#27 - 10 Million Reasons Why He Plays Poker

we just kinda started this regular poker games for me just like a way to like make all money on the side i was hungry i was looking for more games and i like thought i was good at this thing while nineteen i built up from basically a hundred dollars to a hundred and eighty thousand dollars i'm doing the math of how i'm gonna make millions dollars a year do i go with a class or do i play this guy heads up who's sitting there at twenty thousand dollars we ended up renting a nine bedroom house calling into the poker house we started throwing these parties where we'd have like three hundred people show up and you know where these kids renting into all this money over the course of the next six to nine months i basically lost at all and even got myself in fifty thousand dollar death i got super depressed i'm in this hole i don't know how many get out i ended up finally having my first big tournament win i think i won like thirty grand that's basically one my career kind of shot off and i never really looked back hundred thousand three hundred k five hundred k seven hundred and seventy k the now one like three months later i'd made one point seven million five million is not enough ten million twenty million dollars hundred million dollars half billion hundred and fifty million dollars one or two people in a bedroom actually put threats to these like giant multi dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose add another zero to that price buddy had two more zeros first million every week we sit down with self made millionaires and asked them how did you do it i didn't start a podcast i started my own personal business school and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands and businesses that you find today i wanted to know the real stories what all the details like how did you get your first hundred customers what did it feel like shit i ask them how do you spend your money now that you're rich and what would you do if you're were starting over from scratch again today if you're like me and you wanna own your own business instead of living a nine to five job this is the podcast for you the hustle presents my first million if you i'm here we did it i'm excited i'm gonna frame this for people because i don't know how much of my audience knows about you so i gotta do like a proper intro so we have for us jo here i'm gonna just read these accomplishments you just sit there and just ba okay ready you're a professional poker player yeah six world series poker final tables i didn't know that you were named world poker tour player of the year yep that's pretty damn good and most importantly of all i think this number is right this is what wikipedia tells me ten million and career lifetime earnings playing poker yes wow how does that feel and your nickname was the toilet why is your nickname the toilet that's the most popular interview question and talk my of course spoke because when i first started playing in college you know i had no idea what i was doing kinda was self top beginning so just like suited cards must be good so i'd play like every suited hand and i'd get all these flush and my room roommates would get super annoyed and it'd be like damn the toilet flush again so when i had to make an online screen name it'll play online wasn't really taking it too seriously i was like i haven't calls with the toilet boom toilet and next thing you now the toilets is playing like high stakes fifteen years later and there's you know the media loves it because it's like the toilet flush away the competition and the toilet they gets flushed like you're marketing genius and you didn't realize it at the time okay so how does a nice round kid like you become a professional poker player that's not a career path it wasn't what i expected either you know i started playing freshman year in college just you know some guys were playing in the dorm room one guy was trying to get edwin everyone together to teach him out of play so you know we put together a little tournament actually won the first tournament i played it was all of us and only one of the guys had played before yeah so we just kinda started this regular poker game and for me it just like a way to like make some yeah college money on the side and what's funny actually kind think two weeks in that i was down a hundred and eighty dollars and i was like man like like i was college yeah like i was ask you like where was like i need like step away right i not do this you know if i get to minus two hundred i'm just gonna stop right i don't know if i would've have stopped or not like i thought i would at the time but either way i went in a big heater yeah and over the next few weeks ended up like up a thousand dollars at the beginning i was just really good at like outs smart people good at reading people i didn't really you know know too much of fundamentals and that kind of thing just instincts at the time yeah just instincts at the time and i started seeking out kinda you know bigger games i started going to other f other dorm started playing other places so what what were the stakes of the first games that you're so like ten dollar buy ten dollar little sit go like a turn the first one i played with a tournament but after that it was all cash games okay so ten dollar buy ins and then you sort of you graduate up to where i just i was hungry i was looking for more games and i like thought i was good at this thing so i ended up winning another tournament at some f eternity there's was only two of us that weren't from the f opportunity and the guy who got second was the other guy and i realized he was pretty good and he realized i was pretty good so we started talking we became friends and you know he was like i got this five dollar game you know he invited me his thing yep and that's ben la so he became know if you've seen like rounder like you know like worm and mike like kinda like bank partners yeah he was like my bank partner so he'd been playing since he was a kid and he'd read every poker book and like knew the math behind it so he kinda helped me kinda understand that there's some fundamentals of the game you know like here's like the starting hands like this the chance of you getting a flush like so he kinda helped me a little bit like understand the fundamentals and i probably helped him in the fact that all just like no like we're not playing this like the go find bigger games you know right so kept going for bigger games and eventually you know we couldn't find a bigger game at twenty dollars so do we start our own game so now you know we're running our own game and in a dorm room or we this is in the dorms and you know start playing online start going like this local charity casino and you know what one thing led to another and you know next fast forward and