Jason Su, mental game and performance coach for an increasing number of poker players, returns to the Zoo. While poker is a game (not “just” a game), there is something a touch more serious in this visit. Why is this? Perhaps because the money involved in poker is increasingly scarce and so every edge has become important.
Actually, it’s worse than that. People are leaving the online scene and rolling the dice in live MTTs or private cash games at a new clip. Nick Howard has gone AWOL and become a concierge for desperate poker nerds. Scamming and scammers have never had it better.
So, do you need a mental game upgrade to deal with it all? Maybe.
My first impression of The Joy of Poker is that this is a book about the ego, not in the pop psychology sense, but in the Freudian sense. The ego mitigates the unconscious and reality. The ego is, as Jason would say, present. This mental awareness of ourselves is not only what makes us conscious but helps us deal with all the pressures of our irrational desires and what society tells us. Freudian or not, Jason puts great stock in being in touch with reality and ordering our response to it. Credit to him, you can hear his measuredness, his lack of hysteria, on our podcasts. Ok, so what?
One big assertion he makes is that mental game has made no progress since some undefined point. This seems doubtful to me, but in conversation, Jason seems convinced enough. Still, everyone now has a little meditation app or something now. Everyone knows to breathe. Go crazy, you oxygen addicts.
While I don’t get into on the podcast, as I expect the reader and other pods to handle certain details, Jason provides a methodology to handle the stress of the game. Read the chapter Clear the Path to get down to business.
Instead, I focus in the interview on an introduction to his ideas and on the culminating chapter, Master of Luck which he referred to in an oblique tweet several months ago. Can you make your own luck, really? At first, he seems to mean something else, and that the argument is more semantic in nature: you don’t make luck, but you can experience it. Fair. Then, I stumble onto something more important: a human approach to embracing variance, which has always been the key to the seemingly impossible goal of playing with a sense of peace.
After reading the book I realized the answer to Jason’s supposition that no progress has been made in the mental game department. It’s a slippery area of the game which has been promulgated through so many empty words, true, but progress has indeed been made and Jason is making some of it. Jason means that the way out of pain is not around but through, both in poker and in life. Words are not enough for the human emotional experience; they are signifiers but not actions. Jason wants you to take a sequence of action steps, which you can read about in the book. So, while the field’s methodologies have been dodgy overall, Jason has refined the answers, both in print and in practice.
Processes that allow us a modicum of acceptance are the progress we’ve made, however imperfect they are. We must fully embrace the swings of the game and thus the feelings associated with them, just as we already know we must max out the corresponding and primary challenge of the game, the challenge of poker strategy.
In other words, to interpret Jason correctly is not to merely hear him say, “you must be willing to win big.” No, you also have to be willing to lose. Perhaps he doesn’t say this enough, given that “willingness to win” always sounds paradoxical. And so this is where emotional availability – presence – meets up with Mason’s critique through knowledge alone – and explains Chewy’s curious quote,

It’s early in the back nine for the Poker Zoo podcast, so it’s time to focus on what we want to accomplish. I have a fitting guest today in Sara O’Connor, a mid-Atlantic player and writer who has gathered some attention through her book, A New Queen’s Guide to Poker, and through some social media expertise. Sara has a lot of drive.
I was introduced to Sara through my friend Jason when he bit off a little more than he could chew in the course of his regular Twitter trolling. While Sara and I discuss many things about her life in poker, her first book is or was the original focus of the interview. I think she has done a great job in acclimating the novice to specifically live casino poker. Explicatory passages such as this could do a lot for the unfamiliar:
The game is played with a dealer in the center of the table and
two to ten players. Seat numbers start from the dealer’s left at seat
one and usually end at eight or nine but may go all the way up to
ten. Currently, my favorite seat is seat five, but never become too
attached to one seat. You never know which seat you’ll have to start
playing at, and attachments can lead to feelings of jinxes which
must be avoided. That said, you can ask for a seat change button if
you’re horribly uncomfortable and playing a cash game. With a
tournament, you’re stuck with the seat you’ve been given. We’ll talk
about the nitty gritty details of each of these table positions later.
This is far more practical than many, drier introductory texts. Sara conveys much of the real game and the concerns of its new participants. That’s the “good for poker” stuff everyone yammers on, right there.
When it comes to the strategy discussion in New Queen’s, my response is a little more complex. I think of Dan Savage’s “campground” rule, where he posited that in certain relationships, you must leave your partner better off than you found them. In essence, much of my coaching practice lays in correcting concepts and their misapplication. Does A New Queen’s Guide to Poker and other such novice guides to strategy help or harm the player in the long run? Does she follow the campground rule?
I tend to think the answer is that there is little harm here in the end, and that Sara answered my question during the podcast well enough. Things are going to be wrong, inevitably and everywhere; you’ll recover from your middle school texts no matter how careful they are in addling your brain. The so-called “ladder of learning” is not just straight up and up – the process of learning and relearning also matters. That’s real enough and leaves the writer some reign to describe things that need to be introduced even if those things will need to be corrected later. And of course, I like teaching poker and its theory! Bring on your confusions.
Really, though, I want to skip all that and focus in on what I liked hearing about at the end of the pod: Sara’s coming poker fiction. Ideas start with books and stories, and usually only then proceed to reach popular culture and its bigger, more splashy mediums where huge profits and big picture trends develop. The current debate over poker media is reductive and misguided, as I have written, in both how influence works and what makes it work.
So, if Sara is going to give us some “smut,

