My Poker Journey — Part 5
--
Now its time to actually look back and reflect on last year. That was really meant to be the purpose of writing a blog post in the first place, but that’s okay, I thought the stuff before was worth writing down as well. When I moved back home in late 2019, I fully expected to never play poker again, at least not more than a random Sunday MTT. And that thought held true for a while, I don’t think I played a single hand of poker until January of 2020. Weirdly though, I was still going over hands with friends pretty often, which probably should have been some pretty obvious foreshadowing if I think about it now.
When 2020 came around I started playing a tiny bit again, not sure how much exactly, but it slowly ramped up from one tourney, to 5–10 on Sundays, to eventually back to a full-time grind alongside my studies by April or so.
Now it probably seems hypocritical that only months after calling poker effectively an unacceptable profession that I was playing full-time again, but my mindset had shifted (improved) a lot in that time. Recently, I have made a concerted effort to focus more on mindset, not only for poker success, but just for life in general. I realized that I could play poker and still make a positive impact on the world, and to do so, I pledged to donate at least 10% of my profits to charity. I followed through on that promise and donated about 15k in December, which honestly felt a little scary. I feel like I should have no problem giving even more, and think that I should, but money has had such an importance, and even scaredness, placed on it throughout my life that parting with anything that I have “earned” is really difficult. Especially with poker being my source of income, this kind of thought lingered in my mind: “What if lose money next year, I might need that money.” That really isn’t possible with the money management principles I follow, and of course the causes I am donating to have more use for the money than me, but that fear of giving up money really tries to get into my mind and overpower my thinking when it comes to donating large amounts of money.
As far as mindset practices go, I have been meditating every day for a long time, even pretty consistently towards the start of my career. These days I do 15 minutes after reading, which is my first activity after waking up. I also do yoga as my preferred form of exercise. I have never really been a huge fan of the gym and like the easy access and mentally engaging aspects of yoga. Maybe the biggest visible thing I did last year was to go through Elliot Roe’s mindset course on RunItOnce. While I can’t say that it was a life changer or some kind of one-stop shop to solve your mindset issues, it did help me see quite a few things a bit more clearly and would definitely recommend it to anyone.
More than any of these actual practices though, I would say the biggest change I made was just trying to be more present in all aspects of life. Not always being on your phone, or not always having a podcast or Twitch stream on in the background are easy examples of the sort of things I’m talking about. Just focus on one task and truly give it your full attention; it makes a big difference, whether its relationships, poker, or literally anything else. I am at the point these days in regard to poker where I have really close to zero tilt of any kind. Even in huge potential runs I think I do really well at not getting attached to the possibilities. A lot of the times I don’t even watch all-ins when I’m 12-tabling, not because I am actively trying to avoid it, but just that I have accepted that what happens after I have went all-in is irrelevant. There is definitely still a lot of room to improve, though, and I will write about that more in my next post about what I want to achieve this year.
Jumping back into 2020, I graduated and got my bachelor’s degree in August and just kept on grinding for the rest of the year; it went insanely well, and I managed to have my best year ever. I was playing basically every high-stakes game running on the sites I could play on and finding success in them continually, which was a good sign given my past experiences in the HS games. The graph looks really good, in part I think due to smaller field sizes on the sites where I was able to play, as well as quite good play, and maybe a bit of run good thrown in, although I really don’t think my profit was out of the expected range of where it should be playing that schedule.
The last thing I want to discuss here is my decision to move back out of America for 2021. This was a decision that weighed on me for months and really felt like an impossible choice. The reason to move back out of the country was mainly that I could save a lot of money taxes, almost enough to freeroll living expense wherever I moved to, if I made a decent amount in 2021. That was because I was staying at home for free in New Jersey and had no plans of moving, unless it was out of the country. There were more positives to leaving as well, though; I love traveling and exploring new cities, as well as the chance to potentially live near other poker players that I knew was quite appealing. By this math, the decision seems quite obvious, and really, it was, but I let my always-worrying mind get the better of me for a long time. I would constantly think of the risk of moving and what would happen if I couldn’t succeed again. “What if I can only win here because of the weaker player pool?” was a thought that went through my head a lot, and I really struggled to push through it. Eventually, though, I had sort of had enough and just decided to find an apartment in Vienna and commit myself in a way that I couldn’t easily undo. It was by far the better decision for me, but it just took a lot of time for me to be able to get over that fear and see things more clearly. I think meditating and setting aside some time to just think helped me come to my decision in the end, and I am thankful already that I decided the way I did.
Next time will be some thoughts of what I am expecting and wanting to do in the new year. Thanks again for reading!