Latest / Everyday Ancestral with James Barry / The Art of the Long Game: How Martin Jacobson Uses Pressure, Presence, and Pattern to Win at Life

Transcript

The Art of the Long Game: How Martin Jacobson Uses Pressure, Presence, and Pattern to Win at Life · Everyday Ancestral with James Barry

• 0:00
  Welcome back to every day in Sestrel. I'm your host Jamesberry. My next guest is a former chef
• 0:05
  turned professional poker player and he won the 2014 world championship.
• 0:11
  How incredible is that? We delve into the championship, the traits that poker playing in bodies
• 0:17
  that actually tap into our ancestral characteristics, the things that help keep us alive
• 0:23
  ancestral. They show up in poker players. So stay tuned. This is a fascinating episode with
• 0:29
  Martin Jacobson. Martin, thank you so much for joining. You know, you and I met a while ago and
• 0:36
  I instantly liked you, instantly connected with you, but selfishly, I'm just excited to get to
• 0:41
  talk to you for an hour. Thanks James. It's great to reconnect and it's a pleasure to be on the show.
• 0:48
  What a lot of people don't know about you is that you are a former chef.
• 0:54
  So how does a former chef turn professional poker player? Walk us through that journey.
• 1:01
  Well, it's kind of like the right place at the right time, I suppose, and things just
• 1:06
  like sort of happened that way. I was actually in between two jobs. So I got a job offer to
• 1:14
  move to Barcelona, work at a Michelin star restaurant down there. And this was very early in my
• 1:20
  chef career. And I'd quite high ambitions. So I didn't take the long to accept that offer.
• 1:26
  But then I quit my job and stock on at the time. And during that period, like at the overlap
• 1:32
  period, my contact there went totally MIA. I just couldn't get a hold of her. I don't know if
• 1:39
  I imagine, you know, obviously thought a lot about this, like what happened. But I would imagine
• 1:44
  that the job wasn't there. And she was too embarrassed or felt too bad to spill the news. So she
• 1:51
  just chose to ghost me. Ghost, did you? What people say now? Ghost, it's a ghost, did you?
• 1:58
  So it was during that period that I was already playing poker as a hobby in parallel or on my
• 2:05
  off time when I wasn't cooking. And it was during that period that I started devoting more time
• 2:11
  towards poker and it sort of became more professional about it, I suppose. But then one thing led
• 2:18
  to another and had some very fortunate early success. And then that sort of allowed me to
• 2:25
  never look back and just completely pursue a career as a professional poker player.
• 2:30
  Getting offered a job, though, in a Michelin restaurant, I mean, that's no small beans,
• 2:35
  like that's not everyone gets that opportunity. So when you left for Spain, did you actually land
• 2:41
  in Spain and then have no job? No, no, I think so far. Yeah, the opportunity calls for me back then
• 2:48
  was quite low. So the way I viewed it, you know, transitioning to poker now, the way I viewed it
• 2:54
  was that if poker obviously didn't work out, I could always go back to cooking. So knowing that I had,
• 3:01
  you know, I didn't drop out of college, like a lot of my peers have done putting all the eggs in
• 3:06
  one basket and just going all in, they'll put it to the bed on poker. I feel like I had more of
• 3:14
  it like a safety net because I had a very peer skill and like I was fully educated at the time,
• 3:20
  I had a good network so I knew I can always get a job in the restaurant industry if I needed to
• 3:26
  again. What kind of chef were you? Were you a savory or sweet savory? So I was a junior sous chef that
• 3:33
  was like the highest I ranked. And did you have like a specialty that you particularly felt like
• 3:40
  you excelled at a special the dish, you mean? Well, dish or like, oh, I loved, you know, I'm the
• 3:46
  sauce guy or I was the griller, you know, any aspect of the kitchen it. Well, you, you know,
• 3:51
  as a sous chef, you're doing more than just one thing, but was there one that you really like,
• 3:56
  this is my sweet spot? Yeah, I was usually on, God, I forgot even the term now, but, you know,
• 4:02
  you have the grill, you have the pastry chef who does like the garbage or something or you do
• 4:08
  that. Exactly. Yeah. I was in charge of all the sauces and all I'm thinking back in Swedish now
• 4:14
  because this was at the time where I was living in Sweden. Yeah, where you're exclusive. Yeah.