For our milestone episode, I talk with old friend Steve “ChipXtractor” Catterson. I met Steve through the defunct Red Chip Poker forum, and we have been more or less in touch since.
Steve and I go over some stories, but it seems to me that the present in this case is more interesting than the past. Steve is working on his game and that means becoming more interested in the game. Teaching, in turn, makes me more interested in the game. The reason for all this is that when we see what is possible or what we have been blind to, the world regains its color. I’m obviously not just talking poker here. The way to overcome loss is to see what still lives and what you have been missing from the bigger picture.
Less seriously, it’s fun to hear hand histories from South Point, which can be a fun, popular local’s place. Soon Steve will be moving up from the cheap seats and will get involved with the notorious shit regs of the “Jewel.” Good luck with that.
Here’s the hand discussed:

The theme of this podcast is sociability. From Steve’s angle, poker is a part of one’s real, physical, meaningful life. Otherwise hard-tack players need to remember that. I regret my many rudenesses at the table and have been trying to make up for them for some time. For those currently embracing misery and its spread to others, I suggest you rethink your approach. You don’t have to embarrass that old guy who doesn’t want to show his cards. You don’t have to fight over who straddled when. You don’t have to wander the room looking for exact right game to worsen.
Thanks to Dean for all his work on the pod. Thanks to Porter, Julie, Burge and anyone else who put in some editing time. Congratulations us.
If you want to join Steve in relearning the game, use the coaching link or email me.
Have a great week,
Chris
 

As we roll into 2025 it’s well worth checking in with Zoo member Jason Burge, aka Jambasket. He’s a tough online winner in the active Michigan online games but is also a hidden superhero on Twitter (I’m not calling it X, c’mon), where he trolls the hell out of poker’s puffed-up personalities and various engagement beggars.
Students in the Zoo have a lot of questions about how to Jambasket, so we go through them all. Should be valuable for the aspiring: how do you make a living in your underwear these days?
We also talk poker culture. One thing that’s important this month is the Global Poker Awards and their coming award show on February 22. Anyone (who is fair) can see that Eric Danis and company do a pretty damn good job overall. I have no complaints and enjoy helping out by voting. Because the awards are really the promotional arm of a poker business rather than some non-aligned committee, it’s easy but incorrect to get upset when some corner of the industry isn’t included or perhaps is passed over.
One of those debatable corners is the podcast scene, where the usual suspects keep shuffling in and out of the finalist nominations. Those selected are worthy candidates who serve the needs of the poker industry. Yet one of the few podcasts of any real lasting worth, Sessions, isn’t likely to ever make it out of the first round, never mind win the award itself. Jason and I talk lightly about this problem for a bit.
After seven seasons of diary-meets-storytelling, Billy is still in a tough spot, but he continues to stretch out a grand story arc. His is not really a podcast in the sense GPI voters mean, but a kind of oral history, one which represents an entire vein of the culture. It’s hard to compare Sessions to a half-hour interviewing the latest tournament donkstar, in other words.
Jason and I also go over the recent Faraz Jaka queen-nine of diamonds hand, tournaments in general, and a few other fun things as well.
Jason has made several appearances on the Zoo, here’s another one to check out.
He also has a series of amusing trip reports documenting his days in Las Vegas, check them out through searching my website. Here’s one.
Hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.
Thanks,
Chris

The five things you need to do to win in 2025. The roadmap to poker success in 2024. Three tips for crushing poker in 2023.
They do it all day, every month, every year, but what if we turn them on their head and listen carefully:
You’re not winning 20 bbs/hr at your live game because you didn’t listen to us. You’re not trading pots with NL500 regs because you didn’t take our program. You’re not heads up because of our ICM class that you skipped.
Sirens, our poker masters, yet sirens who compete heavily for our sailors. The proliferation of information and poker knowledge has never been greater, and so the big poker educators say with more and more confidence and more and more fear, we have the way to win. A few authors pitch in, too: look at this fresh batch of Poker for Dummies.
I’m sure they all bring some value. Yet the exact same people say, out of the other side of their mouth, that only a select few actually win. In other words, come to be vetted and culled. Is this how coaching should work?
If all these poker educators are doing their advertised job, we should, by 2025, be seeing the Great Evening of Poker, where win rates plummet and loss rates improve, but the evidence is not clear. Instead, the migration to tournaments may be the ultimate expression of the Evening and its tighter margins, where more and more money is agreed to be flushed out of the player pool and into the supportive but parasitical industry. Hey, here’s a mystery bounty, dummy! Come over here!
My win rate, for instance, is the same now as it was then; the Evening of Poker is not affecting me in some respects. In fact, certain faces never seem to leave, while newbies come and go like the tide. Moreover, the primary public-facing success of the poker industry, the story of the tournament luckbox semi-genius, continues its tale of an unstated minimal return floated by an increasing volume of staking cattle-calls. Further, while the channels do change, the themes do not: just as we once loved Andrew Neeme’s tour of how soft 5/10 Vegas was, now Marc Goone fascinates us by showing deep 5/5 games which seem to be as full of fish as the Hudson was in 1609.
So how do we resolve the essential contradiction of the poker educators, who break the rule of good business and prefer to promise more than they can deliver? After all, the best students are those already destined to win, but they compose a tiny fraction of the student pool.
What about the try-hards, don’t they count? More importantly, what if that try hard is you?
Today our guest is James Tichenor. He’s played poker over a long time period. He’s getting there, but it is a struggle many of us can identify with. Almost everything he was doing when we started working together, I considered backwards – yet he didn’t just make it all up on his own. No, he came from all the usual schools and classes and coaches and poker celebrities.
Didn’t the tips work? Did he not read the menu? Are we supposed to blame him or them? Is everything that simple? What happened and what’s next?
Today, we find out.

