s black, I don’t.
01:10:13 So you’re not even making,
01:10:14 you’re no longer making actual decisions for yourself.
01:10:17 You’re just randomizing.
01:10:18 And that’s way less fun for me
01:10:20 than tailoring it to the situation.
01:10:23 And the final table at the main event,
01:10:24 there’s none of that.
01:10:25 You have to, I mean, it’s all or nothing.
01:10:28 Well, you shouldn’t be, but there are like, again,
01:10:30 I think a lot of the young guys,
01:10:31 they are thinking in that regard,
01:10:32 like, oh, randomization.
01:10:34 Maybe at that table, the final table at the main event,
01:10:38 what’s a hand that stands out to you
01:10:39 that was especially gutsy and powerful or memorable
01:10:44 for that you’ve seen in the history of poker?
01:10:46 Well, for me, the one that stands out
01:10:47 and probably because I was so young
01:10:49 and it was my first year, like one of my wife,
01:10:51 won a bracelet that year,
01:10:53 was I was friends with Scotty Wynn, the Prince of Poker.
01:10:56 And he was heads up against the guy named Kevin McBride.
01:10:58 And I was on the rail, you know, I’m like, wow,
01:11:00 he’s gonna, you know, he’s heads up.
01:11:02 And he was so cool.
01:11:03 Like he had a mullet, but it’s perfect, right?
01:11:05 He had the white shirt, the black thing.
01:11:07 He’s drinking a Michelob, smoking a cigarette, whatever,
01:11:10 you know, all chill.
01:11:12 He bets it all on the river.
01:11:13 And the guy’s thinking, and he psychologically owned him.
01:11:17 And he said, he goes with his beer, he goes,
01:11:20 you call gonna be all over baby.
01:11:21 Ha ha ha, that’s right.
01:11:23 Okay, so this guy who was an amateur heard that
01:11:27 and was like, there’s so much pressure
01:11:29 in this moment right now.
01:11:30 I can’t handle this pressure.
01:11:31 But Scotty just told me, if I call here,
01:11:33 the pressure’s gone.
01:11:34 I don’t have to be under it anymore.
01:11:36 So he sort of hypnotized them into making the call,
01:11:39 you know, and Scotty had it.
01:11:41 Scotty had, you know, the full house
01:11:43 and it was over for the guy.
01:11:44 You call gonna be all over baby.
01:11:45 It was, I just, I love that aspect,
01:11:47 sort of the table talk dynamic,
01:11:49 which isn’t as prevalent today as it was back then,
01:11:54 but that one sticks out.
01:11:55 And it probably, because it was one of my first.
01:11:57 So the few words you say at the table can completely affect
01:12:03 a hand like that.
01:12:05 That’s almost, that’s scary.
01:12:07 It was just so cool to me, you know,
01:12:09 like just how he was so calm.
01:12:11 And I think that too, added more pressure to the amateur.
01:12:14 And I think like, again, part of it is,
01:12:17 even back then it was 1998,
01:12:19 there’s still a big rail of people and there’s lights
01:12:21 and they’re, you know, they’re filming
01:12:22 and all this kind of stuff.
01:12:23 And it’s a lot of pressure for a guy
01:12:25 who’s never been in this environment.
01:12:26 And now I’m telling you, it can all be over soon.
01:12:31 It will all be over soon.
01:12:33 Just call, it’s finished.
01:12:36 Something about that accent too.
01:12:39 Now you’re a master at table talk as well.
01:12:41 Do you have, do you just kind of go with your gut,
01:12:45 you flow with it?
01:12:46 Or is there a deliberate strategy with this sometimes?
01:12:49 There’s usually some sort of strategy that I think about
01:12:51 in terms of what I want to say and whatnot.
01:12:53 But a lot of the time I just go, I go with it, you know,
01:12:56 the more you talk, the more information you get.
01:12:59 Yeah, but in some cases against really good players,
01:13:02 you’re just giving away information, right?
01:13:04 Like if I’m playing against Phil Ivey,
01:13:05 I’m not engaging in anything.
01:13:08 Cause he can read through it.
01:13:08 He can sense based on what I’m saying, you know,
01:13:11 the clues and where I’m trying to take him.
01:13:13 And he reads through, he sees the tree through the forest
01:13:16 or whatever you want to call it,
01:13:17 the forest through the trees.
01:13:18 And you know, so then I would just be like
01:13:23 allowing myself to be exploitable.
01:13:24 Is some of it just for fun?
01:13:26 Because at the end of the day, if you’re having fun,
01:13:29 you might be at the top of your game.
01:13:31 I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately actually.
01:13:33 It’s funny you bring this up
01:13:34 because I’ve been thinking about when I’m at my best.
01:13:36 And I think I’m at my best when I am comfortable like that.
01:13:39 Right?
01:13:40 Where I’m not so stiff and worried about, you know,
01:13:42 checking properly and worried about reading people.
01:13:44 I’m like, no, I’m me.
01:13:46 All right, I’m going to play some poker.
01:13:47 What do you want?
01:13:48 Do you want to call me?
01:13:48 Call, go ahead, do what you want.
01:13:49 Right?
01:13:50 Cause then I realized, you know, ultimately it was like,
01:13:51 I’m comfortable in that.
01:13:53 My opponents aren’t as comfortable in that.
01:13:54 They’re comfortable with this, you know, the robot thing.
01:13:57 But I thought more about that and how,
01:13:59 especially with some tournaments coming up,
01:14:01 I plan on really kind of sort of getting back to my roots
01:14:05 in that regard.
01:14:07 I love it.
01:14:08 From a spectator perspective, I love it.
01:14:10 But it’s also interesting whenever you see a Daniel
01:14:11 on the ground of quiet.
01:14:15 That’s an interesting, like it feels like a calm
01:14:19 before a storm of sorts.
01:14:20 So I’m sure that’s also part of it.
01:14:22 Yeah, like I’ve gone, I’ve ebbed and flowed.
01:14:24 And like I said, you know, I took on some coaches
01:14:25 and that was really learning game theory.
01:14:27 Cause I felt like it was important to always stick,
01:14:29 you know, keep up with what’s going on.
01:14:31 And then I do feel like to some degree,
01:14:33 it sort of took away a little bit of my own
01:14:37 instinctual ideas in terms of what I should be doing.
01:14:39 Right?
01:14:40 So I think like the most dangerous version of myself
01:14:43 is a deep understanding of the game theory
01:14:46 with my wisdom of many years of,
01:14:50 and comfort of just sort of like being myself at the table.
01:14:53 And being relaxed.
01:14:54 Relaxed.
01:14:55 Letting your mind flow.
01:14:56 Let me ask you the greatest, the goat question,
01:14:59 greatest of all time.
01:15:00 Can you make the case for a few folks?
01:15:03 So first you tweeted referring to Phil Ivey as the goat,
01:15:07 saying the goat doing goat things.
01:15:09 That’s a recent tweet.
01:15:10 So can you make the case for Phil Ivey,
01:15:14 or maybe who is the greatest poker player of all time?
01:15:17 Would you put Phil?
01:15:19 For me, until someone knocks him off the podium,
01:15:21 the king of poker and the goat is Phil Ivey.
01:15:24 Okay?
01:15:25 So, and the reason I say that is,
01:15:26 I think of poker as more than just one game.
01:15:28 Right?
01:15:29 There’s different variants.
01:15:29 You know, there’s Holdem, Omaha, Stud, Triple Draw,
01:15:32 all these different types of games.
01:15:33 And Phil in every arena has been dominant.
01:15:37 Whether it was tournament poker, dominated it.
01:15:40 Mixed game, high stakes poker in Bobby’s room, dominated.
01:15:43 Online poker against all the wizards, dominated.
01:15:46 Made millions in every arena.
01:15:48 And, you know, he sort of took a few years away from poker
01:15:51 with his legal troubles and things like that,
01:15:52 but he’s back.
01:15:53 You know, he’s been playing in the high roller series again.
01:15:56 And, you know, he comes from,
01:15:58 he’s cut from a different cloth,
01:15:59 but he has a tenacity and a focus that’s unparalleled,
01:16:03 I think.
01:16:04 When he’s in the zone, I mean, for lack,
01:16:06 and this has nothing to do with race.
01:16:08 It really has to do with mannerism,
01:16:09 but he does remind me of like a combination
01:16:12 of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods
01:16:14 in the way that he approaches it.
01:16:15 He’s very intense.
01:16:16 And he outworks everybody, you know?
01:16:19 And I think, frankly,
01:16:20 a lot of his mannerisms do come from them
01:16:22 because he’s young watching these guys on TV.
01:16:25 And a lot of his ways of being, you know,
01:16:27 his learned behavior, I think probably from people like that.
01:16:29 People at the top of their sport
01:16:31 and people that are Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan
01:16:34 aren’t just at the top of their sport,
01:16:35 but they kind of dominate the sport
01:16:37 to some kind of aura that.
01:16:38 There’s a uniqueness to them.
01:16:39 They’re not built like us.
01:16:41 They’re not, you know, they’re not.
01:16:42 Like I wish, I wish I could have the kind of focus
01:16:45 that Phil Ivey has, you know, and see everything
01:16:47 that he’s saying.
01:16:47 I just, that’s not me, you know?
01:16:49 I don’t have that.
01:16:50 And he does, he has that gene, whatever it is.
01:16:53 But they also look like they’re not having that much fun.
01:16:55 They’re more focused on the perfection,
01:16:58 like a dogged pursuit of perfection.
01:17:00 And you know, that might even be true.
01:17:01 It might not be as fun.
01:17:03 You know, I don’t know.
01:17:03 Like I have fun at the table.
01:17:05 When you look outwardly, you look at someone,
01:17:07 like maybe he is having a blast.
01:17:08 Maybe that’s just the way that he likes, you know?
01:17:11 Like is Tiger Woods having fun when he’s like on 17
01:17:13 about to win a major?
01:17:14 It doesn’t look like it, theoretically.
01:17:16 Well, if you look at Michael Jordan,
01:17:19 I don’t know about Tiger Woods,
01:17:20 but I think they’re more focused
01:17:22 on every single mistake they make.
01:17:25 I think they’re more obsessed about not making a mistake
01:17:27 and hating every time they make a mistake.
01:17:30 That’s probably like 99% of their mental energy.
01:17:34 I think that’s part of what makes them great, right?
01:17:37 They don’t look past the mistake and just let it,
01:17:39 it’s whatever.
01:17:40 They’re like, they want to correct it.
01:17:41 And yeah, there’s a tension, almost like a trade off.
01:17:44 I wonder if that’s always the case
01:17:45 between sort of greatness and happiness.
01:17:49 I remember Huck Seed, who, you know,
01:17:51 when I was a kid growing up, he was like the poker idol.
01:17:53 He won the world championship in 1996.
01:17:55 And I was lucky enough to hang out with him a little bit.
01:17:57 And he would go through these streaks
01:17:59 where he had an A game and he had an F game.
01:18:02 His A game was unparalleled.
01:18:03 Nobody could beat him, right?
01:18:05 But his F game was so terrible that he was just a fish.
01:18:09 You know, he was playing terribly.
01:18:10 And I remember him saying,
01:18:11 and it was exactly what you’re saying.
01:18:13 He’d make like one little mistake, right?
01:18:16 And then he would go off.
01:18:17 And I was like, Huck, why do you do that?
01:18:19 Like, you know, your B game would be just fine.
01:18:20 He’s like, well, if I’m gonna make a mistake,
01:18:21 what’s the point?
01:18:23 What’s the point, right?
01:18:25 I’m trying.
01:18:26 Like, if you can’t play perfect,
01:18:27 there’s no point in playing at all.
01:18:28 So he was extreme in that regard,
01:18:30 in the way that he viewed it.
01:18:32 And depending on the sport,
01:18:33 those folks, like in chess, certainly the case,
01:18:36 that kind of mindset can destroy you.
01:18:38 Absolutely.
01:18:39 No, I totally see that.
