Continued from part I.
“I love struggling, actually. It makes me feel alive.” — Alysa Liu, Gold Medalist
Okay, so the next block was supposed to be about table selection stuff. But let’s talk about something else in the present moment. One of my motivations for why I’m even writing about poker in the first place was to probe and hopefully answer the question: why do I burn out on the things I used to love to play? It’s happening in the present with trading. It happened in the past with poker. It has happened periodically with my most intense hobbies like pool or golf. Is there something wrong with me? Can it be fixed?
I was reading Thi Nguyen’s The Score to try to get some answers. Thi is a philosophy professor who has a lot to say about the mindset of approaching games and scoreboards. At first he wrote a bit on the micro level of what I was trying to figure out but mid-way through the book, it’s become more macro focused about institutional benchmarks and society’s inclinations. I haven’t finished it yet, maybe it comes back full circle.
I’m going to borrow a couple terms from the book where he describes two types of game “players”–achievement players and striving players. Achievement players primarily care about winning or accomplishing the goal. Striving players care about the process or the struggle of the game. They only care about winning in the sense that they need to try to win to achieve the struggle itself. An example of this might be a rock climber aiming for a graceful climb rather a primary focus of reaching the top, or a fly fisher aiming to catch a fish to enjoy the patient, meditative journey of fish catching–something like that.
I am most definitively an achievement player through and through. Trading, poker, pool. All hobbies and games I’ve ever cared about, really. Even something that’s like a fifth tier hobby for me like rock climbing, I can get pissed off when I struggle on a difficult climb and slip. It’s just the way I’m wired to be–which is to let the results heavily impact my happiness. The activity where I’m closest to being a striving player is perhaps exercise and weight lifting. I don’t care about benching 300 or running 10 miles. I’m just trying to do something active every day to stay mentally well. But it’s an area where I’ve often lacked sustained motivation and it is because of the lack of competitive fire to achieve goals. A key part to being a striving player is to try to win even if you don’t care about the outcome. There’s no winning in exercise for me, I’m just kinda there drifting and checking my e-mails.1I did hire a personal trainer 6 weeks ago, to push my effort more. It’s my first time. We’ll see where that goes. So it’s like this… you need to care about winning but not too much?
Anyway, I’m just writing all this to say I don’t think it is a good thing (for me) to care so much about winning or being a winner. Once a upon a time, I craved the winning so much because all I had was a lifetime of mediocrity, paired with an unwarranted superiority complex. So yeah, it tracks to feel so invested in success because it was an investment in my own validation of worthiness. Now I’m in a part of life where things should feel nice and settled and yet I’m still habitually wired to want to win anyway. It burns me out quickly.
Our most recent figure skating champion Alysiu Liu seems to have figured out the magic mindset. Once I heard what he said about struggling, I couldn’t help but think about what kind of “player” she really is. She took time off, accepting that she might never skate again. She came back for pure love of the game. She won the gold medal. Her short program is hailed as one of the most graceful and effortless individual skating performances we’ve ever witnessed. She just didn’t give a fuck and maybe it’s a lesson for all of us.
Table Selection — Forget Being a Poker Virtuoso, Become a Bum Hunting Merchant Instead
“If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker.” – Rounders (1998)
Anyway, back to poker. Once I collected a decent amount of PT hand histories, I had a treasure-trove of data on the regular online players. I’d sort by win rate and see 90+ VPIPs fishies bleeding off a massive amount by BB/hours.
I also opened up the numbers of tables available to me at any given moment by equally distributing my money across the three major sites of the time: Party Poker, Poker Stars, and Full Tilt. If one site felt slow at the moment, I could migrate to the action at another. Pokerstars actually had a feature where you follow certain players and see if they were online–I don’t think they meant that feature to be so predatory in nature. The same fish I’d see at those hours would often be back again, and I’d chase them down as soon as I logged in. The best spots were 6-max tables, where you could exploit them even more in short-handed play—especially if you had position on them. Those were always my absolute best sessions.