• 4:18
  Well, this brings up actually a good point though, because this was going to be one of my questions,
• 4:23
  is since you kind of moved away from cooking and being a chef, you really in many ways went all in
• 4:29
  with poker, right? So have you lost some of those chef skills? Because it is very much one of the
• 4:35
  things like I should preface like you always will know how to cook, but I mean working in the
• 4:40
  intensity of a kitchen, you know, a restaurant kitchen, that is a skill. That is something you can
• 4:46
  lose. The speed, the kind of high intensity, you know, being calm in that high intensity environment,
• 4:53
  those are skills you can lose if you're not in it all the time. Yes, true, but like what I went
• 4:59
  into instead is arguably more stressful than working as a chef even though I think working in a
• 5:05
  kitchen is one of the most stressful environments you can be. But yeah, I mean a lot of those skills
• 5:11
  and sort of work environments are very frequent in poker as well, like you're constantly under a lot
• 5:16
  of pressure, a lot of stress. You have to make decisions within seconds, which is very similar to
• 5:23
  working in a kitchen, you know, that where the bar is set high and you have a lot of expectations
• 5:28
  and everything needs to happen as quickly as possible because you're working with such slim margins,
• 5:34
  you know, like you can't waste anything like time, resources, produce, like everything has to be
• 5:41
  spent very efficiently. So I think learning that at an early age has a sort of helping
• 5:47
  poker as well, also like staying calm under pressure in high pressure spots.
• 5:51
  Yeah, it's really interesting to know, I mean what you're saying that there is an overlap.
• 5:56
  One of the reasons why I wanted to interview on the podcast is because I see the qualities
• 6:02
  that it takes to be a professional poker player as ones that are ancestral. If you can indulge
• 6:09
  that thought, what would you say are the qualities of being a professional poker player and you've
• 6:14
  already just touched on them and maybe elaborate even more so on them? Being able to
• 6:20
  endure and thrive in high pressure situations, I would say is like one of the key aspects because
• 6:26
  you need to be able to stay cool under pressure. You can't just freak out because then your decision
• 6:32
  making goes out the window and you start acting from a more emotional aspect than rational. You
• 6:39
  always want to be rational in your decision making. So being able to differentiate between emotions
• 6:45
  and rationality is very important. I would say obviously being patient and disciplined is very
• 6:52
  key as well. Is there also a lot of stillness? Because I imagine when you're playing poker,
• 6:58
  at least from the little I've watched from shows and when I'm in Vegas or something like that,
• 7:04
  I notice the professional players. It's fascinating because there's such a clear difference between
• 7:09
  someone who just casually plays and someone who's professional and what I observe is in the professional
• 7:15
  players. They're more still. Their body is kind of more contained. How would you classify the
• 7:20
  difference between a casual poker player visually and a professional player visually?
• 7:27
  I think the main difference is probably discipline. As a professional poker player,
• 7:33
  you have to be disciplined. Otherwise, you're just never going to make it a part of being disciplined
• 7:39
  is having that stillness that you're referring to. Being cool under pressure, taking one decision
• 7:46
  at a time, not looking ahead and not looking back, just trying to operate from a rational
• 7:52
  standpoint rather than getting emotional over outcomes so you can control. So that's another thing
• 7:59
  leading into that that you have to be able to separate and be okay with making decisions with
• 8:07
  uncertain outcomes. That's something that's extremely challenging as a human being because we are
• 8:14
  dependent on the outcomes in our decision making and we have so much bias towards if a decision
• 8:20
  was the right one or the wrong one, depending on the outcome. But in a lot of what poker teaches you
• 8:25
  is that you just want to focus on making good decisions. The outcome is irrelevant. Obviously,
• 8:31
  it matters and can have a huge outcome of the game or even your life, but you just have to
• 8:38
  separate yourself from that. I'm even realizing right now that I even am assuming that I know
• 8:44
  what poker is, but what is poker to you? You've already embodied how you show up and you play
• 8:51
  poker, but what is the actual game? How is that different versus other card games?