We are happy to close our best year of interviews with Poker Zoo stalwart Greg Porter. We not only cover his swingy year in the games but address the many interesting things that happened in 2024 poker culture.
First, though, remind me what they were again?
One thing that does actually matter to a serious player who needs to produce is dealing with the increasingly gatekept public/private games. Greg tells us about his experience managing expectations and keeping the games alive. That also brings up the inevitable novelty games that help sustain the action, such as the notorious Stand-up, aka Nit Game. (And look at that friendly guy in the podcast photo – don’t you want him in your game?)
For those dealing with the stress of performance, Greg talks about hiring Jason Su for mental game coaching. Here’s our interview with Jason that I mention, and here is that essay on mental game from way back.
Two notes on the close of the podcast. While we joke around about some of the foolish “women in poker” discussions that happen among the thinkfluencer types, it’s worth underscoring that there is no inherent reason for women to play worse (or better) than the men do. There are always, however, personal issues for both men and women and these are far bigger hurdles than immutable characteristics. To that question, Greg provides some classic, unheeded, and excellent advice on how to get to his level – it’s the theory, stupid.
(If you need a more in-depth discussion on why there are so many bad takes on the woman in poker subject and why it is women are slow to take up the game as their hobby, I wrote heavily about it here.)
Second, I meant the question of what is the good poker book or good poker writing of 2024 rather literally. I’m out of touch on this subject after a year of closely following politics instead of poker. Other than yet another solid Dara O’Kearney intro to strategy text, is there something great I should check out before the GPI Awards process starts? Let me know.
Here’s last year’s interview with Greg if you want to hear more from him.
Thanks for listening and putting up with me. Special thanks to Dean for all his work and to SDJen for the recording space and her general helpfulness in all Poker Zoo matters. Have a great 2025, readers and listeners.
Chris

Merry Christmas from the Poker Zoo! To celebrate, we bring on (depending on your point of view) gadfly or pest Norman Chad. Mr. Chad is indisputably one of the true co-pilots of poker commentary and the boom itself. There are many myths that surround the poker boom, such as it being triggered by the 2003 world series champ, but we’re not going into that today, because Norm is still alive and kicking and screaming and yelling at the clouds, here in post-Covid, dumpster-fire America.
One problem he’s having is that the technology of the social media age allows the audience to yell back. Fortunately, Norman has broad shoulders, or at least a funny suit jacket, and is weathering Elon’s version of twitter and the 2021-24 reaction to the censorious centrist politics of the past decades fairly well. Norm, ever the grumpy contrarian, takes up the cause for institutional standards on a daily basis on X, but also on his revamped show, Gambling Mad with Norman Chad.
Gambling Mad is being promoted on YouTube under the preferred two-pronged strategy, leading with a long video and following up with clipped-out “shorts.” For the moment, both are unloved and underappreciated by humans and algorithms alike, but this is a favorite to change; even as this is being written, one of the shorts I mention in the podcast seems to have become a hit on the TikTok platform. Norm has little quit in him and everyone can eventually find their correct YouTube pitch. As I delved into Wolfgang’s extraordinary success, the short form is about precision – every nanomoment truly counts for the “shorts” viewer. The spoiled-for-choice make instantaneous decisions on tone and expectation – literally within seconds – and so far, Norm needs a little more time to fire up his best rant.
For this reason, the full show is Norm at his best. We talk about its origins today, including the interesting set he films on.
Also, for everyone who does not enjoy Norm or who flames him on Twitter, he invites you to go here, the “worst restaurant in Las Vegas.” However, it might just be that no one ever taught Norm how to handle the tableside music: you don’t pay for the accordionist, you pay for accordionist to go away.
Hope you enjoy our show. Dean and I are talking about how we might continue and improve the Zoo. Help us by letting one of us know what you’d like to hear and who you’d like to hear from.
Best wishes,
Chris