01:18:40 Because of a sequence of mistakes.
01:18:42 Like the kind of year you had
01:18:44 with the well scissor poker
01:18:45 can completely destroy a human being.
01:18:48 If you’re not able to see the bigger picture of it.
01:18:51 Yeah.
01:18:52 You said that Phil Ivey is the hardest,
01:18:55 your toughest opponent,
01:18:56 the toughest person to play against.
01:18:57 Why is that?
01:18:59 And how do you beat him?
01:19:00 Because Phil Ivey’s just,
01:19:02 he’s seeing things that nobody else has seen really.
01:19:04 Like subtle things, where I’m putting my hands,
01:19:06 where I’m looking, you know, my pulse,
01:19:08 like stuff that I don’t even know I’m giving off.
01:19:10 He’s so engaged and so focused
01:19:13 and has such a, just a, he’s fearless, right?
01:19:17 A lot of people, you know,
01:19:18 they’ll play poker and be like,
01:19:19 you know what?
01:19:20 I don’t think this guy has it.
01:19:21 But do they have the guts?
01:19:22 Do they have the cojones, if you will,
01:19:24 to actually do anything about it?
01:19:26 Right?
01:19:27 And stand up to this person?
01:19:27 He does.
01:19:28 You know?
01:19:29 I forgot the hand that you tweeted
01:19:30 about the goat doing goat things.
01:19:33 That wasn’t even that big of a goat hand.
01:19:34 But like, there’s hands where like,
01:19:37 there was a famous one in Australia
01:19:39 where the flop was like jack, jack at nine
01:19:43 and Phil check raised the flop with six, seven, nothing.
01:19:46 Just absolutely nothing.
01:19:47 And the guy re raised him, right?
01:19:50 And Phil just knew.
01:19:52 He went all in with nothing.
01:19:53 If the guy calls, he’s done, he’s cooked.
01:19:55 But he was so tuned in that this guy’s not strong,
01:19:59 that he just, you know, he did things like that.
01:20:01 And it’s tough to play against a guy like that.
01:20:03 So he gets great reads and is able to execute on them,
01:20:07 has the guts to execute on them.
01:20:09 He’s got experience, he’s got work ethic.
01:20:12 He also, I think one thing I’m underselling too,
01:20:16 is his strategic mind, right?
01:20:18 Like I believe that, you know, like I said,
01:20:21 the new age player, they learn how to play
01:20:23 through a very systematic approach.
01:20:25 Okay, let’s look at the data.
01:20:27 Make up a game right now.
01:20:29 Three cards, we each get three cards.
01:20:31 Jacks are wild, sixes are, you know,
01:20:34 six of hearts is wild, right?
01:20:35 Just make up that game.
01:20:36 Phil will figure it out intuitively,
01:20:39 very, very quickly, right?
01:20:41 Without having the answers for him, right?
01:20:43 So that’s like the difference
01:20:45 between the players of my generation.
01:20:46 We had to figure this stuff out on our own.
01:20:48 Today, well, I wanna know the answer,
01:20:50 I go ask the computer and the computer tells me.
01:20:53 So I really believe like if you created a game from scratch
01:20:55 that Phil Ivey would be my horse that I wanna play in it.
01:20:59 So he’s in some sense in tune with some deeper thing.
01:21:03 He has what we used to call card sense.
01:21:06 Card sense.
01:21:07 Can you try to make the case for some others
01:21:09 like Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negrano,
01:21:13 and maybe one of the modern guys
01:21:15 like Justin Bonomo or somebody like that?
01:21:17 Sure, oh, so let’s start with Doyle, okay?
01:21:20 Like what Doyle has going for him above all,
01:21:22 above and beyond is twofold, really.
01:21:24 Longevity, I mean, he’s in his late 80s.
01:21:26 And last time I played with him, I was like,
01:21:29 how is he getting better?
01:21:30 Like I really felt like he was playing better
01:21:32 than he had, you know, in the previous years.
01:21:34 But also with Doyle, like Doyle had to figure,
01:21:38 you know, we talked about my generation
01:21:39 having to figure it on their own.
01:21:40 I mean, they really had to figure it out on their own.
01:21:43 Like they didn’t have any computer simulation
01:21:45 to tell you if Ace King was a favorite over pocket sixes.
01:21:47 They didn’t.
01:21:48 So we know what he did.
01:21:49 He would take a deck of cards and they would deal out,
01:21:51 and they were with a notepad, right?
01:21:53 Okay, Ace King won.
01:21:54 And then they would do like a hundred of them
01:21:55 and be like, all right, Ace King won like 53.
01:21:57 So it must be a favorite.
01:21:58 And he did it manually, you know?
01:22:00 And he did it in a time when it was very, very difficult.
01:22:03 And he’s seen poker evolve and change throughout the years.
01:22:06 Now, listen, is he gonna be able to compete
01:22:08 against the top players in the world today?
01:22:09 Absolutely not, you know?
01:22:10 But how many people, he’s the best 88 year old player
01:22:14 in the world by a mile, okay?
01:22:16 That’s not even close.
01:22:17 And Doyle, again, he’s another guy who plays all the games.
01:22:20 He’s played high stakes cash, tournaments, you name it.
01:22:22 He’s iconic, you know, he’s the godfather.
01:22:24 So, but there’s also an element to that.
01:22:26 So the iconic element, like your personality in poker.
01:22:30 I mean, not to romanticize this thing too much,
01:22:33 but poker is also a game of personalities.
01:22:38 I mean, it’s part of the greatness
01:22:39 is like the uniqueness of the human being.
01:22:43 Yeah, I think also, yeah.
01:22:44 I mean, if you’d like looking at it from that perspective
01:22:46 in terms of like Goat,
01:22:47 like Goat in terms of what you represent,
01:22:49 like the cowboy, the godfather, you know,
01:22:51 he’s been around, you know,
01:22:52 we played in the sixties and stuff like that.
01:22:54 It’s just something like incredibly cool.
01:22:56 Like I often think about if I could go back in time
01:22:59 and like visit, you know, an era,
01:23:01 I’d love to go like to Vegas in the seventies
01:23:04 and just like, I’m proud.
01:23:05 I already, like, I can think of what it would smell like,
01:23:07 probably not ideal, cigarettes and, you know,
01:23:09 the leather jackets and just the vibe
01:23:11 of what it must’ve been like with the mobsters
01:23:13 and things like that.
01:23:14 You know, he’s lived through all that,
01:23:15 all the cool movies we’ve seen.
01:23:16 Like Doyle talks about some of those films.
01:23:18 He’s like, yeah, that guy,
01:23:20 he said he was gonna stab me in my stomach.
01:23:22 You know, he knows these people.
01:23:23 It was, he’s like a source of history, really.
01:23:27 Yeah, when poker was a game for the mob
01:23:31 and the degenerates and all that kind of stuff
01:23:34 before it transitioned into professional sport.
01:23:37 Yeah.
01:23:38 Professional game.
01:23:39 Yeah, so he was there through the whole thing.
01:23:40 He’s been there through the whole transition.
01:23:42 He’s seen it all, yeah.
01:23:43 Yeah, and then to the online world.
01:23:45 So what about,
01:23:49 I can’t even say without smiling, Phil Hellmuth.
01:23:51 Okay, so Phil, here’s the thing with Phil.
01:23:53 He takes it very personal when I say this
01:23:56 and he doesn’t hear the compliment.
01:23:58 He only hears the negativity.
01:23:59 Because Phil wants to be considered
01:24:00 the greatest of all time.
01:24:01 Hashtag positive.
01:24:02 He wants to be the greatest of all time.
01:24:04 But I’m like, Phil, here’s the facts.
01:24:07 You have the best, absolute greatest resume
01:24:10 at the World Series of Poker of anyone in the world.
01:24:12 Is that not enough, right?
01:24:13 That’s what you have.
01:24:14 You have that, right?
01:24:16 Now, do I think you’re the best
01:24:17 no limit holding player in the world today?
01:24:19 No.
01:24:20 Do I think that, you know,
01:24:21 you can play high stakes mixed games
01:24:22 with the best players in the world today and win?
01:24:24 No, right?
01:24:25 So he wouldn’t get as much flack on this topic
01:24:28 if he wasn’t so boastful and like, you know, demanding.
01:24:31 Like you never hear Phil Ivey say,
01:24:32 I’m the best in the world.
01:24:33 Like his peers do, right?
01:24:35 But Phil wants to make the claim.
01:24:37 And I simply say, I beg to differ, right?
01:24:40 I beg to differ.
01:24:41 Like, I don’t think you are the best player in the world.
01:24:45 If we can linger on the compliment so he can hear it,
01:24:49 what makes him so good?
01:24:50 Because it seems like a lot of times
01:24:52 his play is not optimal.
01:24:54 Yeah, he definitely has his own brand and style of play,
01:24:57 right?
01:24:58 He does not adhere to,
01:24:59 he’s never used a solver in his life.
01:25:00 He doesn’t know, he’s not in that world, right?
01:25:03 Phil has a lot of faith and a lot of confidence
01:25:05 in what he does and that it will be successful.
01:25:07 And I think there’s something to be said about that, right?
01:25:09 He doesn’t ever lack in belief that he can win
01:25:13 and he finds a way to do it his way.
01:25:15 And frankly, a lot of what he does
01:25:18 is very effective against specific types of players
01:25:21 who are intimidated by him,
01:25:23 but whether it’s his resume or his demeanor
01:25:25 or his attitude sometimes, right?
01:25:27 Like if you’re an average player
01:25:28 and then you beat Phil in a hand, you’re gonna hear it.
01:25:31 This idiot from Northern Europe and beat me in this pot.
01:25:34 And for some people, they don’t like that.
01:25:37 So he can use that against them.
01:25:39 But I also think too, like he cares so much, right?
01:25:46 And that leads to trying really, really hard.
01:25:48 Like he sees these moments and he doesn’t phone them in.
01:25:50 Like whatever brand of poker he plays,
01:25:53 he tries his best at all times to succeed and to win.
01:25:57 And there’s some, even though like he’s fundamentally flawed
01:26:00 in a lot of things that he does
01:26:01 compared to some of the bigger players,
01:26:02 his effort and will and like his determination
01:26:05 to stick around is, you know, is up there.
01:26:08 And he is somebody who seems to really hate losing.
01:26:12 Yes, yeah, he feels like he deserves to win, right?
01:26:17 In all cases.
01:26:18 And if he loses, it’s, you know, it’s not just.
01:26:22 As you joked around that you and him
01:26:23 might do an anger management course.
01:26:26 Yeah, I did say that in one video.
01:26:30 Now this is tough because you’re a humble guy,
01:26:33 but objectively speaking,
01:26:35 can you say what your strengths are?
01:26:37 You’re often listed as one of,
01:26:39 if not the greatest player of all time.
01:26:41 So what are the things that make you stand out?
01:26:44 So for me, when I grew up,
01:26:46 I admired the big cash game players,
01:26:48 because that’s what I was.
01:26:49 I love tournaments, but I wanted to be well rounded.
01:26:51 Like in my day, you couldn’t make the poker hall of fame
01:26:53 if you just played one game.
01:26:55 You had to jump in to the high stakes games
01:26:57 in Bobby’s room, as they say, right?
01:26:59 And I was able to do that.
01:27:00 When I was in my early, in my mid twenties,
01:27:03 I was playing 4,000, 8,000 limits.
01:27:06 You know, you could win or lose a million dollars in a day.
01:27:08 So I grinded it out.
01:27:09 Like a lot of people think, oh, you know, he’s lucky.
01:27:11 He’s had sponsorship.
01:27:12 Otherwise he’d be broke.
01:27:13 It’s like, I built multi million dollar bankrolls
01:27:16 before any of that stuff existed.
01:27:18 And I did it the good old fashioned way
01:27:20 by sitting my butt on the table.
01:27:21 I think probably one of my biggest strengths
01:27:24 is self awareness.