you know we're making weekend trips to vegas that's when stuff started getting really crazy so i think i made like few thousand dollars online you know the first time the vegas was pretty hilarious because i remember just walking over to ben's dorm room next door i think it was maybe like midnight or something i looked up a bunch of to vegas and i was like ben like we should go to vegas and he was like yeah you know definitely man i'm down like you know been talking about it like let me know i'm like no like we need to go to vegas now right and he's was just like what do you mean i was like i looked up flights to a flight at six am i was like i talked to our friend g he said if you let him borrow your mustang he'll drive us to today the airport tow harris at the hour drive and he's just like you know it's a thursday he's like what about spanish homework i'm like jeez puerto rican on the way we'll convince him the door spanish homework as well and we literally did he just like can't think of a reason not to go right and we literally just up and went to vegas like two nineteen year olds and i think we had maybe like a ten thousand dollar bank rule at this point so we brought like two thousand dollars each went to the bella played cash gains there obviously we're only nineteen so we would dress up and like a shirt and tie and like act like you're were like just came from work or whatever and you know i i learned all these little tricks so we'd walk in past the guy that ids you at like bay one like when we're here in san jose and i literally like be on my phone acting like i'm yelling at an employee right like just whatever i can do to like pass that guy yeah exactly my favorite one was like when was at the ba on himself like i literally just i noticed the floor man like every time you see them they like oh hey john jo yeah i was like these guys don't remember everyone like there's no way yeah so every time i'd see a floor man i just read their name tag and i'm like oh hey john like how's it going and you're playing high stakes i got at that point they're gonna be too embarrassed idea you know you're acting like you have a relationship with these guys right it literally works like a hundred percent of time just to set the context you're in college you're supposed to be doing what what was the like stated plan i'm in college studying i was economics and business majors so yeah i mean i was passionate about business i want to be an entrepreneur i did in high school we had this like student run business selling silk screens printed t shirts right so that's where i kinda got my passion for entrepreneurship i joined the business for attorney in college it alpha hep that was my plan plan was to go to business and then you start on this sort of slippery slope luckily we know the story ended well for you there are many people who start with that five dollar cash game then go ten it had it's ups and downs so it would definitely wasn't all good over the course of three to six months while nineteen i built up from basically a hundred dollars to a hundred and eighty thousand dollars as a nineteen year old college student hundred and eighty k hundred and eighty k i'm just like this dorm celebrity like the a local you know schools doing articles on me and i'm living the live like we're in college like we're throwing crazy parties yeah what do you even do with a hundred eighty k when you're nineteen years old man we would pay our friends to just like do the stupidest things like go drink this do this go talk to that girl go say this it was fun we ended up renting a nine bedroom house calling it the poker house we were running our own games we were coaching people we were playing online poker it's actually amazing the crowd that came out of that out of the guys we were teaching five of them now had million dollar stores on the big tours wow and probably about seven or eight of them our professional poker players just out of that circle which is pretty crazy actually yeah so we were doing that we're running these games and we started like throwing these parties where we'd have like you know three hundred people show up like nine c right like you know fred alfredo went to college you know like the bragging arch to the party of how good a party is gonna be was how many ke was gonna be and you know where are these kids running into all this money so every other party has like keystone and we have like the guinness the witch cider no one else is doing this so we're charging five dollars a cup so it was funny the first party we actually had to like argue over like who can put in money for the party and by the second one everybody was arguing over who can put in money because we were literally oh it was super profitable right yeah so already yeah so it it was pretty wild we probably threw some of the best parties on campus like forty thousand students there it was up there great so you're you're on this heater you've gone from basically a few hundred bucks a few thousand bucks now to a hundred and eighty k yeah at this point do you think oh there's a career or are you not even thinking about questions like that so i'm doing the math of how i'm gonna make a millions dollars a year right again i haven't actually learned the fundamentals of poker i'm naturally like pretty talented i'm super competitive it's not that it was all just natural talent i mean just to give some background like in middle school i started doing track in seventh grade i was like probably like on the slower side of the team by the end of eighth grade i was one of the fastest runners of the school in high school i became like one of the fastest runners in the district you know ran like a one fifty nine half mile four twenty nine mile and i was super competitive you have an obsessive person exactly for sure on the basketball team in seventh grade i had this big growth spurt i thought i was gonna be like the badass ass on the team and i getting cut i didn't even make the team right i was embarrassed so i spent the next twelve months literally doing like liners every day like pouring rain right like is literally like see that around like yeah like and i didn't think about at the time of looking back and like man that was crazy i you know i bought jump souls and just did everything i could do in the next year starting on the team and that's just kinda the personality i have just super competitive i'm always the guy like diving for loose balls you know bloody knees right i approach poker the same way too i just i get upset when of someone out does me you know it's not like you knew all the tactics of fundamental and math yet yeah but you're saying you had a certain natural aptitude yeah plus this obsessive personality where if you start with something you know you lose we have a bad experience you wanna correct that that was a