This year we have focused on very broad issues in poker, both in poker theory and in its statistics, but today we are going to get very specific. Scoop! is a series of detailed books focused on one game in two variants: PLO8 and Big O. Its author, Greg Vail, makes a living playing and teaching these games alone.
In Hold’em, there are often cards on the board that are considered to be blanks or bricks that should not help anyone’s hand. This is almost never the case in High Low. Since there are so many combinations of hands in play, most cards on the board are going to help or connect with something or someone. Therefore, we must consider how the “best” hand can fare against the entire deck and the entire run out. Once this is done, the “best” hand is the hand with the highest equity. Most of the time, this is not the hand that a Hold’em mind would consider to be “ahead” right now.
Vail, Greg. Scoop!: Big O and PLO8: Winning High Low Concepts for the Hold’em Mind (p. 13).
For whatever reason, splitting the pot into two simply blows away many poker players. While I have been preparing a modest class for Double Board Bomb Pots in particular, the Scoop! series by Greg, soon to be completed with volume four, is the seminal contemporary text for big bet omaha games and is emphatically built around split pot concepts.
Play for the scoop. We wouldn’t draw to chop in Hold’em, so why would we in split pot games? We will gain most of our profit by exploiting players who do exactly that. We’ve all seen someone River an inferior Flush in Hold’em, pay off a large bet to the nut Flush, and say, “I hate it when I was drawing dead and got there.” That happens all the time in split pot games. Do not be that guy.
It is a conceptual series but also a detailed one.

Breakdowns like this, of the entire combo, help clarify what you are looking for in a split pot hand.
A few more links:
Here’s the software Greg mentioned.
Greg can be found at doublesuited.com.
Here’s a Zoo episode where I argue with Limon about a split pot double board spot. What would Greg have to say about it?
Basically, this is a great series, I don’t have a lot to add here. You should just buy and read the books if you are going to play Big O and PLO8.
Enjoy the interview!
As for sourdough, I use allrecipes.com for everything these days. Maybe Dean will write out his own recipe and post it here.

The straddle is a third blind added to the traditional two blind structure of hold’em and other related games. It’s not always a neutral proposition. The extra blind can help stimulate action or inhibit it, depending on the players and stack sizes. More controversially, the straddle often gets put into play with a certain amount of social pressure. For this reason, in the games I host, I allow unlimited straddling but never allow it to become mandatory – because there is always That Guy who doesn’t want to straddle, and I don’t think a good host forces people to do things.
Our guest today Brent Jenkins is that guy who is tired of what he calls “stakes terrorists” prodding him into putting on the straddle. Not a big deal you say? Just say no to straddles, Nancy reminds you – you have the option. Well, as we all know, it’s not that simple. Pro-straddlers can be pushy and unpleasant. There is a social stigma that if you are against the straddle, you are somehow against a “good game.” Objecting to the straddle becomes a form of poor behavior – it is stigmatized.
Brent doesn’t think it should be like this and has written what he titles The Anti-Straddle Manifesto. For the TLDR crowd it’s going to be a heavy lift, but I can assure you it is fairly straightforward and marshals many good arguments for his case. In the introduction he even lists the headers for the points he’s going to make, at pains to be clear.
To really understand his argument, we have to separate the social pressure aspect and the straddle itself. Brent makes arguments against both, but the former is what is most important to him. Poker is constantly concerned with “what is good for the game” and he makes a fairly reasonable case that “stakes terrorists” are not acting in its best interests.
The straddle itself, on the other hand, is going to be a less clear subject. Most players who love it confuse the correlation of action they bring with the incentive the straddle adds to the game, and therefore are under the delusion that they are the “good guys” here, when it is really much more of a grey area. Straddles halve the effective stacks and limit actions, while providing third blind complexity. Tradeoffs.
The notoriously bitchy, micro-edge seeking culture of the 5/10 scene at Wynn and other casinos has led to that leading room now removing the straddle from the game in favor of a big blind ante. Brent is obviously pleased by this contiguous development. We’ll want to watch and see how it all plays out. Brent argues the lack of straddles will stimulate players to play at their appropriate stakes size, and anecdotally already reports some of that happening. Conversely, I’ve heard negative rumors as well.
In any case, whether you are a die-hard straddler or one of Brent’s acolytes, hopefully today’s podcast makes you think about this hidden big deal within cash game culture. Enjoy the pod.
N.B. Dean is occupied, my apologies for the stripped down podcast and any balance issues.