• 8:57
  To me, I guess it's competition at a very high level with really high stakes. You're sort of playing
• 9:06
  in a equilibrium. You have your strategy, I have mine, and then we clash. It's whoever
• 9:13
  has the best strategy comes up on top. Because it's a zero-sum game, one of us is going to win
• 9:19
  and one of us is going to lose. The bigger mistakes you make, the bigger I benefit and vice versa.
• 9:26
  That's why it's so important to always make sure that you have some edge on your opponent because
• 9:32
  otherwise you're playing in a losing game. It's like when you show up to Vegas and you play
• 9:36
  Blackjack, you're never going to have an edge over to Casino. That's the difference. Compare
• 9:41
  poker and Blackjack, but to me, they're so totally different because I would never play Blackjack
• 9:47
  because I know it's a losing game, whereas in poker, I would only play games where I think I'm a winner.
• 9:53
  Otherwise, I'm just playing for Fountain, and I know I'm not beating that game, but my main
• 9:58
  objective is always playing in games where I think I have an edge.
• 10:02
  How do you get an edge in poker? Is it researching who you're playing against? Is it just mindset?
• 10:10
  What is an edge? It's very complex and fundamental games. Nowadays, the studying to figure out
• 10:19
  how to play the game looks a lot different than what did back when I was young. I started off
• 10:24
  reading books, reading magazines, watching poker on TV, and then figuring out my own strategy
• 10:31
  from there. Maybe reading on forums and discussing with my early friends what different strategies
• 10:37
  and whatnot. Nowadays, the game has evolved tremendously. You started a game using AI and something
• 10:45
  called solvers, and it's an AI that's place itself in a equilibrium to figure out the best strategy
• 10:53
  that's impossible to exploit, meaning that neither of the two components can have an edge,
• 10:59
  and then you can see both outputs. You know exactly which hands to raise, which hands to fold,
• 11:04
  how often, so poker is a lot about frequencies as well. It's not just about which hands to play,
• 11:09
  it's like how often do you play them? It's extremely complex, but that's what makes it fun,
• 11:15
  because for a human being, it's basically impossible to completely solve the game,
• 11:21
  and playing a non-exploitable strategy, meaning that you play strategy where no one can have an edge.
• 11:27
  You're making me think that AI is kind of like poker's version of steroids for, you know,
• 11:36
  athletes or something. You know what I mean? Almost like it's changing the nature of the game.
• 11:41
  Oh, for sure. Yeah, it's changed huge. It's a complete different game today than when I started
• 11:47
  playing, because back then when I started playing and we were reading books as a resource to get
• 11:52
  better at the game, it was like a lot of it was just trial and error, right? It was like my strategy
• 11:58
  versus stair strategy, and then we'll see you come out on top, and it's like you see different trends
• 12:03
  and stuff like people are doing different things and testing things out and some are more successful
• 12:09
  than others, but the bar was so low back then that you can get away with not being very good and
• 12:14
  still make a lot of money. Whereas today, you really have to study these outputs because people
• 12:19
  are starting to play more and more like the computer. So you have to play closer to the baseline
• 12:26
  of what we call game theory optimal, which is the computerized strategy, which decides how many
• 12:32
  hands you can play and from which positions. This is crazy. I didn't even know this was happening,
• 12:38
  but it makes sense that people would utilize AI to do this. Are you even finding yourself pushed out
• 12:44
  of it, or are you now converting and shifting your mindset to fit this new way of playing?
• 12:51
  Yeah, you have to, totally. Not always. You'll fall behind. I've been using this
• 12:56
  resources for close to 10 years now, but it's constantly evolving. This always new
• 13:02
  software coming out, which you can train in different aspects of the game,
• 13:07
  like you can drill pre-flop, you can drill final tables, you can drill multi-way pots,
• 13:13
  like the game tree is so huge that it's so hard to memorize and learn everything.
• 13:20
  So the key really is to utilize AI in a way where you study it, but you try to develop your own
• 13:27
  framework. So you try to see patterns. The computer likes to play this way with these combinations.