Common situation. BumAssPokerPlayer6969 logs in. My 2 pages of notes say he’s a chip spewer, which is lingo for an aggressive player who lacks a good sense of value 2example: he has two pair and thinks it’s the greatest possible hand after a river with flush+straight possible, so he’ll cap raise it against my actual made draw. I see he goes to the “Vista $3/6 6-max”. I’m planting my ass there or joining the waitlist to sitdown. Two hours in after I’ve taken him to value town for the 39th time, he’s re-loading his 7th buy-in.
BumAssPokerPlayer6969 doesn’t chat at all until the very end. Then he busts again by capping the river with the 12th best possible hand. He hasn’t used the chat all day until the very end.
I start to feel bad. My conscience gets the better of me. Maybe BumAssPokerPlayer6969 just emptied out his little daughter’s college fund. This the moment where I start to realize that poker is an immoral, zero-sum game where good play essentially means exploiting weaker people’s addictions.
Lmao, no, I’m actually quite giddy. Thank you and come again, good sir. 17 year old Pete was a ruthless capitalist. This clown doesn’t deserve his money. I deserve to take it because I put in the work.
I think this stage of growth lasted about a year and represented the majority of my account growth. But something started to happen to how I viewed the game itself. It wasn’t morals or values that dampened my fever for it, it was that this hyper money-focused, edge-focused, exploitation-focused version of poker had taken a bit of the sport out of it. I had now become a bum hunter who only sought out the juiciest tables to play. I wasn’t playing out of a deep desire for competition and finding the best of myself, I’m only in it for the easiest way to make money.
I wasn’t playing creatively like the old days in Tony Pham’s hold games where I would make crazy moves to get into people’s heads. Small stakes limit became formulaic and mechanical. There’s a term for this now–“ABC Poker“. When you play ABC Poker, you just fold everything pre, wait for no-brainer situations, and take money from other’s mistakes. Not a ton of thinking involved–reading the situation, the pot odds, and clicking the buttons basically became muscle memory. I got addicted to the game being easy, just shooting fish in a barrel all the time. I didn’t see myself as a future world champion honing my talents anymore. The dream was fading.
But hey, the money is rolling in nice and smooth, nothing wrong with that, right? That’s certainly the trader mindset–to collect the easiest money out there. Once you get rich, you can quit. But you don’t know how good you have until it ends. 05/06 was the absolute peak of the online poker bubble.
October 2006, Congress passes UIGEA–this prohibited banks and payment processors from knowingly processing internet gambling transactions. It was the result of some Congressman’s rider3fuck you Jim Leach. this is what you did to us! tacked onto another bill that primarily dealt with improving port security. What kind of bullshit is that? The biggest online payment merchants at the time, like Neteller and Firepay, left the U.S. for legal reasons. Then the biggest shoe dropped–Party Poker, the biggest site by volume, decided to withdraw as well. Poof, 1/3rd of the best tables in the game were now sealed off. The bubble’s bursting. It would never come back.
Even though Full Tilt and Stars kept their doors open, you could feel the fish leave in an exodus. My fat win rate declined a bit as the action got slower. The swings got a little swingier as edge diminished. I didn’t want to struggle through a bunch of average tables and suffer through a dry spell. I went from playing every day to only playing once or twice a week. I couldn’t handle drawdown periods and would feel a strong aversion to playing in the hole–more on that later.
Opening up the platform suddenly felt like a job. Playing limit felt monotonous–same strategy every time and grind, grind, grind. SNGs also became formulaic, you basically did a little math in your head on when/how you should shove all-in as blinds got steep. When I played slightly tougher games, I didn’t want to rise to the challenge and stick with it. I wanted to pick off the bums or otherwise not play at all 4Nowadays in 2026, a 2007 “whatever” $3/6 table would likely be the greatest table out there. It’s all relative.. I told myself I’d get back into it full throttle at a later point, but I never did. It was the beginning of the end.
In some ways, I’m reading all of this and it’s not surprising that A) I decided to become a trader and B) I decided to stop trading in the present moment. Trading has less swings as you can chase better edges with far superior sharpe than poker. But then trading, like poker did, eventually became all about money as well. It was the only thing that kept me going rather than any inherent satisfaction or joy. Once upon a time I was young and foolish, hoping to make moves and become a billionaire hedge fund manager. Then I just settled into being a day trader who exploits movements in shitty penny stocks. Every position now feels like protracted mental warfare. My brain got cooked. Once the joy is gone, it is hard to get it back.