One of the common twists of fate in poker is the change in personal relationships on account of strategy and results. At one point now nearly forgotten, the entrance of Alvin Lau into the Red Chip Poker forum caused a whole chain of events to unfold.
One end result was the rise of Alvin’s first poker teaching and programming, Overnight Monster, as ambitious RCP and other players flocked to his initial offerings. This established Alvin as a strong coaching prospect for low stakes online players. The forum feuding and questions of etiquette in turn led me to become more independent, as I could not deny Alvin’s superior strategies and reasoning in the forums. This interaction later became a series of interviews with Alvin which would become the most popular of the Poker Zoo’s first episodes, as we both agreed and sparred over a whole series of subjects and ideas, from Pluribus to race identity.
Today Alvin returns after several years in the Texas poker scene. It’s been a minute for sure, and he’s changed quite a bit: our far-reaching conversation reflects both personal and professional changes. As a coach who has a very straightforwardly successful and straightforward program, he has become popular with those who are absolutely committed to moving up fast online and live. While coaches and players do grumble about their competition behind the scenes, Alvin belongs in a special tier of slightly less-known experts you can count on probably better than anyone in poker yet are still accessible, a unique tier that includes player/coaches like Upswing’s Gary Blackwood, Peter Clarke of Carrot Poker, and now Marc Goone of Hungry Horse.
While Alvin had earned a reputation as a difficult person to deal with, relationships work both ways; I was not persuaded his apparent harshness was always unwarranted. Further, his many success stories bely the trouble he’s run into – even with students from my own community. He has also had an obviously huge impact on the vlogger with the highest number of subscribers ever – Wolfgang.
We talk extensively about Alvin’s work with Wolfgang today. Being the coach of a near-celebrity poker player means the spotlight is on the student. Alvin, however, is more than ever okay with that, even writing about it on his Youtube page.
Yet that’s not the real surprise today, because Alvin discusses a likely reason he has sometimes struggled in the coaching relationship, despite his passion for it: autism.
Does this self-diagnosis resolve everything? Alvin, a fierce solver and simplification advocate at the time, was hard on RCP and on a semi-related book project. Under the weight of Alvin’s public fire, the project collapsed, and the forum was retracted as RCP reorganized itself to catch up with the times. Was Alvin unnecessarily cruel or was he just stating the facts, an inevitable agent of the marketplace of ideas?
Through the lens of his diagnosis, it was neither. Instead, it was the manifestation of indifference or unawareness of social behaviors that is often the outcome of his condition. I’m not a fan of the medicalization of personality issues that seems to plague contemporary society and especially parents – why can’t he just have these traits without a diagnosis – but it struck me during our talk that if a diagnosis of a trait can bring understanding and peace to a person, and even change their behavior for the betterment of all, who am I to question the label or the process?
Our talk goes quite a bit beyond this and Wolfgang, as we get the real deal on the state of Texas NL,

The Poker Zoo continues its latest revival with an interview on a key poker subject: the quantification of winning and losing in games of chance. Going to play a session of poker is gambling, guest Mason Malmuth asserts unambiguously, but the question becomes more interesting and complex over the horizon of time. In fact, the answer now can change – or may not, depending on your expectation.
A new edition of his Gambling Theory and Other Topics covers this and all kinds of other poker statistics concepts. It seems like a forgotten essential text because the questions and the math don’t change, nor has the community really added much to Mason’s work that started back in the 1980’s.
Gambling Theory and Other Topics has been very helpful in creating my current article series on playing live one three. The interplay of expectation and standard deviation was not previously clear to me before, especially as forum posters continuously toss around arbitrary sample size requirements and myths about “variance.”
The final section of the book is unexpected, however, being a long series of short reviews on poker and gambling books. As I went through some of the reviews, I realized how valuable this summary is, should anyone want to get a picture of the history of poker strategy. That said, there are two key books (and maybe others) that are not in the reviews, unless I’m mistaken. The first is Easy Game by Andrew Seidman, probably the finest of all poker general strategy books in overall quality and influence. It’s somewhat dated now because of the precision of today’s tools, but Seidman’s thinking process and his teaching knack remains unmatched. Second, Let There Be Range by Tri Nguyen and Cole South similarly shared high stakes high ideas in the transformative years of modern no-limit. This was a breakthrough read for many.
Thanks to Poker Zoo member Kent D. for reading the book with me and preparing questions. Thanks also, of course and as usual, to Dean for putting our podcast together. Now go find some peppers!

Poker pro and instructor Marc Goone has created a bit of a stir in saying he can beat the low stakes, specifically his local 5/5 game, for at least $100 an hour. Interestingly, it’s been done and is being done – the shock is not actually the number but how few do it or challenge themselves to get there.
On today’s Poker Zoo I get the details on the challenge (he’s already well into it) and find out why he thinks he can take the lead in the under-appreciated, temporal excellence of the modest and modest-stakes crusher. After all, if you are good – like Marc is – you don’t hang around here, right?
We also go over Marc’s coaching and staking program, Hungry Horse. He’s not the only one out there providing this exact kind of poker education. More and more of your opponents in the low to mid stakes are part of programs or study groups or professionals. That’s the inevitable effect of time, inflation, and shrinking cash game liquidity. Players move down or laterally, looking to find the existing soft games. Hungry Horse is just that, hungry, and is gathering and focusing many names you know on grabbing more dollars. Marc’s recent tweet about content creators being fish probably hit all too close to some client homes.
Part of Hungry Horse’s marketing is Marc’s appeal to younger players. With his tattoos, mustache and opinionated yet mildly ironic attitude, Marc presents the slimmer, more contemporary face of live poker, a scene which is often otherwise filled with alternating slobs, fitness lifestyle freaks, untrustable social media baiters, and withdrawn or tempestuous shitregs. Hungry Horse is not aimed at the average the aging boomer or gen-x player who no longer studies and still identifies with a fat accountant’s inexplicable tournament run, but at those who still want or need a growing future in poker.
Of course, much of the appeal, as with everything, is in the presentation. Surrounding some intriguing tactics in Hungry Horse’s free Youtube videos are all the classic hits of strategy adjustment: nihil novem sub sole.
A few extra notes: it’s worth listening to Charlie Wilmoth’s six month fall from grace and his subsequent time at the $5 games, in a series of podcasts focused on a major, attitude-changing downswing. Moreover, Charlie coaches for Hungry Horse, if I am not mistaken.
My latest series on a similar challenge contains some data and statistical stuff that might be of use. Further, a Zoo podcast with Mason Malmuth on those ideas is done and is being produced.
Here’s the Aero vlogger I mention who is having big success in my player pool. His style doesn’t look as sustainable as Marc’s but on the other hand, demonstrates the money available and is an argument in Marc’s favor for succeeding in the challenge.
Lastly, check out Limon’s interview with Mike Basich, another known crusher of the California five-dollar games, and how he does it. It’s interesting to listen to how little things change, despite solvers and data and all the stuff with which we scare ourselves.