• 13:34
  So you try to like bucket a lot of hand classes rather than looking at, okay, how do I play
• 13:40
  this specific spot? I totally agree that it's kind of like poker's form of steroids and it's
• 13:46
  actually sadly being used like that because there's a lot of cheating going on nowadays online,
• 13:52
  so a lot of the poker sites are constantly advancing their counter software to detect
• 13:58
  cheating when it's going on and people are utilizing these software in real time,
• 14:03
  which is obviously illegal. I recently was talking to this older gentleman who is a jiu-jitsu
• 14:10
  master really, like he's very experienced been doing it for a long time. We got in a conversation
• 14:15
  about it and he said, you know, I'm not bigger and stronger than a lot of the other guys doing
• 14:20
  jiu-jitsu in this room. He said, but what I do is I understand the strategy and the techniques,
• 14:28
  and so I just wait until they make a mistake and then I got them. But I'm not strong or
• 14:33
  that so I'm not going to muscle past this, but I can just wait for the mistake. So in a sense is
• 14:38
  that because if everyone's using this technique of AI and they're really trying to think like a
• 14:43
  computer, so you are you basically, when you're playing them, are you just waiting for their
• 14:48
  humanness to make the mistake? Yeah, sort of. There's a little bit of similarities there, I would say,
• 14:54
  especially at the higher stakes where the fields are much smaller and the fields are also more
• 15:00
  polarized, meaning that there's the very, very elite players that are very well studied and
• 15:07
  will play very close to optimal. And then you have the wealthy businessmen, recreational pool
• 15:14
  of players that are playing very far from optimal and have a lot of flaws. So you can sort of say
• 15:23
  in a sense that the professionals there, they're not looking to battle versus the shutter. I mean,
• 15:28
  of course they will, but they realize that that's not where they're making their money. They're
• 15:32
  making the money of waiting in these games for the amateurs to make a mistake and then they can
• 15:37
  profit from that. So interesting. So let's go back to 2014. You're in the world series of poker,
• 15:44
  their main event, and you win. This is huge, right? I mean, this is beyond probably what you
• 15:51
  had ever experienced in your life. I mean, that first of all, didn't you win something like 10 million
• 15:56
  dollars? Isn't that more money than you would ever seen in your life at the time? Yeah, definitely.
• 16:02
  Take us back to that. Like, what was that like? First of all, I'm imagining like in that last game,
• 16:07
  and so you're like, you can almost see and feel the 10 million. Yeah, you can't reveal that,
• 16:15
  right? You have to stay very calm and focused. So can you share kind of like viscerally what that
• 16:20
  experience was like? And then of course, winning. I mean, obviously, crazy experience in the
• 16:28
  definitely the pinnacle of my poker career. You know, winning the world series of main event is
• 16:33
  like the number one goal of every professional poker player or any poker player, really. But it's
• 16:40
  one that's not really reasonable, attainable. Like even if you play it every every year for rest of
• 16:47
  your life, like for you to even final table it, you would be a very big dog underdog to do so.
• 16:53
  So to actually final table it and my sixth try and go all the way and winning it, especially coming
• 16:59
  back as a short stack was, you know, still to this day, I don't think it's really, it's really
• 17:05
  hit me yet. I'm sure there's just this elation of like dumbfoundedness of like what just happened.
• 17:12
  But then I have to imagine like, oh no, where do I go from here? Right? Because you reach the
• 17:18
  pinnacle in a sense towards what everyone's hoping to do. So what was the next moment like for you?
• 17:27
  People winning usually have like a different strategy like some people continue playing some
• 17:31
  just get out of poker because they realize, okay, well, I made a bunch of money and that was my goal.