trait you had naturally met a lot of people that are like this in fact when we hire for a company fe who you know very well we had the thing where which was we would look for degenerate and most most people view that as a negative definitely degenerate and we said you know a degenerate because for gameplay poker also i play poker degenerate is word is very common in the poker world it's a sickness it's a sickness it's a sickness but when it applied to a passion what the result is that you become really great at your craft oh for sure we always say like to be one of the top top poker players you need to be a degenerate but you need to learn how to tame it right exactly if somebody doesn't have that d democracy in them you can't put it in them it's a personality trait they want basically taking epic risks right okay so you're at this point where you think you're gonna be millions things are going well you've never really tasted bitter bitter defeat yeah on top of not having the fundamentals of poker i also don't have any concept of ban management so you explain for people what this means is it really we're gonna say a lot of poker terms this is one i think we should stop and explain this a i'm sure this is like super similar like investing in startups and it's just that you know if you're gonna play a cash game buying where it's a thousand dollars you know you need to have forty binds up to a hundred bind depending on if you're playing cash gains or tournaments but it's basically what percent of your nest egg yeah you're putting at risk on any you know if you're not a professional you know that could be you know lower more like twenty five to forty because you're not relying on this from income and it just kinda like rules of thumbs like that you need to follow based on you know your expected roi very similar to sure an angel investor and you wanna figure out how many bets you have you know for how don't bet on one company you you wanna have twenty five bets per potential so i had no concept of that they didn't really think about the long around variance i start playing this like super high stakes games what's super i mean i'm playing on like one hundred two hundred no limit like twenty thousand dollar buy in like online i'm just sitting there and it's like do i go to class or do i play this guy heads up sitting there at twenty thousand dollars i'm gonna crush them right i would crush a lot of these guys but the thing was when when you have bad fundamentals eventually people start to pick up on your weaknesses right and they figure how to get an edge on you so i kinda had this early advantage because i was playing this crazy hyper aggressive style that wasn't that popular back then and people didn't know how to play against it but eventually they would find out how to slowly adjust adjust yeah because i'm playing like the best players in the world and i don't watch poker on tv i never read a book i'm not in the form so don't even know winning these guys are right you know a few later i find out like these are like the top players and i just had like no fear which is something to show that you know it's once you find out who these guys are you do play them a little more cautiously but there's something to be said about just having no fear so even though like i shouldn't have been in those games they taught me so much yeah playing that big it doesn't matter even if you are the best player in the world you're gonna nine nine percent a time go broke over the course of the next six to nine months i basically lost at all and even got myself in fifty thousand dollar debt yep you know borrowing from other players who you know at this point i established myself as you know a player with the big reputation and that was demo you're twenty years old at this point yeah yeah exactly i was about twenty now going into my junior year and i got super depressed you know like just to go from so high to so low in such a short period of time just definitely messes you up and you know it was a combination of things it was that i sacrificed my school and my grades for the last you know year and a half now because of this thing that i was sure was gonna work out for me so now i'm like okay you know i'm i messed this up i yeah messed that up i'm in this hole i know how many get out do you remember when you sort of bank roll hits zero or you know like explain negative because i've been there before right when i was in college used to play much lower stakes than this but i would do the same thing i'd run it up to two grand and i'm like i'm not going to class i have two grand in my account right now and i'd take the whole two grand and i'd go up a bigger game so yeah on the way down i mean i'd get to points where i had like forty k left to my name and i'm still jumping into these twenty thousand dollar and grind this is is now you're trying to make it back yes exactly because i made it so quickly so i this is what you call being a degenerate right and i remember some crazy sessions i had a session where i was down to like my sixty thousand went down to about fifteen hundred and it's like a trained thousand an hour buying game and everyone left the table and there's one guy sitting there with sixty k and from fifteen hundred i literally got all of it back the guy disappeared for months and came back and was just at this point you're just talking in the chat he's like dude like you messed me up that he's like he's like my wife was pissed heavy like i stopped playing it's the first of them back but yeah well one that sixty k back and then the next day boom lost half of it literally feel like you got punched in the stomach like it is awful feeling did you tell kind of friends or you hide it how i would hide it for sure because at this point i'm going broke so and there's been so much hype around me around the dorms and like said i was a you know local celebrity like people like you know like i'm in the newspapers and you know all this stuff it's super embarrassing for me you know what i mean i feel like you know you just feel like you have this kinda of image you have to hold up right and so now i'm broke in the fifty k that that obviously adds to the kind depression i go to school counselor you know they have these kind of therapy resources which is awesome by the way that you know these yeah like either there's so many resources in college like i didn't take advantage of and and now like wow these are amazing and that was one actually did get take advantage of and you know i was probably like press for a good like three to four months already before i went to counseling and just immediately going already felt better just like talking to someone who's professionally dealt with this right there's a few things that really up with me the counselor are told me you know think of your problems like a rug