Legendary poker theorist and writer David Sklansky joins us on the Zoo. We discuss Twoplustwo Publishing’s new book, Small Stakes Hold’em: Help Them Give You Their Money, an already controversial strategy work by David and his business partner Mason Malmuth.
Freshly published in January 2024, the new book focuses on adaptive play in the softest small-stakes games and against the absolutely worst players. “When I started to play these games,” David writes in the book’s introduction, “which are the large majority of poker games spread today, it was shocking at how badly many of the players played, and this included many opponents who were regulars in these games.
A book wasn’t far off from there, especially as Mason was already in the Vegas low-stakes scene and was seeing many of the same things; here’s his PZ interview. Early versions attracted attention on Twoplustwo thanks to some provocatively strange hands that were unsurprisingly misinterpreted; even Bart Hanson, king of live poker training, when correcting a forum statement about wide ranges, felt further compelled to drop some literalist outrage as well as scold Mason over a nitty drawing recommendation. On one hand, everything is fair game, and the examples were not perfectly representative, as David explains in our podcast. On the other, a little unfair given how many ideas Bart (and all of us) has cribbed from the old theorists – think of all those endless podcasts on set mining, implied odds, and effectively value betting that derive straight from Sklansky and Seidman. Ideas, especially in books, are best understood as questions to be discussed. Instead, we have social media, whose arc is short and bends toward conflict.
It definitely didn’t go past me that many of the experienced posters in the book’s forum thread didn’t seem to understand certain poker fundamental ideas. One recurrently loud poster kept challenging Sklansky on the expected value of a hand multiway, not understanding where EV comes from or how the game might differ from the “allowed” calls in a solver abstraction. Now what was interesting was that this player is a studied one, a student of the solves and the population data. He probably is quite the online threat. Yet when his conversation extended itself to why we open and to what size, he revealed only further misconceptions. The urge to assume prolific poker authors don’t have some slight idea about what they are doing is odd to say the least, and the ability of players to play in certain environments without knowing what is going on underneath is a fascinating surety.
These short interactions demonstrate an interesting leak in today’s poker education culture: we love the model and its outputs, while we are quickly losing track of the theory. The model is not theory; we improve theory from the model’s outputs, but the model is itself mute and is only possible because of theory. Consider how often smart players say to study the big picture, not every detail; what do you think that is really all about? Yet aspiring players immediately run home to check their lines against GTOW, the seductive application which has become as much of a soothing AI doll for regs as it is a strategic tool. Further, consider how often someone in your Discord starts a foolish statement with “in theory we should,” then goes on to refer to some obscure spot in a solve output. No,

OOP Oberleutnant Greg Porter returns to the Zoo pod for an update on his successful career as poker pro. I can’t believe it’s been six years! Time has really flown since the early days of our little group and teaching community.
Greg is an indispensable and senior member of said little community. He runs the OOP training games, providing high-level poker feedback, and specialized coaching. Greg edits my more challenging pieces and, more importantly, provides timely puns in the Poker Zoo chat.
On today’s episode, we hear about his games, and in particular about the influence of the Stand-up Game on mid/high action.
We then go through some of the highlights of 2023 in poker, the year of Doyle’s departure, Berkey’s ascension, and the long-needed return of produced poker content. Speaking of, here’s that opinion piece where I called for the return of production and writing to poker media.
After a short mental game interlude, we get into some hands from his local games.
A previous episode with Porter.
Here’s today’s hands discussed:
Hand #1 10/25 6.3Ke 8h
s5 75
s6 c
s2 c 88ds
Ac5d4h
s2 x/f
s5 100
s6 c
6d
s5 275/c
s6 1100
Jh
s5 x
s6 5025ai
 
Hand #2 10/20/40 8Ke 8h
s7 130/c
s8 c/c
s1 650 AJss
Qs9d8s
s1 600
s7 c
s8 f
8h
s1 x
s7 x
2c
s1 x
s7 2500
Best wishes in 2024.

