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It’s been too long since I’ve written. I guess I was focused more on making the show as well as some other personal things, trips out of town, finding a job, etc.

I don’t have a new episode out yet in part because of that, as I didn’t have much time to record, but probably more importantly because I couldn’t line up a guest in time. I’m gonna try to get back on that as soon as possible.

My actual time committed to playing poker has been very sporadic of late. Some of that is due to the aforementioned reasons. Some of it is just that it’s hard to keep up my confidence on this losing streak I’ve been on. Because I play on sites that don’t save hand histories, I can’t quantify exactly how bad it is. But I’ve been losing over my last 850 tournaments with an average buyin in the low $30s. Even though I know I have some skills I need to improve and I’m far from a perfect player, I am certainly good enough at those stakes that that is not reflective of my ability.

And while I can tell myself it’s just something I need to grind through and that it’ll turn around… it’s hard to actually believe that, you know? And hard not to think that, even if my goal is just making money, that finding a job (or getting enough people to listen to the podcast that it actually generates revenue) would be a better use of my time.

It’s certainly not fun to be going through this. Taking the fun out of the game makes it hard to want to keep playing.

Even having said all that, I think as much as anything I need a shift in mindset. It’s hard not to see myself as unlucky given all this, that I just can’t ever get the break I need. That every time I come to a point where I’m close to moving up to meaningful stakes or where a win could really break me through, I instead go on a long losing streak. (This year, in buyins $80 and up, I’m at something like a -93% ROI.) And now that losing streak has reached eight and a half months.

But I do think, especially with poker, a lot of that is just perception. It’s something Andrew Lichtenberger and I discussed when he appeared on the podcast, the idea that a lot of whether we see ourselves as lucky or not is how we interpret events, and our mindsets can do a lot to shape our realities.

The problem is, I don’t know how to change mine.

I feel like there are poker players who see themselves as lucky, just decide to, and then they are, and they win. They’re obviously good players, too, but I don’t know how they just decided to see themselves that way, and I can’t seem to do it for myself.

Every time I convince myself I’m gonna take a more emotionally mature approach at the tables, every time I say I’m gonna focus on the ways I get lucky instead of the ways I get unlucky, what actually ends up happening is, I just lose even more until I finally snap. It never actually ends up affecting anything, and I just see myself as unlucky all over again.

Again, the length of this losing streak has a lot to do with this. I don’t know how I’m supposed to see myself as lucky when the first 2-4 hours of every session I lose every time I’m all-in for my tournament life. I don’t know how I’m supposed to see myself as lucky when I keep losing with the best hand. I don’t know how to see myself as lucky when I have been objectively unlucky at poker for eight and a half months.

What am I to do about this? Who has mindset advice?

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The good news is, I decided to start playing on CoinPoker after I learned my buddy Jon Van Fleet (an episode 3 guest!) was a sponsored pro there. I felt like I should expand my horizons a little, because so much of my experience with the other sites has degraded:

• ACR has sucked for a while with all the bots and collusion they don’t care about, and I went on a long streak at a -30% ROI there, and that was enough to get me to quit.
• I used to win on Ignition, but that stopped happening, the software sucks, and the site flagrantly dumps bots into tournaments at the end of late registration so there’s no overlay, and then those bots collude to make sure they all mincash.
• I never became a winning player on Global, even though I think the competition is not very good. I have no idea why.

ClubWPT Gold I was doing great on for the first eight months or so. Then they started cutting back the vanilla tournaments and the small- and mid-sized field tournaments. And I’ve been on a losing streak there for eight months. The competition is still fairly soft, but so many of the tournaments are huge fields now, and those are that much more difficult to win. And the site is full of PKOs, which I’ve never been that good at winning, and bounty tournaments, which just remove a bunch of the prize pool along the way. (I’ve had better luck in mystery bounties, where at least there’s hope of hitting a big prize for everyone.)

Anyway, my first two sessions on CoinPoker, I made a final table each one. Which was the first time in about two months that happened. Admittedly, there weren’t a lot of tournaments played over that period, for all the reasons I stated. It just gets hard to stay motivated when you keep having 7-8 session losing streaks, when even your big cashes don’t get you back to even. (And especially for me, who has very frustratingly become unable to close a tournament. I’m 0-3 heads-up this year after going 1-9 last year, and I have no idea why.)