• 17:38
  But for me, I've never been into poker because of the money and I think that's helped me
• 17:44
  tremendously of making decisions because I haven't made a decision from a financial motive or
• 17:51
  standpoint. I've just tried to play my game and play poker out of a from a point of passion and
• 17:59
  love of the game. So knowing that heading in and after winning, I didn't see any reason to
• 18:08
  hang out to gloves and move on because I, you know, I still love the game and now I felt like,
• 18:13
  okay, I'm on top of the world in poker and I almost felt like a responsibility to now be this
• 18:19
  ambassador for the game and this spoke person for poker and I was going to widen it to a wider audience
• 18:26
  and do all these media obligations that people expect that you do, especially since I was a
• 18:33
  professional player as well. And I'd already had some success, you know, the European tour,
• 18:38
  nothing to this level, but you know, I had some big scores. So the money was massive, like much
• 18:44
  bigger than anything I ever won before, but it wasn't, I wouldn't say it was completely live-changing.
• 18:50
  So what I did was I just continued playing, never really took a break. I actually like went to
• 18:56
  a new tournament just a couple of months later and then just continue playing from there.
• 19:02
  Looking back at it though, I wish I hadn't, I wish I had taken some more time to properly digest and,
• 19:09
  you know, ask some tougher questions of like, what is it that motivates me now?
• 19:14
  Now, once I've reached this huge milestone post the win, it was definitely something that I
• 19:20
  struggled with. I could feel that I wasn't as motivated to study or to play. I didn't enjoy it
• 19:26
  as much because I knew that I knew the feeling of winning wasn't as good as I imagined it to be.
• 19:36
  It was great, don't get me wrong, but like, I did feel like I didn't get to enjoy it because I
• 19:41
  just couldn't like wrap my head around what happened and then, you know, all the exposure and
• 19:47
  everything that comes from it. It was great, but it was also quite overwhelming for me.
• 19:54
  Knowing that and like, what am I playing for now? You know, if I were to win again, would it be
• 20:00
  twice as nice or would it be less nice because I've already done it? And it's also not really,
• 20:06
  like I said, it's not really a reasonable expectation to ever even final table the main event again.
• 20:13
  What am I doing this for? And it's the time to move on.
• 20:16
  It's almost like an identity crisis. What did you land on? Because I know you definitely have
• 20:22
  gone further with it. Where are you going now with your poker playing, but even beyond poker?
• 20:30
  Yeah, the identity is also a huge thing, you know, giving up. I was only six years into my
• 20:36
  poker career at the time, but it's still six years. And then before that, I was a chef. So like,
• 20:42
  what else would I do? Like those are the two things I know. So when you don't have something new
• 20:47
  lined up or a new clear path, I think it's very easy and comfortable to just continue what you
• 20:52
  already know. And you know, you have all your friends. You know, you know, people, I was
• 20:58
  considered myself like very good at what I did. So it would make sense to continue playing,
• 21:04
  but deep down in me, I felt still felt like a conflict where I knew I wasn't as motivated as
• 21:10
  I was before. So I wish I would have taken more time off and just properly digest and maybe
• 21:16
  explore it out of the things. How do you think now that you've had like 10 or 11 years of space
• 21:23
  from winning that? And we were talking about well, one of the skills of poker playing is stillness.
• 21:30
  Like, are you able just to be with yourself, your thoughts? I mean, you're a new father as well.
• 21:35
  So I imagine there's there's a lot of newness going on right now. But how does stillness show up in
• 21:41
  your life now? The way everything sort of worked out is that I kept playing poker post the win.
• 21:48
  And you know, my motivation has gone up and down since and I've had successes after and long periods
• 21:56
  of really hard times as well. So that sort of like refueled my motivation to come back and
• 22:02
  prove to myself that I still have what it takes to win in an extremely competitive game.
• 22:07
  But now I'm at a point where I'm definitely looking at life after poker. What's next?
• 22:13
  Because I feel like I want to do more outside of the game. I'm very grateful of everything
• 22:18
  that poker has given me and the platform and all the success and the financial freedom of having
• 22:25
  choices that I otherwise wouldn't have. Alongside my poker career, I started angel investing,
• 22:32
  which is something I really enjoy. I see a lot of similarities to poker there. But the main
• 22:38
  difference is that investing is not a series of some game like everyone can actually win.
• 22:44
  So that's what I like about it. And you're building something that's real. Like you really
• 22:49
  building businesses that provide value for people. And that's something that really motivates me.