It’s been a long time since I played in Washington, but the scene continues to evolve, however strangely. See, it’s all about the weird rules and regulations. Podcast guest Mannes N. gives us an update on the state of the games.
The most important details are the rules for the tribal casinos and the rules for non-tribals, which are particularly hard on the poker player. To complicate matters, the tribes have basically quit the poker business, taking the big bets with them, and forcing all the traffic into small rooms around (but not within) Seattle.
Basically, that’s why Eric Persson, owner of many of the small poker rooms, can punt your rake money off at a surprising rate. It’s a great time to own a poker room in Washington State.
Mannes regularly plays at the Caribbean and Fortune rooms, two of the most popular in the current Seattle poker market. He occasionally posts on his “Owlkeeper” blog about poker, mainly tournament trips to Vegas. Here’s a post regarding the local games.

Living in the Raleigh, NC area, Mickey and I started to frequent bar league freeroll tournaments (lots of fun) and landed in our first home game, a low stakes NL progressive-blinds game upping the blinds every 30 minutes.
My first live cash tournament was at Mirage, 2009. I fearfully deposited the $85 buyin and with about 23 runners won the event for something like $575. Needless to say I had no idea what I was doing, played like a passive nit and ran well.

In the second part of the pod, we go over a couple hands under the Spread Limit regime.
HH #1:
– Cardroom: Fortune Renton, 3/5, buyin cap 1,000, betting cap 300. Discuss the 300 constraint and if/how it should influence play.
– Stack: 1080 (216 BB)
– Setup: 8 handed, Villain is Vpiping higher than most of the table, no prior history
– Hero is in S4, Main V is S5 (using the S1=Small Blind convention)
Preflop:
– S3 limp/call
– Hero S4 with A6hh 20
– Villian S5 call, V’s stack covers me
– Pot 60 after $8 rake
Flop: 652 with one heart
– S3 check/fold
– Hero S4 check/call
– S5 40
– Pot 140
Turn: Qh
– Hero S4 check/call
– S5 80
– Pot 300
River: offsuit 8
– Hero S4 check/ action to be revealed
– S5 250
HH #2:
– Cardroom: Caribbean Kirkland, 1/3, buyin cap 590, betting cap 300. Caribbean recently became part of Maverick gaming owned by Eric Persson of high stakes cash game infamy. The clientele is generally older than that of Fortune, it also gets some of the local tech crowd.
– Stack 515
– Setup: 7 handed, early in the session
– Hero is in S2 (bb)
Preflop:
– S4 10. This is “Jack” a 70-ish fun player who was once ejected from another cardroom for smuggling hard liquor in his “water bottle”. Likely playing a linear range with a short stack of approx. $110.
– S7 call, s approx $400. When he sat down he was introduced by someone else as an “action player” and seemed to live up to the tagline so far.
– Hero S2 with AQo call
– Pot 30 after rake
Flop: A86 rb
– Hero S2 check/ call
– S4 20
– S7 call
– Pot 90
Turn brick – think it was a 2
– Hero S2 check / 165
– S4 40/ call for approx 80 all in
– S7 call/call leaving 200 behind
– Pot 500
River 5
– Hero S2 check/ action to be revealed
– S7 200 all in
Mannes is also a thoughtful commenter on my blog, I want to thank him and all those readers who like t...

The poker world loves tournaments in the 2020’s. Online, tournament culture is vital and MTT-heavy while cash game action stalls. GG has challenged Pokerstars with huge tournaments series. U.S.-facing ACR continues to thrive. As for the live scene, everyone is amazed at the action, with WSOP and WPT now vying almost non-stop for your dollars; did I see they were bringing back the NAPT? I give in. Today we talk with one of the best in tournament poker, Enrico Camosci, and hear what it takes to rise to the top of the MTT food chain.
Enrico has had a huge 202o’s so far, with an online bracelet and multiple big results, leaving him with about $2.5 million in online wins. In Spring he took third for a massive score at the EPT Monte Carlo high roller; maybe that’s why he’s even started to scale back the grind and hang with the live whales.
Despite his success, the only way you may know him is that Enrico was the televised victim of a curious slow roll that got a little attention in 2021. Not really sure what Sam Grafton is thinking here.
In this interview I didn’t focus on results and trophies too much, but process. I wanted to hear how Enrico got to the top of the (specifically Euro) MTT world, and so I asked a lot of questions about what he does. In general, it sounds like an intense dive into specific spots but also returning to the spot later, in cyclical fashion, is his studying and coaching key. It’s certainly true that two weeks on a single board BU V BB is going to yield a lot of fruit, for instance, but you must also come back to it to truly own the knowledge.
I’m thinking he’s doing it right. If I study like him, can I be a thirty-year old vacationing in Paris, tired from beating the games in Monte Carlo? Definitely.
Once a novelty, there is now even a school of thought that tournaments have more complexity than cash games; with changing stacks, levels, and tougher competition, I think they may be right. Hope you enjoy my first chat with Enrico. You can find him on Insta, and also contact him at his in-development coaching site, MTTgod.