right now you're overwhelmed like a rug yeah you can't pick up a rug all at once like lift each corner and you know it become easier it's so simple but it's so true and it's actually really helpful now when you have a set of problems like they're gonna overwhelm you and when you just focus on one and solve it like the other one just becomes ten times easier so what was like the first corner for you and you're this fun he also said he's just like your confidence is shot right now so so do things that you used to do that make you feel really confident so i was like okay and high school was get a basketball i write like poultry and wrap lyrics and so i didn't get back into the wrap but i got to you know i got i started playing basketball again right so those are definitely some helpful things but you know he also told me to stop playing poker which i didn't do and to be honest i met the next few months just like oh i'm out of school like partying a bunch like this is still big a bit of a degenerate right but it got so bad that i realized like okay i'm gonna have to like drop out of school anyone who knows brown parents like you're scared shit list of your parents yeah what was their take this whole time were they like so they evil they don't know anything so by now they do know so during the whole come up they had no idea so brown parents like super strict like anti gambling like very conservative so the way they my dad actually found out was someone sent them that article student wins a hundred and eighty thousand playing online poker that was in the daily align night the college newspapers so he found that online and he called me like super pissed and i'm in vegas like at the world he was a poker playing cash chains and you know he has no idea he thinks you know i'm at summer's go whatever right so he's super pissed and wants me to fly home the x day and eventually i ended up going home he basically talks me into like okay like invest some of it or a lot of it into real estate so i'm like okay you know i'm gonna invest like hundred twenty k or something into some property so you know let me make sure i make some more so that was part of the motivation and they're like oh you know i need to make mistakes exactly so that was also added pressure now like during the you know how how shitty i felt that you know it's gonna be i told you so to my parents yeah like i was gonna you know i thought like my dad's didn't kill me and so i i think that the pressure from that was also just making really hard for me and when i eventually called him and told him which is took me like months to you know suck up the courage to do that like his reaction wasn't what i thought it was gonna be at all like he was like instead of like pissed he was just like super worried like it was just like he instantly like knew what i was going through and just like this like father kind of like feel like came out instead it's amazing how parents do that on the micro trans on the small mistakes they blow it up well i you actually make a big mistake parents go into like you know fix up mode where they're like we're here for you they don't make you feel worse you know the best parents well yeah for sure and yeah and my dad is awesome and i i think brown parents have this thing of like trying to intimidate you and like scare you into like doing what they wanna do it's just kind of in is the way they were raised i meet a lot of people who have you know conservative like ethnic parents that are also like you know living a certain way doing a certain things because of like fear of their parents and that's a lot of advice i end up telling them is your parents granted their good parents like they love you and that matters like more than anything else you know what i mean yeah and and a lot of this is just a strategy that they've learned and how to manipulate their kids into like doing what they believe is good right which for the most time is but it's not always you know so that probably helps a lot like you know having my dad kinda react like that so eventually i just kinda hit like rock bottom like so bad that i realized like i'm gonna have to like leave the school like go back home which is what i didn't wanna do like i'm never gonna you know but already leaving california going to universe illinois was a big thing for them so i was still trying to make my bank back why didn't you decide to quit you know most people at this point would say you know i'm never drinking tequila again type of thing i felt like instinctively that i was really good like i felt like i was out playing my opponents like that i knew something that i was capable of something that they weren't i just like you know my gut was telling me that i was good at this thing right and you listen yeah i'm not even sure how to advise people on that one because there's a lot of people that i think shouldn't be plain poker or shouldn't be investing where they're investing and they're just completely blindsided by that right so what ended up happening was be so because i i had already kinda of built this like poker house with my friend ben and we surrounded other players one of the students he was teaching was started doing well in tournaments andy sat so like alright you know let's up with this tournament stuff and you know he's studying and learn the fundamentals you know ben taught him some stuff and he's really big enough the forums even some of my students kevin sc i was teaching him and now he's kind of on the forums like learning stuff beyond what i've taught him right so it's kinda like these are the younger kids like teaching me this was the forums the two plus two forums yeah so tubeless plus two and then we started our own call the poker house i think there was like an fc c a full contact form something like that and there was pocket fives so they're kinda catching me up to speed on kinda what they're learning on the internet i learned really quickly and i'm really good at asking questions and i think that's why i'm able to learn quickly so you know what just like watching them a little bit and like you know ask them questions like seeing like some of the strategy they're doing i was able to just like wash them a few times and take that and start incorporating into my own game learned a little bit about bank management so basically at the beginning while i'm trying to make it back i just you know i have five hundred dollars a jump to a five hundred dollar game well you i build up a few thousand about to zero so that happened like three four months and then i finally buckled down and just started playing five dollar sentence goes and i can't tell you like it's just going from twenty thousand dollar buy ins to five dollar sentence goes like you need to humble yourself that you're able to do that and you know do b and super mill talk about that