They weren’t that big. One I only finished sixth. The other we made a deal four-handed when we were all pretty close to even and pretty deep, so I took a little less than second place. Still, encouraging. I just need to adjust my playing schedule so I can hit more events on the site, because the schedule is not at all geared to Americans, especially night owls like me.

Well, that was a lot to write. Hopefully getting it off my chest will help me unpack any negativity I’m carrying around. And hopefully I’ll be able to book some more guests and resume the show soon. If you have any tips or advice on either one, please reach out.

Sam Greenwood and I have a long and pretty wide-ranging conversation. It was a lot of fun, and I think it’ll be a lot of fun to listen to.

Audio-only link below (apparently WordPress doesn’t like embedding RSS):

https://rss.com/podcasts/cards-speak/2669081

Is now here:

https://media.rss.com/cards-speak/feed.xml

The first episode will be out later this week. You can still subscribe to the Patreon to get advance access to the public episodes as well as bonus episodes and other exclusive content.

Sam Greenwood and I had a pretty long and wide-ranging conversation today that I think went very well and bodes well for the show.

Patreon subscribers can listen now. The full episode will be made available to the public next week, in a show of good faith to encourage Patreon subscribers.

In the future, though, I’m hoping to move to a model where some of the content is Patreon-exclusive rather than just early access. For example, this episode is 2 1/2 hours long; I might make half or the first 1:30 available to the public, and then the remainder as a Patreon exclusive. Or I may go with the more traditional model, if I can get enough guests for two episodes a week, where we release one to the public and one for Patreon subscribers only.

And here’s a little video to discuss today’s work. I may also make a couple of video clips of the episode to promote it. But I just spent five hours recording, uploading, making thumbnails, and whatnot, so I am gonna give myself a break and maybe work on that later tonight or tomorrow.

I’ll try to keep this brief, because I was hoping to have more to say about the last week. But as it turned out, I got food poisoning midweek and that threw off my entire schedule, for both playing poker and recording the show.

Last Sunday, though, I did finally get off the skid in a nice way, with another 2nd-place finish in the WPT $11 12.5k turbo. Frustrating, because it was second place again, and I thought I had a skill advantage and we were deep enough that I could have won. And WPT is pretty top-heavy.

But I’m 1-11 in my last 12 heads-up tournament matches. That just feels like I’m leaving a ton of money on the table. I’m sure some of it is running bad, but I’m starting to fear my heads-up game has become too passive, and maybe I’m trying to small-ball too much, and not stealing pots enough. Maybe some of it is bad luck: Even when I’ve played opponents who aren’t very good heads-up and who will let me do that, it seems like I inevitably get in a pot where I have to put money in with a strong hand that’s still no good. (I keep running into situations like pair + nut flush draw against top pair or two pair, two pair against a straight, straight against a flush.)

So I’m gonna try to review my play and see if I’m doing something wrong.

I was hoping to use the last week to grind more or start recording podcast episodes, but getting sick midweek scuttled all of those plans. To be honest, I still don’t feel like I’m back to full strength. I’ve been able to eat normally the last couple of days, but I’m constantly fatigued in a way I feel like I shouldn’t be. I slept nine hours last night and was still dazed and nearly dozing off while I tried to play today. And then the session was going poorly and I was losing all the big pots from ahead again, so I decided not to push myself. My health comes first.

(Not to just make this bad beat complaints, but for one example, I managed to play a PLO hand where I had my opponent drawing to two outs with one card to come, and lost. Do you know how hard it is to get in a PLO spot with 95% equity? Just getting in one at all is worth writing about.)

Anyway, I should have more free time this week, so I hope to get more grinding in and also record at least our first episode. I’ll start reaching out to more potential guests, too. And if you read this and want to come on the show, get in touch!

If you only follow my work here and not on Media Magpies, then this is a good time to tell you, my annual TV year in review for 2025 is finally ready for publication. Working on this project here, as well as a couple of the personal events I mentioned on the blog, delayed me from finishing. It’ll come out over the next three days, starting at noon Pacific on Thursday, if you’d like to pop over and read it.

So, good news on the pod – I tested out my call / recording setup, and I worked out the bugs. So I think we might get the first episode in the can this week. It’ll take some editing and some time before it goes out to the public— I want there to be a little incentive to join the Patreon. (Ideally, long term, we’ll do one free and one for subscribers, but right now there’s just going to be a delay for non-subscribers, because we gotta build an audience first.)

So, be on the lookout for that soon. I have to update a few things related to that and start promoting what’s coming up.