01:27:25 And in that regard, a level of humility
01:27:29 that always allows me to say, okay, well, you know what?
01:27:31 In this case with these players, they’re better than me.
01:27:34 So what am I going to learn from them, right?
01:27:36 Rather than have this need to say,
01:27:38 I’m the best because of history.
01:27:40 I’m always looking to guys and go, wow,
01:27:41 he does this really well.
01:27:42 Whether it’s the Adamos or the Ivies or whoever it may be.
01:27:46 So my willingness to adapt, I think,
01:27:49 and stay relevant by learning what the young guys are learning
01:27:53 is something I’ve always done.
01:27:54 And I also pride myself on, again, being well rounded,
01:27:58 like playing all the games.
01:27:59 Like I don’t feel intimidated in any game,
01:28:02 you know, whatever the format is.
01:28:04 So always being a scholar of the game
01:28:06 as the game evolves, as the different games evolve,
01:28:09 the different players evolve, the culture evolves,
01:28:12 always adjusting by being a scholar,
01:28:13 having the humility to be a scholar.
01:28:14 A healthy respect for, a healthy respect
01:28:18 for the younger generation, how they learn,
01:28:20 what they learn and what they can teach me,
01:28:22 rather than poo poo it and say, oh, these kids today.
01:28:25 Cause that’s what a lot of people,
01:28:26 like the Mike Matisos and the Phil Hellmuth, my generation,
01:28:29 they just poo poo it because they don’t understand it.
01:28:32 On a level of one to 10,
01:28:33 their level of understanding of this is like a one, maybe.
01:28:36 If I’m being generous by calling it a one,
01:28:38 they really don’t understand it.
01:28:39 So they poo poo it, right?
01:28:41 It’s easy to do that.
01:28:42 Like, oh, that’s not how I do it.
01:28:44 So that’s wrong or that’s stupid or whatever.
01:28:46 I don’t take that approach.
01:28:47 I go, well, let me learn.
01:28:48 Let me see what there is to this.
01:28:50 But that said, the crankiness that Matisos
01:28:53 and Phil Hellmuth have is great to watch,
01:28:55 especially when they’re on a table with you.
01:28:57 Oh, I love it.
01:28:58 Yeah, it’s a blast.
01:29:00 You’re masterful at being able to get under their skin.
01:29:03 What about somebody from the new school,
01:29:06 like Justin Bonomo, who’s leading in terms of cash wins.
01:29:11 Is there somebody like that,
01:29:12 that stands out to you as a potential GOAT status person?
01:29:17 Yeah, so there’s two different ones, but one is very…
01:29:20 So they’re both just no limit, right?
01:29:23 So again, when I think of poker,
01:29:24 I think of a variety of games,
01:29:26 but there’s so many of the young guys that specialize.
01:29:29 Michael Adamo is one that I’ve mentioned several times
01:29:31 and I love the way that he approaches the game.
01:29:32 Another one that’s highly respected
01:29:34 because of his online prowess and his…
01:29:37 People have looked and how close he is to game theory
01:29:39 and they say he’s about as perfect as you get.
01:29:41 And I got a kid named Linus.
01:29:43 Linus love online, Linus Linger.
01:29:46 So he just came second recently, I believe in the Triton,
01:29:50 huge Triton event.
01:29:51 So he’s primarily an online player.
01:29:52 Yeah, he’s an online cash player for the most part,
01:29:54 but he plays some live.
01:29:55 And he’s, again, and I respect the peers that I play with
01:29:58 who say, yeah, he’s tough as nails.
01:30:00 There’s another kid too, Russian kid named Timofey Kuznetsov
01:30:06 and he plays all the games and he’s well respected
01:30:10 in that regard.
01:30:10 And same with a guy like a Jungleman, Dan Cates,
01:30:12 who’s a unique personality.
01:30:14 I mean, this guy showed up, won the poker players championship
01:30:17 back to back years in a Randy Macho Man Savage costume.
01:30:20 And he was doing Macho Man the entire time.
01:30:23 Oh yeah, I’m gonna take all the chips like I did last year.
01:30:27 Bust them all.
01:30:28 And he was in character for the entirety of the tournament.
01:30:30 This is great.
01:30:31 Just unique.
01:30:32 But yeah, I respect for a lot of those guys.
01:30:35 Is it gonna take time to figure out
01:30:36 who stands the test of time?
01:30:40 That’s the thing, right?
01:30:41 So a lot of these kids,
01:30:42 like there was a guy who beat me heads up
01:30:44 in the million dollar one drop.
01:30:46 I got 8.7, he won $15 million, kid named Dan Coleman.
01:30:49 He was seen as like the next big thing in poker, right?
01:30:53 He made his money, just wasn’t for him.
01:30:56 So he’s moved on to doing what he’s doing,
01:30:58 skiing in the Alps, whatever.
01:31:00 We have nobody seen him from like five, six years.
01:31:02 So that can happen, right?
01:31:04 Because there is a lot of burnout.
01:31:06 I think it was actually a Gotham Chess
01:31:09 who mentioned something about how difficult it is to like,
01:31:12 I think it’s true in poker.
01:31:13 When you get really, really good at something,
01:31:15 to get this much better takes so much work.
01:31:18 And a lot of people don’t necessarily wanna put in
01:31:21 that kind of work in order to do that.
01:31:23 That’s just even staying at the same level
01:31:25 takes a huge amount of work.
01:31:27 Like, so if you wanna get better at chess,
01:31:28 you’re already like really, really good.
01:31:29 And you’re trying to get like one little bit better.
01:31:31 You have to study like in a ridiculous amount, you know?
01:31:34 And again, that’s once you’ve already had,
01:31:37 I think the toughest thing for anybody,
01:31:38 once you’ve tasted success
01:31:40 and you’ve already achieved it,
01:31:41 staying hungry, staying on the top,
01:31:43 reaching the top is much easier than it is to stay there.
01:31:47 Yeah.
01:31:49 Over years, what’s your training regimen in poker
01:31:53 in terms of how you keep improving?
01:31:58 So you said you study games,
01:31:59 but that’s mostly leading up to a particular tournament.
01:32:03 But is there kind of a behind the scenes daily activity
01:32:07 you try to do that kind of over time keeps you sharp?
01:32:11 So for me, now that I’m 47,
01:32:12 and I feel like the predominant aspect of my poker game
01:32:17 is going to be in terms of my success
01:32:19 is gonna be my mental state, right?
01:32:21 So I find it’s really, really important for me now
01:32:23 at this age to have balance.
01:32:26 So when I’m not playing poker and I’m out of it,
01:32:30 poker is not even on my radar.
01:32:32 You’re able to remove it from your mind.
01:32:34 Doing my fantasy hockey, play a little chess,
01:32:37 you know, play some golf, watch some hockey,
01:32:40 whatever the case may be,
01:32:41 outside of the game.
01:32:42 And then I start to get the itch.
01:32:43 Like after the World Series of Poker,
01:32:46 the poker door was closed.
01:32:47 Yeah, you took some time off.
01:32:49 All of August, I didn’t play any poker at all
01:32:51 until just recently, you know.
01:32:53 I started to get the itch again.
01:32:54 Because that’s what’s important for me,
01:32:55 is if I don’t have the itch and I don’t want to play poker,
01:32:58 then I’m not gonna be at my best.
01:32:59 Once I start getting the itch,
01:33:01 that’s when I start to say,
01:33:02 okay, let’s start watching some of these streams.
01:33:04 Let’s see what my opponents are up to lately.
01:33:06 And, you know, let’s look at some solvers
01:33:09 and different things like that.
01:33:10 And you’re doing pretty good.
01:33:12 You came back and doing pretty good.
01:33:15 Yeah, so far.
01:33:17 Do you like being in front of the camera
01:33:18 through the hell of the World Series of Poker this year?
01:33:21 You filmed every single day.
01:33:23 You did a vlog.
01:33:24 Does that energize you?
01:33:25 Is that exhausting?
01:33:26 Because it’s really beneficial to a huge amount of people.
01:33:28 It energizes the poker community.
01:33:30 But do you see it as a service
01:33:32 or do you purely just love it?
01:33:34 I’ve been comfortable on camera since I was a kid.
01:33:37 When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor.
01:33:39 Like really, really young.
01:33:40 And I was always comfortable in that environment.
01:33:42 I think like that gives me a little bit of an advantage
01:33:45 sometimes too, with these film events.
01:33:47 Cause I’m comfortable with the mic on
01:33:49 and on camera with the lights.
01:33:50 And I think a lot of people maybe aren’t
01:33:52 with the knowledge that other people
01:33:53 are gonna see what they’re doing every day.
01:33:55 So it’s been so comfortable and easy for me.
01:33:57 As far as the World Series goes
01:33:58 and the vlogs and all the shooting,
01:34:00 it’s kind of therapeutic for me.
01:34:02 It is essentially my version of journaling, right?
01:34:06 So there’s a lot of value, I think,
01:34:08 in like at the end of a day doing a brain dump
01:34:10 where you just write out and journal.
01:34:11 But doing it on camera has this similar effect.
01:34:15 And it also, when you make a mistake on your own,
01:34:19 you’re held accountable to you.
01:34:20 But when I have to explain it to others,
01:34:23 like here’s what I did.
01:34:24 And this is the mistake I made
01:34:26 or whatever the case may be.
01:34:28 It actually, I think that helps me.
01:34:31 Yeah, so you’re held responsible by a larger audience.
01:34:34 I think it’s like, so like I said,
01:34:35 listen, I’m 47, my life is good.
01:34:38 I don’t have to be in this tournament.
01:34:39 If I’m over it, I can just dump my chips off and go home.
01:34:42 But I can’t when I’m doing the vlog,
01:34:45 like I have to actually answer to that.
01:34:49 And it keeps me in line.
01:34:51 How hard is it to win the main event
01:34:53 of the World Series of Poker?
01:34:56 So the main event of the World Series of Poker
01:34:57 is the hardest event to win
01:34:59 simply because of the sheer size of it.
01:35:01 You’re talking seven, 8,000 players, right?
01:35:04 And a lot of landmines.
01:35:05 And frankly, there are so many players
01:35:08 that you’ve not played with before too.
01:35:10 You play these high roller events, like the super ones,
01:35:12 you get 30, 40 people, you know everybody, right?
01:35:15 So you have an idea.
01:35:16 You sit at the main event, you don’t have any idea.
01:35:19 This guy wearing a Philadelphia Eagles jersey
01:35:21 and sunglasses, and he just raised you big.
01:35:23 I don’t know this guy, I don’t know what he’s about.
01:35:26 So there’s a lot of like, it’s grueling too.
01:35:29 You’re seven, eight days where you’re in the blender
01:35:32 as you might say, so.
01:35:35 So what’s the structure?
01:35:36 So it’s $10,000 buy in or something like that.
01:35:38 And there’s a bunch of tables and you just keep playing.
01:35:41 Like when is it over for a single table?
01:35:44 Does it go?
01:35:45 So the way that it works is this.
01:35:46 So there’s, let’s say 8,000 players.
01:35:47 And the way the main event works, unique to others,
01:35:50 is there’s various day ones you can play, right?
01:35:53 So a day one, you’re gonna play from noon
01:35:55 till like midnight, right?
01:35:57 If you’re still in, you bag up your chips
01:36:00 and you’ll come back for day two, okay?
01:36:02 There’s four different day ones, right?
01:36:04 Now they’ll all combine essentially to play on a day two.
01:36:07 And at the end of the night, they redraw the tables.
01:36:09 So you don’t just win your table.
01:36:11 If players get knocked out, tables break,
01:36:13 they continue to be replaced.
01:36:15 So you start with 8,000, then after day one,
01:36:18 you’ve got 6,000, then you do the same.
01:36:20 You play like a 12 hour day and you slowly whittle down.
01:36:25 Day four, day three, day four, you’re in the money.
01:36:28 And then you continue to progress.
01:36:29 And then what they do now with the final table is they,
01:36:32 because they were trying to do this for TV,
01:36:34 these final tables can take, you know, 12 hours to play.