a lot that is one of the most important things like not caring what anybody thinks what anybody's gonna say because people are gonna like talk shit right and you just need to do it and you know stay true to yourself so you know just getting the courage to do that so i started building up slowly you know to ten dollar to twenty dollars and now i'm kind of in this tournament thing so i eventually like qualified for a tournament in rub like a live tournament so fly a rub and knocked out of the tournament i'm playing online on a sunday like and it's like outdoor lobby with his security guard there just me him all night it's like three am i ended up finally having my first big tournament win it was like a party poker like nightly one sixty two think one like thirty grand like three i'm my night i ever running into my room for like bug spray like five hundred breaks and i was like literally is literally just like me in the security guard is like pitch dark black and i'm just like on the floor like celebrating with all my friends so that was my first big tournament win and then like a few weeks later at think i got like second or third in an ultimate bet tournament it's like another like forty fifty k and and that's basically when my tournament career kinda shot off and i never really look back so you've gotten out to the point where over ten million in career winning so what was the next sort of thing come in small chunks or was there one big score that really like you kinda elevated your profile and your winning so i basically just started jumping on the live tour immediately so you know now i'm twenty one so i could actually play in like the live tournament so ar i think it was only nineteen plus so that was at twenty but yeah now at twenty one so you know i start flying the bay one a one to commerce basic on weekends or at skip class and i'd start playing this turn i think i won a one thousand dollar tournament at commerce for hun hundred thousand dollars and then i think it was like another year finding when that i was around twenty two twenty three and i basically just had my like killer breakout year where i made one point seven million in earnings mostly you on like the wp t tour in w p there's like this fifteen thousand dollar buy in events at the ob bella i got second in one for seven hundred and seventy k the next one like three months later i got like third and like five hundred k and then also there was an rant the w a p that i got third like three hundred k right like all in one year like all within like a six month span and i had investors so i had to give a percentage of that to them and there's also buy ins but long story short like basically i made a million dollars at year and so when you think about your career you have different tactics that you use mh the one thing that i find interesting about you when we were having dinner i don't know a couple months ago you were telling me that you were playing in the world series of poker the main event ten thousand dollar buy in and you said that i was asking you sort of like how do you stay at the top your game how do you keep peak performance because these events are like you know multi day you know there i don't know how many days the main event is but i think it's like five seven days of like that just to get through the field of tens of thousands of players so first i'll get to even how do you like get good at poker or whatever it is you're doing and then i'll get into that yep so kind of first thing is you know i realized that these are kind of key things like hey you know you need to be doing some sort of studying you know whether that's like then you know taking hands and analyzing with friends like reading books like watching videos online so you need to be doing you know one study thing you need to have a group of peers whether it's you know mentors or in poker you know i have these whatsapp groups where you know to be anywhere to like three to ten people and we post hands and talk about it right and by the way this advice is relevant to whatever it is you're do you're trying to get at what you're saying is exactly what i do in the start world yeah so you need you know either books or videos to learn from you need you know this pure circle and then you just need to you know be like reviewing and analyzing your own work and i i think you should have a mentor you need be surrounding yourself by people that are equal or better than you right so kinda kinda those the things you need and then okay the second question you asked is you know just how do you stay at the top of your game and yet that's extremely important just being able to play your a game there's so many talented players you know more talented than me that just are not able to stay at their a game because you know they get frustrated or they have vice or they have ad or whatever it is and you know they just they end up broke so you gotta eat healthy you gotta work out like you gotta do whatever it is is put yourself in a good state so for me so you know we'll start with kinda of pre game like i'm really big on like cold showers in the morning you know that just it gets your adrenaline going and it relaxes all your muscles it's kind of a medi experience like your natural reaction is when the cold hits you to like shiver and like i just try to not shiver and just try to like focus my mind calm doesn't need to do that right and just like you know spending and doing that for a few minutes like you'll just feel like in a medi state after that and i actually my goal and i'm doing cold showers is i try to do it until i pee because it relaxes all your muscles and it naturally makes you pee that's the true which is i'm kinda weird but yeah it's just like okay like all my muscles are just relaxed right i love doing like head stands i actually i don't know any like science behind that but it just you know gets all the blood like flowing in my head and it just i know i feel like in a great state part of your morning routine yeah so you know a whole shower you know a meditation i'm huge on meditation about six years ago i went to a ten day silent meditation retreat in thailand the boss a retreat but and that was definitely just like one of the most like influential things i've done how so it's just like you're wearing sunglasses of your whole life and you just took them off of the first time nice it just so share the enlightenment what what does that feel like what what did you realize what did you learn from that yeah so at the time i kinda went because i'd been kinda like passively like doing some seed investments some startups ups and like a lot of my friends like killing it in startups ups and you know i naturally want to be an entrepreneur for poker i was doing both and i realized like when you do both you're not doing either well so i kinda need to