More Home Games
Around my junior year, which was the peak of my poker ability, Tony Pham and most his pals had graduated and moved on. It was the new HS seniors that started to run games of their own and I didn’t know them as well. Even though this is live no-limit play, I didn’t try to bluff anymore. It just didn’t make sense when everyone plays loose-passive with a low sense of self-awareness. So I’d play my new brand of boring-af ABC Poker, exploit mistakes, and always finish strong, but ther was another development to my game that I’m not super proud of.
I was kind of a dick at the table.
Too much of a rotten attitude–I would criticize bad players after they made nonsensical moves5this is called ‘tapping the glass’ and is highly NOT recommended if you want to keep games soft and get invited back. I wouldn’t react well after bad beats. I felt this strong feeling of… entitlement? Like I deserve to win and nobody else did, because I’m the one who takes this seriously and I have proven chops with my $20 to $20,000 online growth. Poker is my thing and everyone is a pretender who’s just “playing for fun”–an absolute joke of a concept to me, because playing for fun means losing money. Who wants to willingly lose money? What kind of mindset is that?
I remember one particularly cringe-worthy incident that permanently lives in my head — like one of those childhood moments, such as calling your teacher ‘Mom’, that you never quite live down. It’s a chill home game tournament and everyone’s having fun. I got all my money on the turn against a newb player, classic situation–bare ace board without any obvious draws–I have AK against his AQ. I’m supposed to win here 9/10 times, 93.5% to be exact. River is a queen. He takes it down.
It happens. Whatever. I’ve played like 50,000 online hands at this point. Whatever. I can take it. No big deal. I’ll sit and stew and make it back eventually.
Then he starts laughing. Like a cartoonish, maniacal laughing. He doesn’t regularly play and it might literally be his first time hitting a 3-outter on the river while all-in.
After a pause where I thought I could handle it and not react–well, now I can’t handle it. You’re laughing at me????
Then there was another pause where I thought I could re-collect myself and even an louder f-bomb following that. After that moment, I didn’t get invited anymore. One of the players later told me I had to work on my anger issues. It wasn’t an isolated incident.
How I learned to not love the struggle
Some players, pro’s even, don’t even play no limit. They can’t handle the swings. — Mike McDermott, Rounders (1998)
Please allow me to indulge myself here in some imaginary hypotheticals–I sometimes think to myself, why didn’t I make *even more* money? Did I hold myself back?
First, let’s talk about how players respond to draw down. For a confident, winning player with a fat win rate playing against the softest poker environment ever, we can presume that downswings are primarily the result of negative variance rather than outright bad play. Ask yourself, among these 3 winning players, who is reacting to their steep drawdown in the “best” way?
Player A: Neil. Neil plays $20 SNG’s and endures a rough spell. His opponents always seem to hit their river and he bubbles out. His bankroll gets hit with a 30% decline in just a few sessions. He decides to move up to $100 SNG to make it back quickly.
Player B: Mo. Mo plays $1/2 NLHE cash and he’s enduring some tough luck as his premium hands haven’t held up. He gets mad and starts to force the issue. His VPIP expands from 20’s to 40’s. He also expands his bluff range to win more pots.
Player C: Pete. Pete plays $3/6 limit games and he’s on a modest 5% downswing. Some of his fat win rate 60+ VPIP tables disappear and he has to play regular ol’ 40 VPIP tables. Fearful of a 5% drawdown becoming a 10-20% drawdown, he quits. He plays DoTA All-Stars with his cousin Arthur for the rest of the night.
I guess on the surface, most of you would say Player C responds to drawdown the best way. It’s certainly prudent to step back against uncomfortable drawdown and diminishing edge. It’s also kind of chicken shit. It’s a statement that implicitly says “I don’t want to struggle. It’s too much for me.”