01:36:38 And what we were finding was, you know,
01:36:41 you start the thing at 5 p.m. and it goes till 8 a.m.
01:36:44 And like nobody’s watching anymore.
01:36:45 So they separate into three days now.
01:36:49 And so you’re talking now, it’s like six, seven days
01:36:52 to get to the final table and another three days to play it.
01:36:54 So you’re grinding for, you know, a week and a half.
01:36:58 But most of the time you’re playing against people
01:37:01 you’ve never played against before.
01:37:03 Especially early on, yeah.
01:37:04 And then by the end, like, who knows?
01:37:06 You know, rarely do you see, you see in the last hundred,
01:37:09 you usually see some notable names.
01:37:11 Then in the last 27, you might see one, maybe two.
01:37:13 Final table, maybe one.
01:37:15 But often it’s gonna be, you know,
01:37:17 some players you’ve never heard of before.
01:37:20 Is there strategies that maximize your likelihood
01:37:24 of having a chance?
01:37:25 Yes, absolutely.
01:37:26 Like I think the World Series of Poker main event
01:37:28 is a unique animal in that, you know,
01:37:30 like we talk about game theory and all that kind of stuff.
01:37:32 If you’re focused on that when you’re playing,
01:37:34 you’re really not playing well, right?
01:37:36 You need to just exploit
01:37:38 because you’re gonna have a lot of people
01:37:39 who see this as a bucket list item.
01:37:41 You know, they just wanna play
01:37:42 the main event in the World Series.
01:37:43 And they might be scared, they might be nervous or whatever.
01:37:45 You don’t have to worry about being balanced, right?
01:37:48 Oh, you know, I have to make sure that I’m, no you don’t.
01:37:51 You might not, you’re playing with this guy now
01:37:52 for three hours, you might never see him again.
01:37:54 So just make the play that makes sense for you, right?
01:37:57 So yeah, you’re gonna, I approach that event
01:38:01 very differently than I would
01:38:02 like playing against the high roller players
01:38:04 that I play with today.
01:38:05 Does that mean more aggressive essentially?
01:38:07 Less actually.
01:38:08 So when you play against really good players,
01:38:11 you have to take small plus EV scenarios
01:38:15 where you push the envelope
01:38:17 and you’re playing really aggressive.
01:38:18 You’re bluffing off your stack.
01:38:19 You gotta do this.
01:38:20 You gotta focus a little bit more on being balanced
01:38:22 because otherwise, you know,
01:38:23 you’re not gonna beat these guys.
01:38:25 Whereas if you’re playing with amateurs
01:38:27 and you’re playing with regular players,
01:38:28 for the most part, risking all your chips on a bluff,
01:38:33 probably don’t need to do that.
01:38:34 You don’t need to do that nearly as much.
01:38:35 You can probably slowly but surely build your stack
01:38:39 without taking, you know, those high risk,
01:38:41 high variance situations
01:38:42 because you’ll find better situations.
01:38:44 What mistakes do amateurs usually make
01:38:47 in tournaments like that?
01:38:48 Are they over bluffing?
01:38:50 Well, I think amateurs generally,
01:38:52 the biggest mistake they make is they think
01:38:53 that pros are bluffing more than they are.
01:38:56 So like a pro will bet all his chips on the end
01:38:57 and they’re like, ah, I don’t know.
01:38:58 Maybe, you know, it’s Phil Ivey.
01:39:00 Maybe he’s doing some crazy stuff.
01:39:01 He’s like, probably not.
01:39:02 He’s probably just got it, you know?
01:39:05 And then they lose all their money by calling
01:39:08 or going all in as well.
01:39:12 And so the right thing is to be more patient.
01:39:15 So amateur is too impatient or just bad reads?
01:39:19 So all the amateurs are built different.
01:39:21 Some of the amateurs are just too weak and passive.
01:39:23 They’re just waiting for the nuts, you know?
01:39:25 And then, you know, the pros, everyone notices that.
01:39:27 And then when they make their big hand,
01:39:29 they don’t get paid anyway.
01:39:30 So in order to win the main event,
01:39:32 I mean, you have to have some components
01:39:35 of your game that are aggressive.
01:39:36 It’s very unlikely to expect to just get the cards
01:39:39 the whole way and just always have the best hand.
01:39:42 You’re gonna have to find ways to win pots
01:39:44 that, you know, where you don’t have the best hand.
01:39:47 How do you win the final table?
01:39:49 The final table is unique now,
01:39:51 especially because you’re talking about the way
01:39:53 that poker works in tournaments is that
01:39:55 if there’s seven people left
01:39:56 and you have just, you know, you’re very short on chips.
01:39:59 But if one other player goes out,
01:40:01 you just make like $300,000 for folding,
01:40:04 like just for sitting out, right?
01:40:06 The term for that that, you know,
01:40:08 show kids uses ICM, independent, you know, chip model,
01:40:13 right, where it talks about the value of each chip.
01:40:15 Where what happens, what we see now is,
01:40:17 let’s say one guy has a big chip lead
01:40:19 and there’s another guy who’s second in chips
01:40:21 and there’s a couple that are short.
01:40:22 These guys in the middle, they just play super tight
01:40:25 and they wait for the little guys to go
01:40:28 while the big stack is just pounding them
01:40:31 because he can afford to, right?
01:40:33 He knows that people are handcuffed.
01:40:35 So let’s say I had 10 million in chips
01:40:36 and you have 9 million in chips.
01:40:38 And these guys have little chips.
01:40:39 If I go all in on you, are you gonna call me
01:40:42 and risk like, you know, guaranteed pay jumps
01:40:45 of like moving up a few spots?
01:40:46 So really the question comes down to like,
01:40:48 are you the type of guy who just wants to inch up
01:40:51 or are you gonna go for it?
01:40:52 And you’re gonna go for the win.
01:40:54 I think ultimately there’s some value
01:40:56 in being the guy who says,
01:40:56 you know, I don’t care if I come seventh.
01:40:58 I’m not worried about going from seventh to fifth.
01:41:01 I’m here to win.
01:41:02 And so you’re saying like the guys that win
01:41:04 will often be the ones that call there.
01:41:07 So like, they’re not just bullying the small stacks, they’re.
01:41:10 Well, they’re the ones,
01:41:11 no, they’re the ones that are willing to risk it, right?
01:41:14 So there are some people who, you know,
01:41:16 if there’s five left, you know,
01:41:19 and they’re third in chips
01:41:21 and there’s two guys very short
01:41:22 and you, you know, they’ll have ace king
01:41:24 and someone moves, they’ll just fold.
01:41:26 They fold the hand because they wanna wait
01:41:28 for those two other players to get broke.
01:41:30 And that way they let you know, they make actual money.
01:41:32 So you, I guess the thought process
01:41:33 between winning first place
01:41:35 and winning the most amount of money are different.
01:41:37 They’re conflicting, right?
01:41:39 Because in order to like win,
01:41:41 if you’re just, if your focus is only on winning
01:41:43 the tournament, you will make mistakes financially
01:41:45 where you had guaranteed income for just folding, right?
01:41:47 Let’s say a guy has one chip left, you know, one chip
01:41:51 and me and you have good chips
01:41:53 and I go all in with you and I lose.
01:41:55 Now that guy, you know, got the guaranteed,
01:41:57 you know, he got the pay jump that I wouldn’t have got.
01:41:59 So there’s some extremely stupid mistakes
01:42:00 you can make from a financial perspective,
01:42:02 but it’s often at odds with, you know,
01:42:05 giving yourself the best chance to actually come first.
01:42:08 And in a tournament, especially the main event,
01:42:11 especially the final table, it’s all about coming in first.
01:42:15 Well, I know because most of the people who make it,
01:42:17 so like, you know, when you play these high rollers,
01:42:19 these guys are accustomed to playing for a hundred thousand,
01:42:21 they’re, they’re accustomed to this kind of money.
01:42:23 So they’re going to play, right?
01:42:24 For the most, but you’re talking about guys
01:42:25 who bought into a $10,000 tournament,
01:42:27 maybe never had a hundred K cash in their life.
01:42:29 And now they’re sitting there and it’s like 1 million
01:42:32 for fifth and 2 million for fourth.
01:42:35 So like, they don’t want to be fifth,
01:42:37 they’re just going to sit there and go, ah, I don’t want.
01:42:39 So they’ll, they’ll be under more financial pressure
01:42:41 because they’re not like your typical high roller
01:42:44 type player.
01:42:45 Are you still able to find the guts to take big risks?
01:42:48 Yeah, see, I’m trying to win.
01:42:50 Like, I think that gives me an advantage, frankly,
01:42:53 where I might make decisions that are financially suboptimal
01:42:57 because I’m trying to win,
01:42:58 but there’s also an inherent advantage to that.
01:43:01 Like that again, something I watched and learned
01:43:04 from a guy like Michael Adamo,
01:43:05 where he takes advantage of these people playing
01:43:08 so passively in these spots where he’s like,
01:43:09 I don’t, I’m not trying to come, I’m going to win.
01:43:11 I’m just going to bull bulldoze you.
01:43:14 Cause I’m not worried about, you know,
01:43:16 the small financial mistake of, you know, a pay jump.
01:43:21 What advice could you give to, to beginning poker players?
01:43:25 Actually at every level, how to get better,
01:43:27 how to improve, how to improve their game.
01:43:30 Obviously, as you said,
01:43:32 it’s easiest to get better in the beginning,
01:43:34 but what advice would you give how to get better?
01:43:37 So one of the ways, I mean,
01:43:38 I think way back to the how I started, right?
01:43:40 And there’s so many resources and tools available right now
01:43:42 to analyze hands, but when you play, right?
01:43:45 And you find yourself in a situation or a hand
01:43:48 that you’re not really sure about,
01:43:49 not because you had aces and went all in and you lost,
01:43:52 like that’s not interesting,
01:43:53 but an interesting situation where you’re not sure
01:43:55 what you did, jot the hand down, write it out.
01:43:59 And then either A, you know, use some of the tools,
01:44:02 whether it’s the solvers, if you’re advanced enough,
01:44:04 or ask your group, you know,
01:44:07 like have a couple of friends at your level
01:44:09 and talk through the different decisions
01:44:10 and start to learn that way, right?
01:44:12 Cause those mistakes that you make
01:44:13 or those tough, those tough hands,
01:44:15 that’s where the real learning comes from.
01:44:17 Like, so that next, so basically if you’re,
01:44:19 cause you’re gonna be in similar scenarios.
01:44:21 In poker, you’re rarely gonna have the identical situation,
01:44:24 but you’ll have situations that are similar.
01:44:26 You know, you raise with ace king, someone three bet,
01:44:28 another guy goes all in.
01:44:29 Okay, well, what do I do in that spot?
01:44:31 You know, it’s, you’re gonna have similar situations
01:44:34 in the future as well.
01:44:35 So figuring that out, the more you can do that,
01:44:38 you chop away at, you know,
01:44:40 different strategical mistakes, you know,
01:44:42 you used to make that you no longer make.
01:44:44 Are there resources like your masterclasses really is great?
01:44:48 Are there books?
01:44:49 So there was a guy named Michael Acevedo.
01:44:51 This is my, again, for a little bit more advanced players,
01:44:54 but it’s a book called a modern poker theory,
01:44:57 I think it’s called,
01:44:58 which sort of explains game theory, right?
01:45:01 To the novice, right?
01:45:02 So it’s a little bit, I think if you’re new to poker,
01:45:05 it’s probably above the rim for you.
01:45:08 But once you start to get a little better
01:45:09 and you wanna understand how to do it,
01:45:11 it’s probably a good resource for as far as books.
01:45:13 And there’s also like tons of people
01:45:14 who stream poker, professional players.
01:45:17 And then you can get in there and you get in on the chat
01:45:19 and you start talking, you ask them,
01:45:20 you see people, you know,
01:45:21 explaining their thought process and things like that.