make a decision kinda like loss in terms of which way to go so like i partially went for that but i just went because i was curious yeah i actually knew nothing about meditation but just like you know it just seemed like something that was gonna be good so so you started with like the most extreme version yeah yeah so like a lot of people like it went there like study and i read about it i know like i actually knew nothing like a friend of mine had went to retreat so he recommended this one literally bit that i know this was like one of the best retreats you can go to call you know steven rosemary retreat they're an australian couple so yeah i mean you get there and the journey getting there was already intense and know first you're flying to bangkok you take a bus to a dock then you get on got them mad on the boat takes you to this other island then you get on to the back of this truck there's like a fifteen hour sleep train like between that i forgot you eventually get up to this hill where yeah and you walk to the top of the hill and that's where the little modest areas and so you know you register like three months in advance you get there and then you know you have to go and take your turn and go talk with the teachers explain to them why you're there and they decide if you're ready to be there or not so you might even get turned down oh wow generally people don't get turned down but if you if they see you have some kind of intense like demons you're they're dealing with that you're not ready and you might be a distraction to the retreat they'll offer you their book and some advice and you know ashley what did you say you tell i'm split on kinda of where i wanna go i don't remember exactly but yeah you know something like that like i strengthen my mind like that type of stuff so the schedule was you wake up at five am before the sun comes up you have kind of an hour yourself the shower was literally a garbage can of water and a little scoop in this small dark room where literally like spiders like as big as your hand my or might not be in there i mean you're just in the wild you know and then you know at six am like they do like an hour of yoga to start the day following the yoga would be you know like hour long sitting meditation basically every hour but bell rings then you do you know a light breakfast and then you do walking meditation be and basically throughout the whole day they'd go for like you know about twelve hours every hour bell rings and you just switch from sitting meditation standing meditation eating working meditation the yoga in the morning and then every day they'd be a one hour talk from them where you know they would kinda share their philosophies it's incredible like they're able to kinda predict what you're thinking a lot of times what you're going through so basically teaching you how to meditate and whole idea is that your whole life you're doing everything is outward energy your focus outwards and did this is the time for you to focus inwards you know what's actually going on in your mind and your body i got there thinking like i'm gonna like ride a journal and do all this stuff is like no no writing that's outward energy no eye contact with people that's outward energy so yeah the whole time you're just trying to focus basically and like you do these hour long meditations i'd be so frustrated because i literally feel like i only meditate like five minutes of this hour and i'm like oh like i'm totally messing this up but that give their hour long talk that you've been waiting for and that literally say exactly that they're like i'm sure you felt like you've only even been meditate a focus for like one minute of that hour but you know don't worry like you know that struggle that you're doing it's like you're working out you're exercising your mind and it's so true like by the end of it or you know five days in you start to realize that all that not meditating you're doing is actually like improving the hell out of your focus and you're start to be able you get so much better at it obviously no technology there's no eye contact yep you're not speaking or making sound do you throughout the day that right yeah no what about even in the morning you know when you're taking your shower you do you make any sound there just to get it out for the day or nothing no not no not really also walk around the medi so every step you're supposed to take you're supposed to feel the air like feel the ground and you're supposed to like like feeling the touch of things a part of being awareness so you're trying to be aware of what's going on in your mind and also what you're feeling and experiencing so you know they taught us some like awareness technique so like i not i use this to the poker table or like you know when i'm working or whatever all the time so a really simple awareness technique is right now if you're sitting like feel your butt on the chair like you feel your butt like before i said this where you're feeling your butt like probably not so now you're aware so the idea is to go around your entire day is being aware like feeling things or you think unconsciously your mind wander all the time and that's not beneficial like it's okay to like consciously focus and think about something but most of the time your mind is just wandering and that's one thing you learn the retreat you don't like ninety percent of your day your mind is just wandering wandering wandering and so they start to teach you to pay attention your body and you'll see that okay when your mind wander these places of stress like you tense your breathing your arm your leg and this basically wears you out throughout the day and you're basically learning to just let go you know you recognize these patterns let go let go let go and by the end of the ten days you just feel so much energy and we're sleeping on this wooden bunk bed shy at his tub of water like living the most simple form of life you're living at the first day i was like i know how gonna to get any sleep like in this environment like i'm talking a pure wood like you're sleeping on and instead like you're just happiest you've ever been you're like the healthiest you've ever felt and just like whoa like i've been searching for happiness in the wrong place like it's all in just strengthening your mind right and just that enlightenment was just insane i love that you know the mind is a muscle and it's amazing how little we sort of stretch it and strengthen it consciously yeah you do some other things that thought mentioning you know there was a period of time where you didn't own a home or rent a place you were totally nomadic the hook for me has always been oh wow this guy's is an amazing poker player he's had tremendous success in the poker world that's fantastic cool we've made millions of dollars playing poker but what