I found myself developing a seemingly harmless but self-defeating habit that I would carry with me for the next 20+ years–I’d count how far away I was from the high watermark as my drawdown increased. Bad run punctuated by another hand where aces got cracked in a huge pot? Time to count how far away I am from my prior peak…
What we’re talking about here isn’t about about tilt or bankroll management, it’s about pain tolerance. Player A and Player B are showing more tolerance for pain than Player C, even if they aren’t quite dealing with it in an optimal way by either going on tilt or taking reckless shots. Maybe Player A and Player B go bust. But they embrace the gamble and the inevitable struggle.
The next time Player A and B take on the game, hopefully with applied wisdom and experience, they start crushing it with massive exponential gains. Moving up stakes every 6 months. They become nosebleed level crushers reknown around the world. When they’re interviewed, they talk about how going bust sharpened their desire to win more.
Realistically–sure–this probably only happens to 1% of the winning players who walk this path. Many others blow up and never solve their discipline problems. Player C never goes bust, maybe he even sustains a decent living by becoming a highly selective live game player, but he also never becomes one of the best of the very best. He can’t take the pain that’s inherent in the struggle for greatness.
I’m not addicted to the struggle for greatness. I’m addicted to 45 degree equity curves.
My decision to quit poker when it became even just a tiny tiny bit harder, reflects that mentality. I want easy mode. I’m the guy who wants to hack the game with strategy guides and shortcuts.
There used to be this website called HighstakesDB with all these graphs of high stakes online players from the late 2000’s. You could see performance graphs from legendary players of the time like Phil Ivey, Isildur, Phil Galfond. This site has unfortunately ceased to exist as I once knew it. So I gotta draw them by hand now. All of the famous nosebleed pro’s graphs looked like this:
Ugh.
Look at these 50% drawdowns. The prolonged dry spells and those wavy oscillations above/below break-even. Disgusting. How can these people live like that? It’s not normal. Give me my 45 degree angle and let me sleep at night.
But I think you need something special inside to just not care about the swings–a little fearlessness, a little gamble, a little excitement flowing your veins while you got yours ball hanging on the line. Or it could be something entirely different in nature–like a stoic spirit against all outcomes? I don’t know, I don’t have it.
Whatever that is… I wish someone could bottle it and inject a *little more* into my veins. Not too much. There’s a critical checkmark for every successful discretionary trader, to define what path they will traverse. Are you the solid under-the-radar pro who grinds away or are you the incredible compounder who gets written into the latest Market Wizards book? As your bankroll grows–can you keep betting that percentage amount to maintain accelerated growth? Or will it level off as the gross $$ amount starts to get in your head a little?
There came a point for me where risking even a responsible 1-2% on a trade wasn’t tolerable from a gross $ perspective. Some people can get over that so easily, like it’s just video game money to them. For me, it feels too real and the suffering from loss/failure is also too real.
I remember around 2019, someone introduced me to a Twitch feed of this whale trader–let’s calling him Fred–who’d just be swinging ridiculous amounts of money across 8-12 positions. He didn’t do anything particularly fancy, he just bought breakout charts and would swing them for the moon. I remember how often his portfolio would just eat shit in the market and then he’d just be laughing. Hahaha, I’m losing so much money this morning. What a gig this is, am I right guys?
This would be me in the same situation:
There was something valuable to learn from Fred’s feed but after a few months of observing, I couldn’t participate any longer. I kept seeing the difference between his mindset and my own and I struggled to perceive it any other way besides the fact that I was born inferior. Defective. Unable to trade at larger size without intense episodes of suffering. Lacking the special gene to become of the trading legends of the game. Then I’d see my own contemporaries like Clockwork and Eagle from MBC surpass me and it further made me question my own constitution. Now some of them will literally be in the new Market Wizards book that’s about to be released this year. Special stuff makes special traders.
The point I’m trying to make here isn’t that risking more is inherently better. It’s that struggling is good. It makes us feel alive. truggle, ariance, bad luck, defeat, failure, setback–whatever you want to label “it”–you have to embrace it, not run from it, if you want to go further than you ever thought possible.
We can end it here. Maybe there’s a part III.