01:45:23 There’s so many free resources.
01:45:25 And of course my masterclass,
01:45:26 I think does a good job of sort of compartmentalizing,
01:45:28 like, you know, how to attack it on a deeper level.
01:45:32 And we, you know, we get it, I try to get into,
01:45:34 what’s funny when I did the masterclass,
01:45:36 I asked them, I was like, well, you know,
01:45:38 how high end do you want this in terms of poker?
01:45:41 And they’re like, we want really, really high end.
01:45:42 And I was like, okay, sure.
01:45:44 Then I started to explain really, really high end.
01:45:46 I’m like, okay, well, maybe the one below that, right?
01:45:50 So I try to explain really complex, you know,
01:45:54 theory in a more palatable way, in English, if you will.
01:45:58 Cause some of these kids, you hear them talk
01:46:00 and you’d be like, huh?
01:46:02 But you also, which is really nice, give example hands
01:46:07 that really illustrate the point, which is really nice.
01:46:10 You also wrote a book, I think 10 years ago,
01:46:13 Power Holding Strategy.
01:46:16 It’s interesting to think how much of the stuff
01:46:19 in that book still applies, how much doesn’t.
01:46:21 Listen, I still think the book holds up to a certain degree.
01:46:23 Obviously like, you know, it isn’t optimal
01:46:26 because there’s like a more advanced strategies.
01:46:28 And if you played that way,
01:46:29 people will figure out a way to exploit you.
01:46:30 But if you’re like an average player playing
01:46:32 an average buy ins, like that’s sort of what I coined,
01:46:35 like small ball approach, absolutely will work.
01:46:38 You know, at the highest level,
01:46:39 you have to add much more, a lot more bluffing.
01:46:42 But overall, I think it’s still, you know,
01:46:44 for the most part, there’s a lot of really,
01:46:45 especially with tournaments,
01:46:46 there’s a lot of really good principles in the book.
01:46:48 What’s the difference in the dynamics,
01:46:50 if you could just comment on between a heads up poker
01:46:53 and when multiple people are in one hand,
01:46:56 what are interesting aspects to everything
01:46:58 we’ve been talking about from game theory
01:47:01 to exploitative strategies, all that kind of stuff.
01:47:04 So the biggest difference when you play,
01:47:06 let’s say nine handed, you know,
01:47:07 against eight other players and you know, heads up is,
01:47:11 first of all, just the type of hands
01:47:13 and the number of hands you’re gonna have to play.
01:47:15 So the way that it works is if there’s nine people,
01:47:18 two out of the nine hands, you have to put in money.
01:47:20 And the other seven, you could just fold for nothing, okay?
01:47:22 When you’re heads up,
01:47:23 you’re forced to put money in every single hand, okay?
01:47:27 And there’s only one other hand in front of you,
01:47:29 which means the ranges of hands that you play
01:47:31 is way wider, right?
01:47:33 So if you’re nine handed, right?
01:47:35 And you’re in first position, you’re like, all right,
01:47:36 what do I need to play?
01:47:37 Like a good pair, you know, two high cards suited,
01:47:41 a big ace, you know, stuff like that, that’s it, right?
01:47:44 That’s what you’re gonna play, right?
01:47:46 And you’re gonna fold all the rest.
01:47:47 When you’re heads up, you look at a king and a two
01:47:50 and you’re like, well, I gotta play this.
01:47:52 You know, you’re gonna, you’re gonna,
01:47:53 you’re forced to play a lot more hands
01:47:55 in a lot more complex situations
01:47:57 when you’re playing heads up,
01:47:59 because you’re gonna be playing much far weaker hands.
01:48:02 Queen five, Jack three, all these types of hands.
01:48:05 And you’re gonna see flops where you’re,
01:48:06 you’re not gonna have the luxury of being like,
01:48:08 I’m in there with a premium hand, queens, kings, aces.
01:48:11 Those are easier to play, right?
01:48:13 Very, very strong holdings.
01:48:14 Heads up, you’re forced to dance and fight a lot more.
01:48:19 You know, you can’t sit in the weeds and wait.
01:48:21 What do you enjoy more?
01:48:24 Heads up is very intense.
01:48:25 I like heads up, but I think if you had to play heads up
01:48:29 eight, 10 hours, it’s so mentally draining
01:48:31 because your face with so many constant decisions
01:48:34 each and every spot.
01:48:35 Like you play nine handed, you look at a nine and a three,
01:48:37 you throw it away, you hang out for a bit, relax,
01:48:40 you go, you get a little break and then play hand.
01:48:42 Heads up, you’re like, it’s like, boom, boom.
01:48:44 It’s like you’re in the ring, you know,
01:48:45 you’re in the octagon and you’re facing like
01:48:47 haymakers nonstop.
01:48:50 Since we talked about online a bit,
01:48:53 is it possible to cheat in poker, especially online?
01:48:56 So we offline also talked about the cheating controversy
01:49:00 that’s going on in the chess world.
01:49:02 Is it possible to use, what is it?
01:49:06 Remotely connected anal beads to somehow cheat?
01:49:10 No, is that a concern of cheating online?
01:49:15 So here’s the thing, it’s kind of like romanticized
01:49:19 from the old days, like, you know, in the Western stuff,
01:49:21 like people trying to cheat.
01:49:22 And have you ever killed a man because he cheated?
01:49:24 No, I have not.
01:49:25 But when I started out as a teenager,
01:49:26 I played in a game with a bunch of Italians
01:49:28 and I knew they cheated and I didn’t care
01:49:31 because they were so bad that I could win anyway.
01:49:33 I was like, I knew they would cheat,
01:49:34 but I knew how they were cheating.
01:49:35 So I was like, all right, you guys suck.
01:49:37 But so here’s the thing,
01:49:37 anytime you’re talking about large sums of money,
01:49:40 there will be people looking to take advantage,
01:49:43 whether that’s live or online, right?
01:49:45 And so it’s like the job essentially of the, you know,
01:49:49 the online operators or the, you know, live event staff
01:49:52 to police it the best they can.
01:49:54 And the players themselves being on the lookout for it.
01:49:56 You know, like a guy like Dole Brunson is a great resource
01:49:58 because he’s seen it all and he’s seen all the tricks,
01:50:01 you know, and so live, you know,
01:50:02 he probably could spot a few things.
01:50:04 But online, there’s various ways people can try to cheat,
01:50:07 but there’s also really good security measures in place
01:50:12 to catch them, you know?
01:50:14 And we’ve caught, you know, like about two years ago,
01:50:16 there was a huge undertaking of like 500 accounts
01:50:20 that were banned for doing different things.
01:50:22 And, you know, there’s, and again, you can’t go in,
01:50:24 they can’t go into detail in terms of how they’re doing it.
01:50:27 Cause otherwise, you know, then you’re sort of giving
01:50:29 the cheats the playbook in terms of how to take advantage.
01:50:32 But it’s always gonna be a concern for poker
01:50:34 wherever you play, right?
01:50:37 But it’s not something I’m worried about personally.
01:50:40 So at the highest in person, and by the way,
01:50:42 online there’s really interesting algorithms
01:50:44 that do some of the work in an automated way
01:50:46 to detect, to flag things that are weird.
01:50:50 But in person, it’s just not something at the highest level
01:50:52 that you’re super concerned about.
01:50:54 So it’s not, it didn’t quite infiltrate the poker world
01:50:58 to a degree where it’s a huge concern.
01:51:00 Yeah, like, so here’s the thing.
01:51:01 I don’t play in private games and whatever, right?
01:51:04 But in private games, theoretically, you know,
01:51:06 you could be in, if you don’t trust the people
01:51:07 you’re playing with, like I’ve heard stories of people
01:51:09 where, you know, they have an earpiece in
01:51:11 that you can’t see, right?
01:51:13 And they have, you know, like RFID on the cards
01:51:17 or something like that, and they have a phone reading it.
01:51:19 So they have somebody in a truck telling them,
01:51:21 you’re gonna win this hand, you’re gonna lose this hand.
01:51:23 Like that happened in a private game.
01:51:24 You know, and the guy, what’s often funny
01:51:26 about some of these people who cheat is they’re so greedy
01:51:30 and blatantly obvious that they get caught.
01:51:32 Where if they use this tool in a more subtle way,
01:51:35 they could probably continue to get away with it.
01:51:37 But again, that’s not something I worry about
01:51:39 in a casino environment, you know, in these tournaments
01:51:42 and things like that.
01:51:43 But if I was playing in private games,
01:51:45 like if I came down to Texas and some guy,
01:51:48 I got cheated in a game by a guy named Blackie Blackburn
01:51:51 and Tex, I was at the Chimo Hotel, I was a teenager
01:51:55 and they saw me playing, you know,
01:51:56 I was making good money as a teenager.
01:51:58 I had like a $13,000 bankroll, you know,
01:52:00 and I went and played in this game with them
01:52:02 in a private hotel room and found out later
01:52:04 that the guy was a card mechanic, you know,
01:52:06 he was dealing and he could, you know, deal you the hands
01:52:08 and he knew what you had and stuff like that.
01:52:10 So yeah, I remember, you know,
01:52:12 I lost a big number in that game
01:52:14 and it was a good learning lesson in terms of, you know,
01:52:16 being wary of who you trust.
01:52:18 Yeah, so if the dealer is in on it,
01:52:22 that’s one way you could cheat.
01:52:23 It’s fascinating.
01:52:25 That’s part of the reason that they cut.
01:52:27 So like, you’ll see like, there’s a burn card
01:52:30 because what would happen in, you know,
01:52:32 maybe in the old days is like,
01:52:33 if you’re sitting in the one seat,
01:52:34 I could lift the card and you could see it,
01:52:36 the next card coming, right?
01:52:38 So what they do is they have a card on top of it
01:52:40 that you burn that isn’t the card
01:52:41 and then the next card is the one that comes face up.
01:52:44 I just learned about the edge sorting thing
01:52:48 that Phil Ivey and maybe others were involved with.
01:52:52 I just, reading it at first was super interesting to me
01:52:55 that you can exploit the imperfections
01:52:59 in the printing of cards.
01:53:01 That was almost cool to me.
01:53:02 That’s almost not cheating because it’s like.
01:53:05 That needs to be a movie.
01:53:07 That needs to be a movie, yes.
01:53:08 Yeah, what happened with Phil Ivey in that whole case
01:53:10 is it’s a catastrophe, really.
01:53:12 It is such a horrible precedent.
01:53:14 Cause here’s what he did.
01:53:15 Phil Ivey shows up at the casino says,
01:53:17 I want to play this game.
01:53:18 They say, okay, all right, I want to play with those decks.
01:53:20 They say, okay, they agree to everything that he says.
01:53:24 He never touches the cards.
01:53:25 He doesn’t do anything outside of the fact
01:53:28 that your cards that you supplied
01:53:30 have imperfections on them and he can see them.
01:53:33 Okay, so that increases his chances of winning.
01:53:35 He could still lose theoretically, right?
01:53:38 Probably not, but he can lose.
01:53:39 In theory, it just gives him a little bit of an edge
01:53:41 and it’s all stuff based on what you provided.
01:53:44 Yeah.
01:53:45 So the idea that you offered a game, I accepted, I beat you
01:53:48 and now you want to free roll me?
01:53:50 That’s disgusting.
01:53:51 So for people who don’t know, maybe you can elaborate
01:53:53 and it’s just fascinating to me,
01:53:55 but you’re exploiting the imperfections
01:53:57 in the card patterns on the back
01:53:59 and then they look different if you rotate it.
01:54:01 And the fascinating thing too, when you shuffle,
01:54:04 usually you don’t rotate the cards
01:54:06 so that you can see the sort of
01:54:11 detect which cards are the strong cards by marking them
01:54:15 by through rotating them.
01:54:17 And the way you know they’re rotated
01:54:19 is because of the pattern imperfections.
01:54:21 Yeah, so some of the cards, like you said,
01:54:23 like they had that pattern on it
01:54:26 and some of them, this was faulty cards on there,
01:54:28 were not cut properly.