i think sets you apart and what made you kinda of fascinating to me was a silent meditation living them nomadic all the little technique and tactics you do to you know like you said your pre game routine i know you told me that during tournaments during the five minute break when most people just go grab a bag of chips and start eating it you will run into the parking lot you do a bunch of jumping jacks to freshen up your body yourself you're asking about my routine so this is something i learned from poker but i think everyone should do and so in poker we call it on tilt so on tilt is basically like something negative happened to you and your emotional you know pissed off and now you're acting out of emotion whatever in business might happen to you because a coworker had something yeah was until yesterday yeah or whatever some some deal some i'm employee does something dumb or whatever someone says something to you you need to recognize when you're kinda in this state of mind and everybody should have something in their pocket of how do i get out of this snap out of it yeah how did like it's just a trick it's just a hack like and if you just literally just today like go write it on a piece of paper like how are you're gonna get out of it try it if it doesn't work write something else down right and just once you know works it works and usually from my experience it's not thinking you're out of it don't logic your way out of it yeah so move your body is at much faster so for me it's i will go and do wins sprints in the parking lot on my fifteen minute breaks people they come pretty weird and that's i'll literally go out there and i'll just i'll be like you know dressing my like nice fall table clothes sometimes and go do four sprints and i promise you at the end of it yeah you don't care anymore you're just back and it gets you back in the zone breathing exercises like so helpful what's one breathing exercise so it's hard to kinda show without video but you know basically you cover one nostril so first you learn to breathe into your belly so you know you'll cover one nostril and you'll breathe in and out you know as you breathe in your belly needs to get bigger and as you you know exhale your belly goes back in so you'd take a big deep breath in like holding one nostril and you close the other nostril you hold all the the air in your belly suck your belly in so it all goes into your chest now just hold it there for like five seconds or or actually no longer if you can and then release it out of the other nostril mh so that's one so now repeat during the other direction just do like four or five of those and just you feel amazing like you feel on a high it just like completely refreshes you yeah that somebody teach me this around breathing which was there's something called stress breathing yeah and stress breathing if you'd be say alright take a big inhale right if you just listen to this right now take a big inhale and now one of two things happened either you sucked in right because sometimes people try to take a big inhale their stomach goes inwards that's stress breathing what you're describing with the belly going out that's that's sort of the the sort of proper relaxed weight it to breathe where an inhale should expand why is it that some people when they inhale they tense up and squeeze in mh and says two different types of of of breathing and if you notice a very common pattern is when somebody stressed sort of the reverse breathing they'll breathe inward rather than expanding their belly in order to breathe yeah i i naturally breathe the wrong way so i have to consciously try to do the that type of breathing yes sam what do you think is the advice you would give not to like somebody else but i'm thinking like to your own future kit would you if your kid was interested in playing poker would you say yeah this is a good path or would you be like hey this worked for me but i wouldn't recommend it what's your take on it so those two things there's learning how to play poker because it's good for you which i strongly strongly believe and there's playing poker because you wanna do a learning it as a game versus wanting it as a job yeah doing it as a job i think that just totally depends on where the industry is right now like online poker was you know banned i don't remember like seven eight years ago at this point so you know that's taken a lot sponsors a lot of marketing dollars out of the game so it's not a great industry to get into right now if you're trying to make a lot of money you know it was seven years ago and that might come back as online poker gets legalized in the us which it has in a couple of states but was waiting for the bigger states then that might be a very viable career option right now i would say it's not if you're recreational just trying to play poker because you think it's funny you think you could learn some cool skills from it then yeah it's great time to be in and so i gets my second part i think i've learned poker has taught me you know how to think in such a more like logical productive way that i've been able to implement into the rest of my life there's this thing we call like plus e thinking that's you know expected value yep and so if you don't know you know what expected value is you know let's just take a simple example you take a coin flip at ten times you're taking heads i'm taking tails the expected value of that flip is zero like if we're betting a dollar or whatever because it's fifty fifty it's a weighted coin fifty one towards forty nine so now you know it's plus e on the head side by a certain amount right so basically when poker you're basically trying to make plus e bets right and you it's the same as you know if you're investing in startups or the stock market and then you could also apply it to life right so you just have to think of what is the game of life you know my points are in like happiness points like so what is the e of dating this person or being single what is the e of me you know going to this concert servers not going to it and how much does it cost me you know monetary wise and it just kinda teaches you how to make you know better decisions so like the classic example like flawed thinking is you know okay i bought these two hundred dollar concert tickets and we're gonna go to this concert but my best friend just to this birthday party there's gonna be super fun like it's actually gonna be more fun than the concert most people will still go at the concert because oh i already spent this two hundred dollars i don't wanna lose that two hundred dollars that's the like classic like sunk cost fallacy that you already spent the money you know the money's already gone now you just go to which one's gonna bring you more happiness right so poker just teaches you i mean like a lot of you know lines of thinking