• 22:57
  What kind of investments are you finding yourself attracted to?
• 23:01
  So far, I've mostly been drawn to consumer market. I love the consumer sector, I think,
• 23:10
  because there's a lot of psychology involved with a physical product that you sell directly
• 23:18
  to consumer or customers. I love to dissect brands and think about them from a deeper level of
• 23:24
  what attracts what makes some companies work and others don't, like what makes them stand up.
• 23:30
  Like is it the branding? Is it the customer service? Is there sales channels? All those aspects
• 23:39
  I love to think about. So that's something that I'm more drawn to rather than
• 23:46
  be-to-be SaaS products. Are you finding yourself gravitating towards food products because you were
• 23:52
  in restaurant or no? No, it's sort of had the opposite effect. When I was very young,
• 23:58
  I always dreamt of starting a restaurant. Then soon as I started working in restaurants,
• 24:03
  and I saw the owners and all the stress that they were experiencing, I realized quite quickly
• 24:12
  that that's not who I want to be. Let's share a little bit about that because I talk a lot
• 24:18
  about it. Sometimes I say how to me, cooks or chefs in the restaurant business are like
• 24:24
  pirates or modern day pirates because they're living these crazy lives. They're up really late at
• 24:31
  night. A lot of them are chain-smoking. They're on their feet all day. In many ways, they might be,
• 24:37
  I know not every restaurant is a healthy restaurant, but they might be espousing making food that
• 24:42
  is to nourish people, but they are the ones that are not nourished. No, I can totally relate to that.
• 24:47
  I think it's like a young man's game as well. A lot of fun when you were in your young 20s,
• 24:53
  but thinking now to go back to that environment does not sound very appealing to me. I do miss
• 24:59
  some aspects of it, like coming in, working through the list, prepping everything, doors open,
• 25:06
  service, working as a team, problem-solving, cleaning up the kitchen,
• 25:14
  sharing a beer and talking some shit, and then go home and do it all over the following day.
• 25:20
  That aspect I miss, but as a whole, yeah, I totally agree. It's one of the hardest
• 25:27
  professions you can have. It's sort of strange because you can work in a kitchen and feel like
• 25:33
  you're part of a team because you're all in the kitchen. But when you're doing your job,
• 25:38
  you're depending on the kitchen, but most kitchens, you're very isolated. You know you're quiet,
• 25:43
  you're not necessarily talking when you're working. You're all working towards the same goal,
• 25:50
  but you're independently doing your job. It's only afterwards or before work starts or
• 25:56
  after work that you really get to be a part of the community. Is that kind of how poker plain is as
• 26:01
  well? Totally. Yeah, I've actually never made that connection, but yeah, you totally right.
• 26:07
  And that's probably what draw me to both careers, actually, because I'm a quite introvert
• 26:14
  as person. But I also like the social aspects, but in moderation, and especially when I'm focused,
• 26:20
  I don't like to talk to people. I just like to focus on what I'm doing. And then we can talk about
• 26:25
  it after. But yeah, it's definitely a strong parallel there. And poker can be extremely lonely,
• 26:33
  even though I have lots of friends like we're all competing against each other, essentially. And
• 26:38
  there's no friends at the poker table. And you're only as good as your last result and
• 26:43
  each one for themselves. And since it is the CRSOM game, it's very competitive. So you just
• 26:48
  kind of have to have them mentality. Is the poker community such, I think of the parallel
• 26:54
  like politics? So even after you've played and you guys are like, say, hanging out together,
• 26:59
  you're still protective of your process, just like a politician might not want to reveal all
• 27:03
  their cards, you know, internal cards. I have to imagine that that's probably how you guys
• 27:08
  are with each other as well, right? Because you don't want to reveal too much of your process,
• 27:13
  because then they could use that against you next time they play, right? No, there's not much
• 27:17
  of that to be honest with you because there's this so rare that the same exact situation is going
• 27:22
  to occur, especially versus the same person. And nowadays most of the big games, their live streamed
• 27:29
  anyway with commentators and whole cards up and everything is like very face up these days.