In poker, nothing really special going on. Steered out of a brutal February with a positive start to March. Not a highly positive start— and bubbling the final table of the $55 20k on WPT yesterday stung— but, nevertheless, not the constant losing streak that February was, which is good. So I gotta get on the horse more.

Anyway! Be on the lookout soon for a more definitive announcement regarding the first episode.

First, to the first point of that headline: I wrote today’s Sunday Special for Sam Greenwood’s Punt of the Day blog, and you can read it now here.

Anyway, it’s Sunday, and while I’m getting back on the horse soon for some tournaments, I wanted to quickly write up something both for my POTD guest article and to review my own play of late. It’s been a mess.

My horrible session that I wrote about last weekend was followed with an equally bad session on Sunday in terms of results, but even worse, it really got to my mindset. I started playing pretty badly and desperately forcing the action in a few spots. I ran into one of the worst feelings you can have as a tournament player, the belief that, actually, I couldn’t win any of these tournaments. I believe I can win any time I play, or I don’t play, but I was playing so badly that I lost that belief.

So I quit and took a few days off to reset my mindset.

Then when I played again Friday, I didn’t lose as much but ran just horrifically bad once again. Probably the emblematic hand here:

An $11 bounty, early on. A bad loose-player open limps from the hijack off 75BB. I (47BB) am in the cutoff with AcTc and raise to 3bb. The small blind (27BB) 3-bets to 10.5bb. The hijack cold calls. That’s a worrying size from the SB, but I decide my hand’s nut potential, plus the bounty potential from the small stack, plus the chance that I double through HJ, who is certainly much too wide here, make this worth taking the variance of calling and going to the flop.

Flop (33.5BB): As 5s 5d. It checks to me, I bet 15% pot (5BB). SB folds, HJ calls.

Turn (43.5BB): Td. HJ checks. I decide that I now beat all the other Ax hands (except A5) and might get called by them drawing to three outs (or none), plus the two fives to chop, make it a good spot to shove for value. I shove for my last 31.5BB, about 72% pot. HJ tanks and calls with… QcJs.

River (106.5BB): Kd. HJ wins with a straight.

Villain makes the wrong decision at every decision point, I get in a 100BB pot with him drawing to four outs with one to come, and he wins. That kind of day.

So I find myself torn. On the one hand, one of the best ways to not let a bad beat affect you is to just get back on the horse. On the other hand, if I’m losing my mental focus and control and starting to tilt, then I don’t want to play under those conditions. But more importantly, if I want to put in the volume I want to put in, I’m not gonna do it if I have to take long breaks every time I hit a downswing.

So I’m continuing to work on both keeping my mental game strong and making more time to actually put in the grind at the tables. Both of these will require some changes of habit and adjustments to mindset. My schedule isn’t allowing me for enough time to get things done in the morning before playing and I want to change that. Especially since some kind of physical activity, even on the lighter side like walking, before playing helps me a lot mentally. Getting up earlier will also give me more time to work on other things, like this website and the podcast, before playing.

So, the journey continues. It’s been a tough month, but I’m not giving up yet. And I’m hoping this week I can nail down some of the scheduling for the podcast and actually get that up and running, and hopefully with your support turn it into something high-quality and meaningful that’s worth watching or listening to.

‘Til next time.

So… I’ve been saying for a while that we were getting close to getting set up, but personal things kept getting in the way. Well, that was partially true for a while: I probably could have gotten the ball rolling sooner, but everyday responsibilities took some time, but I was also thwarted by my own fear and anxiety about whether I could even get this project off the ground or if it would fail to launch.

Mental health can be a bitch, huh?

Now that I’ve said that… I’ve made some strides to actually get closer to getting the project underway. I’ve even started lining up some guests for Cards Speak (and if you know poker, they will be some good ones you will recognize). Unfortunately, this week and next, I actually have (and have had) some serious personal and family matters to attend to. I’ve had a couple of deaths in the family recently, and, well, to be starkly honest, the grief from that has exacerbated some of my existing mental health problems, and that’s caused or perhaps brought to light some problems at home I needed to address… and unfortunately, again, while I’ve been trying to better address my mental health, it can be a bit of trial and error, and at the moment I’m not dealing with things very well.

But, having said all that, it is true that I’m underway getting the show set up. Hopefully once this dark fuckin’ period passes, I will be able to announce something definite about when Cards Speak will premiere.

And, as always, sign up to the Patreon, please, to support the project and to be able to participate with features like audience questions and offer feedback about what you want to see.