like that are really beneficial and in poker you might say i've already put a hundred dollars into this pot mh now they're betting three hundred you know i already put in a hundred maybe i should just do the do the rest but that's the sunk cost there yeah on the other side you you have for e if you're wanna to learn a little bit more about this there's a basic formula for e which is essentially you take the result you think you'll get if the thing happens times the probability it might happen so you know your your expected value of the lottery is pretty low a huge prize but the probability of you winning is super super low whereas you know the expected value of something that might be higher chance of happening is gonna be a lot higher and you wanna calculate am i making positive e decisions or negative e decisions based on the cost takes you to make the bet yes i'll even like when i'm booking flights now so like this used to be such a stressful thing where when i first started where i like oh like this round trip flight is you know a thousand bucks like abroad and i i wanna leave on this date but if i make the final table i'm have to miss this and you know like pay another thousand dollars was like okay the chances of that happening are like five percent so you know i just multiply you know a thousand by five percent and you know that fifty dollars is the cost of me booking this flight the day i wanna leave like right okay fifty dollars that doesn't sound that bad right so now you know just think of like you know these expenses that i might have to cancel and lose as what is the e that it actually cost me because if i'm in this situation a hundred times i'm only gonna have to cancel that fight five times right i might have this with a job offer where you get stock options and they say great you know here's what the stock options are work today but it's privately valid company so it's not like you can go sell it so you basically say alright i give this a ten percent chance of becoming a hundred million dollar company well if that's the case then this is worth ten million dollars today right the value of the company today is worth that and then you can price your shares accordingly so it'll lets you assign value to things that seem different chance of occurring which is important so this two other things that poker taught me that i think are super important that everybody should learn this one drives me nuts in the startup world actually it's not being results orientated i shouldn't say start world i should say business world because i see a lot of maybe they mean the term in a different way but i see a lot of you know business articles talking about being results and that being a good thing right whereas i strongly believe that's a bad thing and you should not be results and let me explain what i mean by that you can make a bad investment in a company and it can end up making money and you could go on to make nine investments in good companies and lose money it's just because there's a lot of variance let's use the heads or tails example just the weighted coin it's fifty five on the head side forty five on the tail side we flip at ten times it ends up being seven times tailed does that mean you were dumb or you were wrong for choosing heads no it's just short term luck if you flip that coin you know a million times is gonna end up being fifty five forty five right so someone whose results orientated is gonna say oh why did i pick tails like you know like that was dumb so i hear people say this you know when it comes to like oh why did i date this person why did i choose this job why did i go on this trip because like something bad happened but again they're being results orientated because some fluke thing happened where the percentages were low right or maybe you know the opposite that maybe the percentage of something bad happening was like eighty percent but the twenty percent that something could happens and the gain you get out of it is so big it is worth you know just taking error it's the ability to separate analyzing the decision you made versus analyzing the outcome that happened yeah exactly so like poker you analyze the decision that's where you need if you wanna get good you analyze the decisions and you sort of ignore outcomes to an extent because the outcomes have this huge degree of variance yes i'll see some people you know even in startups and stuff like really smart people but just have this kinda laws in the way they they think about that and you know whether it's a facebook ad or whatever just something that led to some success and they're just like so hundred percent that this was the way and they're just so you know at the third part was sample size just that you need to be sample size aware like it's okay to be like okay i did this thing and it worked but you know i don't have a large enough sample size i my confidence in this being their answer should be low like it's better than nothing so i'll go with it but you know and as your sample size grows you have more and more confidence in you know that method that direction that add or whatever it is you're doing it's not i don't hear it being taught you know like one of the most important things i think like being able to make logical decisions that's arguably one of the most important things in life right what you're saying is that there's a set of frameworks around mh making better decisions and using logic you where logic combines with math and probabilities and poker obviously teaches you that the hard way because if you don't know it you're gonna lose a lot of money yeah so the cool thing of with poker is that you get to go through you know thousands of sample size and like a very short period so you know within a couple years you know you will go through the financial experience of someone's entire life right which is really valuable you know it gives you life fantastic and so if people want to follow you get a hold do you reach out to you where should they connect with you yeah you could find me on twitter it's at far that's f a r a z j a k a i'm also on instagram at jo or you could go to my website jo dot com i have some like blog posts on there but it's more just kinda like evergreen content i'm not updating it regularly but there's like a contact me page and right some some stuff about me some articles my meditation from blog is on there which people find pretty interesting so yeah check it out and i can attest it you know when for us making a run and a tournament he'll post like hey tomorrow is the final day i got this many chips yep follow me at two pm it starts and let's see if we win and those are a lot of fun you know i have it on my second screen at work often where i'm following the progress and seeing if you can take it down awesome thanks for coming man this has been awesome