01:54:29 So like the eights and nines had the card cut differently
01:54:33 and those are important cards in this game,
01:54:35 the eights and nines or whatever.
01:54:36 So you could essentially,
01:54:37 from looking at the back of the card,
01:54:39 discern what it’s gonna be.
01:54:41 You do nothing in terms of like cheating yourself.
01:54:45 You’re not rigging the game.
01:54:45 All you’re doing is taking advantage of the fact
01:54:47 that you’re playing, you’ve offered me cards
01:54:49 that are faulty.
01:54:51 Can I just say that, of course, it would be Phil Ivey,
01:54:54 who’s the goat at the normal game
01:54:56 who will figure out this particular thing.
01:54:58 I mean, that’s what, if you’re into soccer,
01:55:00 this Diego Maradona has that famous hand of God
01:55:03 in the World Cup where he scores a goal with his hand.
01:55:07 And so, of course, the referee didn’t see it.
01:55:10 They thought it was a header.
01:55:11 So, I mean, part of the magic of the genius
01:55:14 of the people at the top of the game
01:55:15 is they’re able to exploit all the flaws that are there.
01:55:20 That’s a beautiful thing to see.
01:55:21 Well, see, Phil had, in his heyday,
01:55:24 he had, he exploited weaknesses in casinos,
01:55:29 systems all over the country.
01:55:31 Like in one night, I don’t know if you know this story.
01:55:33 In one night, he would take a plane, a private plane,
01:55:35 and fly to 30 different casinos all over the country.
01:55:38 Cause he would have these deals where they’re like,
01:55:40 all right, we’ve got this big rich sucker
01:55:41 who’s gonna come here and play craps
01:55:43 and he’s gonna lose all our money.
01:55:44 So he’d have this deal with one of the casinos
01:55:46 where they’d be like, all right,
01:55:47 you get 20% back up to half a million, right?
01:55:50 So if you lose half a million, we’ll give you back 100K.
01:55:53 So he’d go to one casino in Tunica,
01:55:56 he’d play half a million, win, win or lose, he would leave.
01:56:00 They think they’re gonna get him to stay,
01:56:02 they get him a big room or whatever.
01:56:04 So let’s say he goes to Tunica, he loses half a million.
01:56:06 Now he goes, he flies to Atlantic city,
01:56:08 he wins half a million.
01:56:10 He lost half a million and won half a million,
01:56:12 but he got 100,000 back.
01:56:14 So he’s actually plus 100,000.
01:56:16 Do that at 10 casinos a night,
01:56:17 you’re making a million dollars in free equity.
01:56:19 And they would give him promotional chips
01:56:21 and all these kinds of things and free flights
01:56:23 and stuff like that.
01:56:24 So he took advantage of the image
01:56:26 that they’re trying to exploit.
01:56:27 So this is why I don’t have any empathy for these casinos.
01:56:29 Cause they’re giving you free drinks,
01:56:31 they’re giving you, why do you think they’re doing that?
01:56:33 The kindness of their heart.
01:56:34 They’re trying to exploit you.
01:56:36 So guess what?
01:56:37 You lost at your own game, pay the piper.
01:56:39 And I think it was crazy.
01:56:40 Cause the judges in his case said,
01:56:43 he did not cheat, but yeah, it’s probably not right.
01:56:47 Hold on.
01:56:48 You just said he didn’t cheat.
01:56:50 That should be the end of the case.
01:56:52 And then the casinos do the funny thing.
01:56:54 I mentioned to you, I was just at the UFC
01:56:56 and Dana White is a huge gambler.
01:56:59 She’s a blackjack gambler.
01:57:01 And there’s that famous situation
01:57:04 where you got kicked out of a casino
01:57:05 and the casinos do that kind of thing
01:57:07 when you win too much.
01:57:08 So he won some ridiculous amount of money.
01:57:10 He bets like, I mean, he plays like millions of dollars
01:57:15 on hands of blackjack, it’s insane.
01:57:16 And so he won really big and he got kicked out.
01:57:19 Was he counting?
01:57:20 No, no, he wasn’t counting.
01:57:21 So counting in blackjack here in Las Vegas
01:57:23 is like the only game where they actually
01:57:25 can ask you not to play.
01:57:26 So like basically if you’re counting cards, right?
01:57:28 You could potentially have an edge in blackjack
01:57:30 and there are some professionals who do that,
01:57:31 but they get caught pretty quickly.
01:57:33 And then they say, you can play craps,
01:57:34 you can play whatever you want,
01:57:35 but you can’t play blackjack here anymore.
01:57:36 No, I think, I don’t think Dana White is counting.
01:57:38 I think he was winning a lot.
01:57:40 I guess they can claim that they believe you’re counting
01:57:43 because how do you really know if you’re counting?
01:57:45 Well, they easily, they figure it out.
01:57:47 So basically they have an eye in the sky
01:57:48 and they can see, so if you’re varying your bet size, right?
01:57:51 So there are certain spots where based on the cards
01:57:52 that are out, let’s say for example,
01:57:55 a lot of the twos, threes and fours and fives
01:57:57 have been coming out.
01:57:58 So the deck is rich in face cards.
01:58:01 That’s very good for the player, right?
01:58:03 So imagine you were betting 500 bucks
01:58:06 and then all of a sudden you up your bet to 2000 or 5,000
01:58:09 when the deck is rich.
01:58:11 They know when the deck is rich in high cards
01:58:12 because they keep a counter themselves.
01:58:14 So if they notice a player increasing their bet sizes
01:58:17 when the deck is good for them, it’s a telltale sign.
01:58:20 Interesting, I don’t think Dana White would be counting.
01:58:22 And so casinos don’t kick you out
01:58:24 if you don’t often kick you out.
01:58:26 Do they ever kick you out if you make too much money?
01:58:28 Because you’re playing millions of dollars that they.
01:58:30 Unless they, they would never kick you out
01:58:32 for making too much money, unless they suspect cheating.
01:58:34 Because why would they?
01:58:35 They have an advantage, they want the money back.
01:58:37 It’s not like you go in there, win 10 million,
01:58:38 you’re like, oh no, that’s enough for us.
01:58:40 What about if he was talking shit the whole time?
01:58:42 I wonder.
01:58:42 I don’t think that would matter.
01:58:44 Because in the long run, they’ll get the money back.
01:58:48 Exactly.
01:58:51 You tweeted, if you watched Jersey Shore,
01:58:54 Family Vacation, we would probably get along really well.
01:58:57 What is it about, because I lived in Jersey for a while,
01:58:59 what is it about Jersey Shore characters that you love?
01:59:03 I just love that they’re sort of, I love the debauchery.
01:59:06 I think Pauly D’s a fun guy, you know,
01:59:08 and just like, it’s just something like,
01:59:11 it’s just, it’s what do you call it?
01:59:13 It’s trash TV, it’s a guilty pleasure.
01:59:15 But you can just watch the Snooki get drunk
01:59:17 and fallen all over herself or whatever.
01:59:20 Is that part, do you love that part of Vegas as well?
01:59:23 Not really, I don’t go out and stuff,
01:59:25 but I just like the characters.
01:59:27 I like that they have unique personalities.
01:59:30 And I think we live in a world now
01:59:32 where people are more and more careful of what they say
01:59:36 and afraid of backlash and all that stuff.
01:59:38 And it’s kind of like an old school version of just like,
01:59:41 say what you feel, it’s okay,
01:59:43 as long as your intent is good.
01:59:44 And they haven’t been canceled, if you will, which is good,
01:59:49 but I feel like their type of behavior slowly but surely,
01:59:53 like, cause they got a lot of flack originally
01:59:56 for misrepresenting like Italian Americans
01:59:59 or something like that.
02:00:00 Like there was a lot of backlash about this
02:00:02 and how Italian Americans really are and blah, blah, blah.
02:00:04 So they sort of were representing that group of people
02:00:08 and, you know, they received some backlash back in the day.
02:00:13 I’m a huge supporter of diversity
02:00:15 in all the beautiful forms that the human species
02:00:19 is able to generate.
02:00:20 And that’s certainly one dimension.
02:00:22 What’s the greatest Vegas movie, would you say?
02:00:25 I don’t know if that’s a difficult question,
02:00:26 but Fear of Loathing in Las Vegas,
02:00:28 Leaving Las Vegas, Casino.
02:00:30 I watch, cause anytime Casino’s on randomly,
02:00:32 I always watch it.
02:00:33 Such a great movie.
02:00:35 It could be one of the Sharon Stone.
02:00:38 Sharon, frankly, Sharon Stone reminded me,
02:00:41 every time I would watch the movie,
02:00:42 it reminded me of my wife, Amanda, like totally.
02:00:45 I would see like the character and I was like,
02:00:47 I’m the Robert De Niro character in the film.
02:00:49 It was, I used to watch it through that lens, you know.
02:00:52 From like the depth of love that you have.
02:00:57 Just kind of, she was, I remember that she was like,
02:01:00 she was like, she lit up every room.
02:01:01 She does light up every room.
02:01:03 She goes there, everybody’s attracted and drawn to her.
02:01:05 And she was kind of, when she was younger,
02:01:07 she was a little wild and crazy and whatnot.
02:01:09 So she reminded me of the Sharon Stone character.
02:01:11 And then the Robert De Niro character is trying to like
02:01:13 have a stable life, you know, and be that.
02:01:16 And that was me.
02:01:17 Who was the Joe Pesci in your life?
02:01:19 Well, there was a guy named,
02:01:19 there was a James Woods for sure, who was the Lester.
02:01:22 We called him, we actually called him Lester.
02:01:24 A few of my friends call him Lester.
02:01:27 The greasy guy who tried to get back in and all that.
02:01:31 But yeah.
02:01:32 Yeah, one of my favorite scenes
02:01:33 is when they meet out in the desert
02:01:35 and it’s like a 50, 50 odds
02:01:36 if you’re gonna make it out alive in that.
02:01:38 I mean, yeah, there’s an epicness to that portrayal of Vegas.
02:01:43 I love, I mean, it’s just totally,
02:01:45 I mean, it’s obviously more corporate now
02:01:46 and it’s different, but I love those movies.
02:01:49 I love all those movies, just seeing that life.
02:01:51 And like I said, if there was a period in time
02:01:53 that I could go back to and just experience it,
02:01:55 it would be that, you know, right around then.
02:01:56 There’ll be that, playing with a mob and not.
02:02:00 I think of like these crime shows today,
02:02:01 like they’re so unrealistic now
02:02:04 because if they’re in an era that is now,
02:02:06 like none of this stuff can happen
02:02:08 because there’s cameras everywhere.
02:02:09 You can’t like get away with these,
02:02:11 like killing somebody and jumping in a car
02:02:13 and you’re gonna get caught, you know?
02:02:15 But in the 70s, you know, that stuff happened.
02:02:18 Across the line, you die.
02:02:19 Yeah, Lake Mead is recently like losing water
02:02:22 and like every couple of days
02:02:24 they’re finding more and more bodies from that era.
02:02:26 Oh no.
02:02:27 They really are.
02:02:29 You’re close with your mom.
02:02:30 What did you learn about life from your mom?
02:02:33 My mother was very generous.
02:02:35 My mother, she experienced joy through giving people food.
02:02:39 For the most part, my dad would get them drinks
02:02:42 and that was how she felt fulfilled, right?
02:02:45 She felt good when she like would cook for you.
02:02:47 And like, she’d be that person you’d come over
02:02:49 and she’d be like, are you hungry?
02:02:50 And you say, no, no, no, I’m okay.
02:02:51 She’s gonna put 15 things in front of you and you’ll eat.
02:02:54 You know, you’re gonna eat.
02:02:55 Cause everyone does that to be polite.
02:02:56 No, no, I’m good.
02:02:57 But you know, they will start to eat.
02:02:59 And just her hospitality in that regard
02:03:01 and just being generous and like being a good host
02:03:04 to people and things like that, like.