• 27:35
  So everyone knows how's the good idea of how everyone plays anyway. But usually like after the
• 27:40
  day ends and we hang out, we don't really talk about poker anyway. What do you guys talk about?
• 27:47
  Just go to everything else or our poker players secretly into like lumberjacking or something.
• 27:54
  Mostly sports. So cool down by watching sports. I mean, there's so many skills that we've
• 28:00
  talked about that poker and even sheffing and body. I know you created like a like a program for
• 28:10
  people to support people in learning poker to understanding these traits. For the people
• 28:16
  listening or watching this podcast, what are a few things that people could do to get comfortable
• 28:23
  with their stillness in your opinion? Or what are some things you do to support these traits in
• 28:28
  yourself? The main thing is to try to operate from a place of rationale and not from emotion,
• 28:37
  try to separate the two. I think that's key. And also like thinking long term, not short term,
• 28:43
  as humans were sort of drawn to both making decisions from a emotional standpoint.
• 28:51
  You talked about like, okay, you won this event and then you had some struggles. How did you deal
• 28:57
  with the downs? Yeah, that's the toughest aspect of what I do. What I did was I tried to devote even
• 29:08
  more time to studying and to take breaks. Having something to look forward to out that
• 29:14
  aren't poker-related, you know, like I stuck to my routine, you know, exercising every day before
• 29:21
  I play, you know, eating nutritious food, getting enough sleep, meditating, all those things,
• 29:29
  sort of like hit the reset button every time I play. I know some guys that are just playing and
• 29:36
  then they go on a bad run and they wake up the next day and they just fire up more games.
• 29:42
  I can never do that. I need to have a reset and stick to my routine. And then I'm good to go
• 29:50
  again. Like regardless of what happened the previous day, pregame ritual is very important to
• 29:55
  me, very key. And it's something that I'd like always stuck to. Being a new dad and having a child,
• 30:01
  how is that affecting routine for you? Because clearly this is your first time being a father,
• 30:07
  so you have no routine. You're figuring it out. It's cool because it kind of forces you to
• 30:15
  be more flexible and realize that like you just got to do things whenever there's, you know,
• 30:25
  free time and you get a window and you have to be a bit more flexible and in your
• 30:32
  rigidness and not expect that everything's going to happen exactly when you want it because
• 30:37
  all of a sudden there's a curveball and he's not sleeping that night or right?
• 30:43
  You got to just be present with it all. When you're playing poker, how much of it is that presence?
• 30:49
  Because at one point you can have as much strategy as you want, but you just have to be present
• 30:55
  with where you are in the game, right? Exactly. You have to be flexible at the poker table too,
• 31:01
  because you never know what's going to happen. And there's plenty of curveball there as well.
• 31:06
  Your first hand, you might be looking down at pocket aces and think, oh shoot, I'm going to win
• 31:11
  this tournament. And then, you know, you get it in versus pocket kings and you're out, you know,
• 31:17
  the very first hand like that could happen. So there's a lot of things that can happen that are
• 31:22
  totally unexpected and out of your control. So just being okay with that, I think, is a good
• 31:28
  starting point. So my family and I, we have a deck of cards on our table, our dinner table,
• 31:33
  we find it really, it keeps us at the table longer and it kind of inspires more conversation
• 31:42
  and it inspires presence because instead of finishing your food and then going off in your own
• 31:47
  directions, you might sit at the table and playfully, you know, for us, we play gin rummy a lot.
• 31:53
  But if we were to start playing poker because that is something I believe is really smart to
• 31:57
  teach kids. It's precisely for all the things we've already talked about because I think the
• 32:03
  characteristics that poker instills are things that are helpful to have in life. How do you
• 32:11
  recommend someone who's never really played poker, start playing poker? I guess, uh, start by
• 32:16
  reading up on the rules, what, what had speed, what, and then you can just find basic strategies
• 32:22
  online like it's, it's pretty, pretty simple and then I would just have those as a printout on the
• 32:27
  tables, everyone can see to begin with and then sure as you become more advanced, you can scratch
• 32:33
  those and start playing for real and then maybe discuss the strategies afterwards. I think that's
• 32:39
  very helpful and there's something that I do with a lot of my friends and high level players,
• 32:45
  like we talk about strategy quite openly because poker is a game where you play against other
• 32:50
  humans, right? Yeah, we learn from watching the computer play the computer, but that's not in
• 32:55
  reality. That's not the end goal. Like we're still going to continue play versus humans.
