Setting the Scene This morning, I woke up in an AirBnB just a few minutes northwest of Lansing, North Carolina, nestled deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I drove into town, laced up my trainers, and ran two laps around the extended town park for a 5k, all while admiring the vibrant fall colors. I even envied the fishermen who were already out, casting flies into Big Horse Creek.
Afterward, I went back to the house and made myself an exquisite omelet (tip: avocado and salsa are key ingredients).
Later, I ventured further up Big Horse Creek. Unlike poker, the fishing is always better away from the crowds. I caught 5 or 6 beautiful trout, each one gently returned to the water with minimal fuss.
I then headed home, cooked dinner, and settled in to write this piece. Remarkably, I didn’t consume a single byte of poker content all day.
What’s Your Point? I thought you’d never ask.
In the past year, I’ve had the best poker results of any one-year period of my life. And in the past two years, I’ve had the best results over a two-year span as well. These are significant because I’ve been playing and studying poker seriously for almost 40 years.
I’ll write more about that in the coming months, but it might not all appear here. You see, a while ago, El Jefito, Brad Willis, and I came to an agreement: instead of cluttering this website with poker strategy content, I would send those pieces to PokerCoaching, Jonathan Little’s training site.
What follows here is still poker strategy, but if I sent this to my team at PokerCoaching, they might think it’s a bit too “meta” for their audience. But Bradley S. will get it. And I hope Dave W. will give me a pass on this type of content. So here we go…
A Balanced Life is More Important Than a Balanced Range I come from an engineering background, and when my poker tracker confirmed that I was winning more consistently than ever, I wanted to understand why. If for no other reason, it would be nice to have a checklist to review during inevitable downswings.
The first thing that stood out to me was this: the improvements I’ve made in the meta-game are just as valuable as any changes I’ve made to my actual at-table strategy.
One of the biggest factors has been placing poker in its rightful position in my life.
Look, I love this game. I consume poker content constantly. Sitting here, 3,000 miles from home, with all the joys and responsibilities of life, it would be easy to fall into a rabbit hole of content. The Thinking Poker podcast, Only Friends, vlogs from Andrew Neeme and Jaman Burton, the PokerCoaching Discord, and constantly refreshing PokerOrg for the latest stories – there’s an endless supply, and nothing to stop me.
But during the darkest days of the pandemic, I had an epiphany: life offers absolutely no guarantees. I’m sure many others had this realization, but for me, it hit hard. Ever since, I’ve lived with the understanding that the next pandemic, or whatever else might come, could take me away. And that’s if something else doesn’t do it first.
As a result, I regularly and consciously review how I’m spending my time. For example, when I wake up 50 feet from a Blue Ridge trout stream on a crisp fall morning, I don’t mindlessly let the YouTube Algorithm take me wherever it pleases.
This All Makes Me a Better Poker Player The benefits of this mindful approach to life are enormous. But since this is a poker website, I’ll let you in on something: it makes me a much better poker player. By placing poker in the right proportion in my life, when I’m studying GTOWizard, I’m genuinely happy to be doing so. If I’m sitting at a $5/$10 NLHE table getting clobbered, I’m blissful. I’d rather win, but I’ve set aside time to play poker—not to win money. I’m doing exactly what I wanted to do.
This perspective means I don’t tilt nearly as much. I run big bluffs when the time feels right because I’m not emotionally attached to the outcome. I’m intellectually invested in playing as well as I can. I don’t tell bad beat stories, and I remain calm about everything that happens. It’s hard to overstate how much that improves my poker results. It may be just one tiny improvement in a sea of changes, but when I’m at the poker table, I’ll take it.
This seems like a good place to end this little meditation. And besides, I’m up early tomorrow for a morning hatch on the creek.