02:03:07 How did that define, like help define who you are
02:03:10 as a person, that generosity?
02:03:13 Did it rub off on you?
02:03:14 It made me think about in my life
02:03:17 when it comes to like any sort of business deals
02:03:21 or things like that, I don’t wanna get the best of it
02:03:23 in such a way where I screw the other person.
02:03:25 I genuinely don’t.
02:03:26 I’d much rather you owe me than me owe you.
02:03:29 So if I hire people, they get paid more
02:03:32 than they’re supposed to.
02:03:33 And I’d rather them do that and work towards it
02:03:36 rather than feel underpaid.
02:03:37 Cause if they’re underpaid, they’ll likely under deliver.
02:03:39 Whereas if they feel overpaid,
02:03:41 then if I need them to do something special,
02:03:43 they’re not gonna be like, hey, I don’t get paid for that.
02:03:45 Like, yeah, you do.
02:03:46 You really do.
02:03:47 So that’s certainly like played out in my life
02:03:49 where I set it up in such a way where I don’t owe,
02:03:53 you know, I’m owed, but that’s okay.
02:03:56 Cause I can handle taking the worst of it in spots.
02:03:58 I don’t like being the person to, you know,
02:04:01 feel like I’m indebted to others.
02:04:04 Yeah, in some way, the karma of that tends
02:04:06 to pay dividends in the longterm.
02:04:09 Somehow there’s somebody up there
02:04:15 that’s keeping track in some kind of way.
02:04:17 What advice would you give to young people today
02:04:20 in high school and college?
02:04:22 How to have a career they can be proud of
02:04:25 or maybe how to have a life in general
02:04:27 they can be proud of?
02:04:28 I would say like your 20s is a good opportunity
02:04:32 to set yourself up for the rest of your life, right?
02:04:34 So while the 20s are a period where you wanna have fun
02:04:38 and you wanna experience youth,
02:04:40 it’s also a good opportunity to start thinking about
02:04:42 what do you want your life to look like
02:04:44 in your 30s and your 40s, right?
02:04:46 So I feel like it’s the best time
02:04:48 to really put yourself out there and take risks
02:04:51 and try to hit it, you know, whatever,
02:04:53 you know, like to work really, really hard
02:04:55 to set yourself up.
02:04:56 Because, and I said this at an event I was speaking at,
02:04:59 when you’re like with poker,
02:05:01 when your bankroll is very, very small,
02:05:02 it’s replenishable, right?
02:05:05 You don’t need to protect it as much
02:05:06 as you do once you’ve got something, right?
02:05:09 Once you have a brand or you have money,
02:05:11 you have something like that,
02:05:12 that’s when you wanna start protecting you.
02:05:14 But in your 20s is an opportunity
02:05:15 to just really sort of get, you know,
02:05:18 to work really, really hard to set yourself up,
02:05:21 you know, for the future.
02:05:22 I am concerned a little bit,
02:05:23 like every time I talk to kids today,
02:05:24 I’m like, what do you wanna be?
02:05:26 They all wanna be YouTubers or Instagram stars or rappers,
02:05:30 right?
02:05:31 Like, okay, I was like, that’s cool,
02:05:32 but like, there’s only so many of those,
02:05:33 you know, that there can be.
02:05:35 So it might be worthwhile having
02:05:36 a little bit of a backup plan.
02:05:38 I think it’s easier to be successful on Instagram
02:05:40 and social media if you do something else.
02:05:43 And I would say this too.
02:05:44 One other thing I would say is,
02:05:46 don’t choose a profession or an idea
02:05:50 because you think it’ll make you rich, right?
02:05:54 Pursue something that you actually love.
02:05:56 Because if you love it,
02:05:57 you’re way more likely to become rich.
02:05:59 If you don’t, you do something that you don’t actually enjoy.
02:06:02 Now you’re spending a lot of your life unhappy,
02:06:05 doing something you don’t want,
02:06:06 and if you’re not passionate about it,
02:06:08 you’re probably not,
02:06:09 the chances of you being successful are much lower.
02:06:12 And also becoming rich,
02:06:14 and I’ve talked to a lot of rich people,
02:06:15 hang out with a lot of rich people,
02:06:17 is not going to be as fulfilling as you imagine.
02:06:21 If you arrive there by not doing the thing
02:06:23 that you love doing.
02:06:24 That’s true.
02:06:25 Ultimately, the thing that you love doing is like,
02:06:28 that’s what makes life worth it.
02:06:30 There’s another quote, I can’t remember who it was,
02:06:32 otherwise I would quote them,
02:06:33 but it says something to the effect of like,
02:06:37 if we believe in the lie that more is always better,
02:06:39 then we can never truly arrive.
02:06:41 Because wherever we are, more is better, right?
02:06:44 I’ve never understood,
02:06:45 and I’ve been around rich people,
02:06:46 like you said, you know, the bill,
02:06:48 I never got, I can’t, I don’t get it.
02:06:50 Like, if you have a billion dollars,
02:06:51 why do you give a shit about money at all?
02:06:54 Like, and they’re still like, oh, we made this deal,
02:06:56 and I’m like, you know, we picked up 300,
02:06:58 who cares?
02:06:59 Like, your life is set.
02:07:00 Like, there is that bell curve, right?
02:07:03 Where obviously being in poverty, you know,
02:07:05 there’s obviously a high rate of unhappiness,
02:07:07 but there’s a certain amount of money where you reach,
02:07:09 you know, where you reach a level of happiness,
02:07:10 and then too much, you find the people
02:07:13 that are searching for money to fulfill these holes,
02:07:15 it starts to go back down again.
02:07:17 Well, the getting more money could become a game,
02:07:21 like a sport, that’s fun to play,
02:07:23 as long as you directly or indirectly acknowledge
02:07:27 that what you love is the game of it,
02:07:29 versus the actual attainment of money.
02:07:31 And I think that’s what it is, right?
02:07:32 For me, I’ve never cared about money that much.
02:07:34 I just never did, otherwise I would have a lot more of it.
02:07:37 But it’s always, like, it’s always been strange to me
02:07:40 how people that have that kind of money,
02:07:42 like, are cheap in any way, you know?
02:07:45 Like, they wouldn’t donate 5,000 to a worthwhile charity,
02:07:48 because it’s like, buddy, this,
02:07:50 like, when it changes your life, not,
02:07:52 I don’t even like, like, small things, like taxes.
02:07:55 Like, okay, you have $20 billion,
02:07:57 and you’re worried about paying 33%, 30% to 31.
02:08:00 I get it, I get the point of it all,
02:08:03 but like, it literally has no effect on your life whatsoever.
02:08:06 Your life is unchanged, whether it’s 31 or 33.
02:08:10 Yeah, that’s the negative of a lot of money,
02:08:12 is if it corrupts the way you see the world,
02:08:14 you start to be protective and so on.
02:08:16 I mean, part of the challenge of when you get a lot of money
02:08:19 is people start to treat you differently,
02:08:21 and so navigating that correctly is very challenging.
02:08:24 So don’t change, remain the same person you always were,
02:08:29 because if you change, you start to,
02:08:32 I mean, that’s why power corrupts,
02:08:33 is you get a lot of power, you get a lot of fame,
02:08:36 you get a lot of money, you start to distrust people,
02:08:40 and you start to push away people
02:08:41 that are actually really close to you with trusting.
02:08:43 And you also, I think, you develop some biases
02:08:45 where you think, like, you’re just this,
02:08:47 you know, you think, like, it was all you,
02:08:49 and you’re a genius, and you’re so great,
02:08:51 and all these other people who don’t have,
02:08:52 it’s just because they don’t have what you have,
02:08:54 and then you start to view that group of people,
02:08:57 whether they’re impoverished or whatever is less than,
02:09:00 and that you’re some great guru
02:09:01 where you could have just got lucky and bought Bitcoins
02:09:04 that you could have done anything,
02:09:05 and then you became super wealthy,
02:09:07 and then you have this Dunning Kruger effect,
02:09:10 where you think you know everything about everything.
02:09:11 And a lot of poker people have that,
02:09:13 and listen, I’m probably guilty in some ways too,
02:09:16 thinking because you can figure out poker
02:09:17 and be great at that, that you could figure out anything.
02:09:20 So it’s true, right?
02:09:21 I mean, we sort of, we genuinely feel like
02:09:24 people that reach the highest levels of poker
02:09:25 feel like they are intelligent.
02:09:27 So they will look at problem solving
02:09:28 and think that they have answers.
02:09:30 Well, you have to remind yourself that you’re not.
02:09:32 It’s best to see the world as you did just get lucky,
02:09:35 or at least from my perspective,
02:09:37 that you’re not better than anybody.
02:09:38 I don’t think there’s anything wrong with, like,
02:09:39 acknowledging that you worked hard to get where you were.
02:09:42 Like, there isn’t, but at the same time, like,
02:09:44 it’s not available to everybody in the same way.
02:09:46 You know, right time, right place.
02:09:47 Like, for me, my poker career
02:09:48 could have gone very differently, you know?
02:09:50 If things didn’t work out, you know,
02:09:52 if I had some bad luck in the wrong times,
02:09:54 like, who knows where I’d be?
02:09:56 So you said your brain crawl is pretty small in your 20s.
02:09:59 I’m sure you’ve been around a lot of people
02:10:01 you care a lot about who’ve lost everything in poker.
02:10:04 What’s that like?
02:10:05 What’s those low points of losing everything?
02:10:09 I think because I’ve been there,
02:10:12 I have more empathy than I probably should for those people.
02:10:15 I really feel for them.
02:10:16 Cause I remember being in Vegas and being totally broke
02:10:18 and like a guy loaning me $400
02:10:21 and me like turning that 400 into 20,000, 400 bucks.
02:10:24 And it was like eternally grateful to that.
02:10:27 So when I have friends who go through that,
02:10:29 like I always try to consult them,
02:10:31 obviously what they really need is money for the most part.
02:10:34 But I remember saying no to one friend
02:10:36 because he didn’t have a plan.
02:10:37 So I like to try to help them in that regard.
02:10:39 Like my buddy’s like, can you stake me in this game?
02:10:42 And I was like, all right, well, how much do you,
02:10:43 then I was like, let’s break down the math, bro.
02:10:45 You want me to stake you?
02:10:46 So you get 50% of the profit, right?
02:10:48 So I said, how much do you think you can make in this game?
02:10:50 How much does the biggest winners make?
02:10:52 It’s like, well, I can probably, you know,
02:10:53 I probably do like 20,000 a month in this game.
02:10:56 So, okay.
02:10:57 So you get half of that cause I get 10, right?
02:10:58 What is your monthly nut?
02:10:59 How much are you spending?
02:11:00 It’s like, well, I’m renting this thing for 8,000.
02:11:03 You’re spending 17,000 a month.
02:11:05 So like, no matter what you’re set up to fail.
02:11:09 Like this isn’t going to work.
02:11:10 So I actually didn’t give him the money.
02:11:12 And I was like, what you need to do to earn more money
02:11:13 is lower your monthly nut because it’s too high.
02:11:16 It just, you know, it just doesn’t mathematically add up.
02:11:19 So trying to set them right in that regard
02:11:21 is something that like I feel obliged to do,
02:11:24 especially if they’re friends.
02:11:25 But what about the mental aspect of the struggle
02:11:27 they’re going through, the struggle you were going through?
02:11:30 Just, I mean, it’s really rough to have no money.
02:11:34 It’s not for everybody.
02:11:35 This really isn’t.
02:11:36 Like a lot of people might, you know, listen to this
02:11:37 and think like, oh, I want to play poker.
02:11:38 It’s like, most people fail.
02:11:41 Most people who want to play in the NFL,
02:11:43 they spend their college years,
02:11:46 like most of them are not going to make it.
02:11:48 Most of you who try to play poker professionally
02:11:50 are going to fail and you’re going to experience despair.
02:11:52 Okay?