• 33:01
  Learning how other people think is such a key aspect of the game and not just in poker,
• 33:06
  like I think in life as well. So I've had tremendous benefit of trying to like dissect and really
• 33:13
  getting into people's brains and understanding how they think and it goes as far as like I can
• 33:19
  sit down at a table in Vegas playing versus someone I've never played before, but I know the type,
• 33:25
  you know, I've seen this type before. So I know how he's going to perceive this situation and then I
• 33:33
  know how to counter that and to play against that strategy. Interesting. So you've gotten really
• 33:41
  good at reading people then as well. Yeah, you sort of kind of like group people into certain player
• 33:46
  types and then you you sort of know their approach to game and then you constantly updating that
• 33:53
  that information and that process as he gathering more data as you seeing everything is
• 34:00
  poker is all about information, right. So in the beginning, you have very little information.
• 34:04
  If you're playing versus someone that you never played with before, but the more you play,
• 34:09
  the more you see the more you see how they're acting, you know, other acting fast, they're acting
• 34:14
  slow, you're normally acting fast, but now they're acting slow. Like that's a break in the pattern.
• 34:20
  So it's a lot about pattern recognition as well. To understand pattern recognition, you need a
• 34:25
  baseline. So you need to understand you need to know how this person normally acts. So you're always
• 34:30
  looking for things that stick out that are deviating from this pattern recognition and then ask
• 34:39
  yourself, why like why is he acting slow now? Is he because he's thinking about bluffing? Is it
• 34:44
  because he doesn't know how much too bad because he really wants to get paid by his really good hand?
• 34:51
  So fast thing. Well, so you have, as I mentioned, you have a program that people can
• 34:56
  do. How would they get involved with that? Where do they go to find that?
• 35:01
  I'll post a link in the show notes. I do private coaching as well, which is something I really
• 35:06
  enjoy because then you really get to know the person and I can sort of tailor the studying
• 35:11
  towards them specifically because progress quite unique in a way that like everyone has their
• 35:17
  own playing style. And it's quite important to like develop that and to take that into consideration.
• 35:23
  So it's not like a one size fits all like it's not that you can just like take one strategy and
• 35:29
  and implement that like you have to follow your own strategy.
• 35:33
  Once you lock into your style of playing that you kind of that that's the piece that kind of
• 35:39
  continues onward or do you find people like is AI getting people to change their styles?
• 35:48
  A little bit. Yeah, just because you can't get away with as much as you used to.
• 35:54
  You know, people used to play like absolutely crazy back in the day. They used to play way
• 35:57
  too many hands. And now you just can't do that because people are too savvy and they're just going
• 36:03
  profit from me from you opening up that much. So the I think as a whole people are playing less
• 36:10
  hands, but they're playing in more aggressively, which is the biggest shift. So back in the day,
• 36:16
  people used to play more hands, but passive, meaning that they weren't putting as much money
• 36:21
  in the pot. They're just trying to small ball is called like when you raise a lot of hands,
• 36:26
  try to take it down without risking too much. But nowadays it's like people play less hands,
• 36:31
  but they play much more aggressively, so they're putting much more pressure on you. So if you
• 36:36
  want to play a hand, you have to be willing to put in money before the flop, on the flop,
• 36:41
  on the turn, on the river, if you want to see their hand. Oh, man. See, I need to learn all these terms.
• 36:49
  Well, thank you again. And we'll put all your information in the show notes so people can
• 36:55
  find you on socials and they can find your program as well. Thank you so much for sharing your
• 37:00
  poker expertise with everybody. Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral.
• 37:08
  If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You could find
• 37:13
  the show notes, links and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's E-A-T-P-L-U-C-K dot com.
• 37:23
  And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too.
• 37:28
  Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.