02:11:53 There are those like in anything that have the passion,
02:11:56 have the knowhow, have the luck and all that sort of stuff.
02:11:58 And it all pans out, but you know, they’re the minority.
02:12:03 And so for the low points, if you remember,
02:12:06 what does it take to sort of overcome that,
02:12:08 overcome the mental struggle?
02:12:12 I mean, you’re making it sound like certain people
02:12:13 are just genetically able to in certain.
02:12:15 I do think some people are more apt to being able to deal
02:12:18 with like adversity and having resilience
02:12:20 and some people just can’t hack it.
02:12:21 But like I generally, what I would advise,
02:12:23 you know, people that are, let’s say a guy’s playing,
02:12:24 you know, really high stakes or whatever,
02:12:26 doing badly is step number one is take,
02:12:29 take a little bit of a break here.
02:12:30 Let’s recalibrate and let’s start small again.
02:12:33 Let’s, you know, let’s restart
02:12:35 and let’s play smaller stakes
02:12:36 and let’s get our confidence back because in poker,
02:12:39 without confidence, you cannot be successful.
02:12:41 It is incredibly important to have almost an inflated level
02:12:45 of confidence in yourself
02:12:46 because you’re up against it, right?
02:12:48 As I said, the majority of people fail.
02:12:50 So why are you special?
02:12:51 Why are you different?
02:12:52 You have to be pretty confident about your, you know,
02:12:54 yourself to think that you are one of the chosen ones.
02:12:57 And then don’t resist the despair and take a nap.
02:13:01 Definitely take a nap.
02:13:03 Listen, it’s okay to experience it.
02:13:05 Like I said, yeah, you’re going to experience despair.
02:13:06 What else would you, what should you be feeling?
02:13:09 You know, if things are going poorly
02:13:10 and you’ve just lost all your money, excited?
02:13:12 Maybe like, okay, have your moment of grief,
02:13:15 allow yourself to experience it so that you can,
02:13:18 you know, reassemble.
02:13:20 There’s a fundamental way
02:13:21 in which you haven’t really lived life
02:13:23 if you haven’t experienced periods of despair.
02:13:27 You have a jaded view of the world, right?
02:13:30 Weird thing about the human condition
02:13:31 that both the highs and the lows are important.
02:13:35 Yeah.
02:13:36 What role does love play in the human condition,
02:13:40 Daniel Negrano?
02:13:42 That’s a good one.
02:13:43 What role has love played in your life?
02:13:47 It’s, yeah, that’s, you know,
02:13:48 you sort of talked about the ups and downs
02:13:50 of the human condition and love has been that for me, right?
02:13:58 Like I’m in a good place now,
02:14:00 but you know, even with my now wife years ago,
02:14:04 you know, she was young, she was, you know, new to poker
02:14:07 and she wasn’t ready to settle down.
02:14:09 I was like, when I met her, I think I was 31, she was 21.
02:14:12 And I was ready to like lock her up, if you will, you know,
02:14:15 let’s do this.
02:14:16 And I bought a ring way back when she was like,
02:14:18 not about that.
02:14:19 She was living the Hollywood life.
02:14:20 She was living, you know, partying in LA,
02:14:22 doing that kind of stuff and wasn’t ready.
02:14:23 And we split and that one hit me hard.
02:14:27 So I didn’t realize how much of a hit
02:14:31 that had on my confidence in my, in everything really,
02:14:35 in poker, with other women.
02:14:36 It had me a little jaded about women too, you know,
02:14:39 resentful, you know, and it took a lot of like self,
02:14:43 I did like a lot of personal growth work
02:14:45 and workshops and things like that.
02:14:47 And then didn’t see her for years.
02:14:49 And she came back to town, I was a much different person.
02:14:51 It was just, you know, four years ago or something like that.
02:14:54 And she was too, went to dinner.
02:14:56 A few months later, we were married.
02:14:58 It worked out so different because we both had to grow,
02:15:01 you know, and become different people.
02:15:03 And that love was still there somehow.
02:15:05 Yeah, like she went through her relationships.
02:15:07 I went through mine, you know, we experienced life
02:15:09 and I was married once before too, you know,
02:15:12 called my starter marriage, if you will,
02:15:16 which yeah, you know, we just, you don’t know.
02:15:19 I think like until you do it, until you get married
02:15:21 and you know, experience like the sacrifice,
02:15:23 not necessarily the sacrifices, but your value systems,
02:15:25 if they don’t align identically,
02:15:27 which they’re not going to, someone like me,
02:15:30 probably one of my strengths in poker,
02:15:32 but my weaknesses in relationship is judgment, right?
02:15:36 When I play poker, I need to judge you.
02:15:37 That’s essentially what I’m doing.
02:15:39 I’m gauging who you are and what you’re good at
02:15:42 and what you’re bad at.
02:15:43 And that can have repercussions because it leads,
02:15:45 that’s how I view, that’s the lens I look at everyone with
02:15:48 based on how you live your life.
02:15:49 I’m judging you, this guy’s this, this guy’s that,
02:15:51 this guy’s that, and that’s not healthy.
02:15:53 So you have to shut that off.
02:15:54 You have to learn to like, and the thing,
02:15:56 I finally realized what love is, frankly for me,
02:15:59 with her is no judgment, right?
02:16:02 She’s so like, yeah, so I have my way of being, right?
02:16:04 If she wants to have cereal for dinner,
02:16:06 babe, that’s the best decision for her.
02:16:08 I was living in a framework of better and worse.
02:16:11 The way that I do things is better and yours is worse,
02:16:13 do things more like I do.
02:16:15 That’s a recipe for disaster.
02:16:17 True acceptance and true love is accepting someone
02:16:19 like exactly as they are.
02:16:21 You know, if she wants to do something different,
02:16:23 I’m going to support her, whatever it is.
02:16:25 Even if I disagree with it personally,
02:16:26 and like the way that I would do things,
02:16:28 learning to just realize that she’s had a different journey
02:16:31 and a different walk towards where she’s at than I have.
02:16:34 So I can’t pass my judgments on other people like that.
02:16:37 I believe it is ethically wrong
02:16:39 and probably illegal to eat cereal for dinner.
02:16:43 Listen, if she wants it, she wants it.
02:16:45 Acceptance.
02:16:46 Like when she goes to bed, like all these little things,
02:16:49 but my regimented life, she’s not.
02:16:50 Like our motto at our wedding was like,
02:16:53 you keep me wild, I’ll keep you safe, you keep me wild.
02:16:56 I keep her safe, she keeps me wild.
02:16:59 She’s like not organized and anal and all those kind
02:17:01 of things, I am.
02:17:02 She helps me like let loose.
02:17:06 You know, oh no, I’m eating this, this.
02:17:07 She’s like, have some popcorn.
02:17:09 Like, all right, let’s do it, you know?
02:17:10 She keeps me freed.
02:17:12 And accepting that, embracing that,
02:17:14 the difference is the chaos of it.
02:17:17 Yeah.
02:17:18 That’s what makes it.
02:17:19 Like I literally do think about with her,
02:17:21 how important it is and how much I try to like just come
02:17:25 from neutral and like compassion and never judge.
02:17:28 Cause she’s got other things that she deals with, right?
02:17:30 That I don’t, she’s bipolar, right?
02:17:32 So with that, I’ve studied and I’ve learned a lot about,
02:17:35 you know, sort of mental health and what that means
02:17:37 and ways in which a lot of characteristics
02:17:43 about somebody is completely out of their control
02:17:45 when they’re bipolar, right?
02:17:47 And there’s swings, like there’s no cocktail
02:17:51 for bipolar that solves the issue, right?
02:17:53 So there’s medications that work to, you know,
02:17:55 level you out for periods of time,
02:17:57 but then they start to fade and they don’t work as well.
02:17:59 So they constantly need readjustment.
02:18:01 It’s an unsolved mystery to a certain degree.
02:18:04 So in some sense, you know,
02:18:07 her diagnosis made our relationship easier
02:18:11 because I don’t take anything personal, right?
02:18:13 I realized that sometimes she’s gonna be in a mood.
02:18:16 I mean, she’s so good about communicating it though.
02:18:19 She tells me some morning she’ll be like bad mood
02:18:22 trying to get out of it, babe.
02:18:22 I’m like, okay, I leave her alone.
02:18:24 Well, that’s great.
02:18:25 That means she’s grown to be able to communicate,
02:18:27 to understand, to self reflect, to understand where she is.
02:18:29 I have people in my life who I love who are bipolar.
02:18:32 It’s a beautiful ride.
02:18:34 It is, right?
02:18:35 Yeah, it’s, yeah, the highs and the lows are there.
02:18:38 So, but yeah, like, because I feel like a protector.
02:18:41 For me, I just want to be a rock, right?
02:18:44 And that’s part of the whole serial thing.
02:18:45 If she wants to eat cereal,
02:18:47 don’t make a wrong for anything she wants to do.
02:18:50 What have you learned from life
02:18:52 from the song, The Gambler by Kenny Rogers?
02:18:55 You got to know when to hold them,
02:18:57 know when to fold them,
02:18:58 know when to walk away, know when to run.
02:19:01 You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table.
02:19:04 There’ll be plenty of time for counting
02:19:05 when the dealing’s done.
02:19:06 Is that, do you live by those words or?
02:19:08 The first part of it for sure.
02:19:10 What do they even mean?
02:19:11 Cause.
02:19:12 You got to know when to hold, know when.
02:19:15 So basically it’s like, all right, you know, in life,
02:19:17 like, you know, let’s say, let’s use a, whatever,
02:19:20 the market, for example, you bought a stock, right?
02:19:23 Or you bought Bitcoin and you’re like,
02:19:24 it’s going to go to the moon, right?
02:19:26 It’s like, okay, well, maybe things have changed.
02:19:29 New scenario, new circumstances, new situation.
02:19:32 Are you going down with the ship, right?
02:19:34 Or are you going to lay the hand down?
02:19:36 Are you going to fold it?
02:19:37 Whether it’s a relationship, you know,
02:19:38 you’re with this woman, you’re like, all right,
02:19:41 I think it’s time to fold this one.
02:19:43 I think, you know,
02:19:44 I don’t think that we’re going to be able to make this,
02:19:46 this hand work right now.
02:19:47 When to fold them and when to run.
02:19:49 Yeah.
02:19:50 So maybe every gambler knows that the secret to surviving
02:19:54 is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep
02:19:56 because every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser.
02:19:59 That’s like a stoic philosophy.
02:20:01 And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.
02:20:06 Every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser.
02:20:09 What does that mean?
02:20:10 I like that one.
02:20:11 I like, for me, that’s like the difference between victim
02:20:13 and responsible, like the way that I think about it, right?
02:20:16 You can be a victim to circumstance
02:20:18 or you can be responsible for everything in your life, right?
02:20:20 So when an event happens,
02:20:22 the event itself is neither good or bad
02:20:24 until you assign it value, right?
02:20:27 So like an event happens and it can be traumatic,
02:20:30 it can be, you know, painful,
02:20:31 but you know, how you respond to it
02:20:33 is ultimately going to be up to you.
02:20:35 Like you actually do have a choice.
02:20:36 And that’s the thing you can control.
02:20:38 The fact that you, Daniel Negrano took my commentary
02:20:42 about The Gambler seriously shows once more
02:20:44 that you’re a beautiful human being.
02:20:47 Thank you so much for being who you are,
02:20:49 for inspiring millions of people about poker,
02:20:51 about how to live life.
02:20:53 And thank you for giving me your valuable time today.
02:20:55 This is amazing.
02:20:56 Thanks for talking.
02:20:57 It was fun, man.
02:20:57 It was great to have the conversation.
02:20:59 Thanks for listening to this conversation
02:21:01 with Daniel Negrano.
02:21:02 To support this podcast,
02:21:03 please check out our sponsors in the description.
02:21:06 And now let me leave you with some words
02:21:09 from Doyle Brunson.
02:21:11 Poker is war.
02:21:13 People pretend it is a game.
02:21:15 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.