Vegas is home to more than just gaming, it is home to the history of those games and to those who created that history. Richie Brodie, lifelong “poker bum,” has played with all the greats, from Doyle and his “southern” crew, to the Mayfair’s Erik Seidel, to California’s rising 1990’s NL scene with Bobby Hoff and Barry Greenstein (along with an apparently more reluctant Dan Harrington). Today we hear his story and the story of a whole age of poker, from the pre-internet obscurity of the late seventies to a comfortable seat at the Sahara deepstack game of the Covid era.
Richie starts in upper New York but is soon drawn to the Nevada games, led by his older brother, a gambler and expert sports bettor. I say Nevada deliberately, as there is a great deal of less-told history surrounding Reno, Tahoe, San Jose, and the rest of western cards; Las Vegas just wasn’t the only place. As Richie emphasizes, the games moved, and the players followed, from famous rooms to forgotten obscurities. (One of the casinos Richie mentions, Harvey’s in Tahoe, was even bombed.)
It sounds like a lot of fun: a bunch of guys who love poker gathering at Caesar’s Tahoe for two weeks of around-the-clock-play.
Think again. This is serious business.
The approximately 100 entrants in the casino’s third annual Superstars of Poker tournament huddle intently around the fifteen tables in the roped-off tournament area.
Their concentration is so intense it is nearly impenetrable. Neither the smoke hanging heavy in the air nor the persistent clanking of coins in nearby slot machines is enough to jolt the players out of their poker-induced trance.
A television broadcasting a college basket all game goes unnoticed for hours. Finally, a passing cocktail waitress turns it off.
from the Reno Gazette-Journal, “Poker More Than a Game for Tournament Players,” probably early 1990’s
For point of reference, when Richie first started playing seriously in the late seventies, David Sklansky, with whom he would soon be playing against, had just published Hold’em Poker, one of the first modern poker books. Doyle Brunson’s Super System would not appear until 1979.
I think I missed some questions that poker players would like – the real details of the games, and I mean down to the nitty gritty: what were the sizings, how many players per hand, and such.  We know Bobby Hoff introduced a lot of three betting, but what about the others? Yet Richie hints at the answer during the interview, “in reality,” he comments, “the games haven’t changed that much, but the number of players who know what they are doing has.” I think we know what that means.
Enjoy this interview full of poker history.

Picture late 2019. Britain was finally Brexiting, Trump was somehow still presidenting, and general protests for a more liberal, freer society were happening all over the world- remember Hong Kong? Remember life before mask and vaccine discourse?  That’s when I last talked with Gerard S., aspiring pro and studied player who had worked with a number of noted pros and organizations, including Fausto Valdez and Solve For Why. Gerard had a poker blog, a girlfriend, a residence in sunny Florida, and was finishing up a year cleaning up at live ring games and MTTs.
Then it happened: Covid went from zero public awareness to a full-blown hysterical crisis that would shape the next decade. Covid would also trigger a sequence of events that changed everything for Gerard and his poker life. Soon he’d be signed up with Poker Detox and battling not only to beat the games, but to understand them at a new level, all while making rent.
Today, we find out where he’s at and what he’s learned.
As any poker player will tell you, a significant element of skill is involved in winning at the tables long-term. However, it’s also important to acknowledge the role luck plays in poker too.
We have zero control or say over the poker hands the dealer gives us. Nor do we have any control over the community cards dealt on the flop, turn and river. These variable outcomes can cause short-term volatility in your poker results, known as variance.
Game selection has a major bearing on the cause of variance in poker. If your preference is to enter vast, multi-table tournaments with fields of hundreds or thousands of players, it’s fair to say your poker bankroll will encounter immense variance. That’s because these big-field tournaments carry so much volatility. If you’re playing for hours or even days, it’s possible to experience run-good and then run into the brick wall of a downswing and be knocked out before you’ve even made the money.
-from “What is Variance in Poker?” by poker.org
The Poker Zoo often visits with Coaching for Profits players, check out episodes such as
Episode 43: Luka turns to CFP and Nick Howard
Episode 40: Coaching for Profits with KYT
Episode 36: Odb_Blackbaron/DLF on CFP
PZ 71: More Coaching, More Profits, with Luka V – Out of Position (persuadeo.nl)
and others, including from a coaching perspective.
 
Food in this episode:
Hot Pepper Jelly
2 C Green Bell Peppers cut into pieces for the food processor
1/2 C Jalapenos, chopped – Seeds & webbing removed
For a red version, substitute red bell peppers and just 1/4 C thai chilies
Combine these in a food processor and mince accordingly
Ingredients:
Pepper mash from the food processor
5 3/4 C Sugar
1 C White Vinegar
1 Bottle Certo (or 2 pkgs) This is just Sure Jell or any fruit pectin
Combine Pepper mash, sugar and vinegar in a sauce pan and boil for 5 min, then turn heat off and leave for 20 minutes.
Add fruit pectin and boil hard for 2 minutes.
Ladle into small canning jars (we use pint size) and can using typical water bath canning procedure.

For a quick appetizer for parties, you can simply serve over a block of Philadelphia cream cheese.
If you have access to a smoker you can take it to the next level ...

Swirling beneath the never explicit politics of the poker scheme is the treatment of so-called “recreational” player. A lot of condescending, hypocritical stuff is said every day, on every platform, by every talking head about this source of all poker income. Occasionally, however, that tension is resolved when one decides to stop donating and start taking his own, or in this case, her own.
Jen Gianera is one of those players who decided to turn it around, and to great effect. Since taking on actual poker theory and not the Tips & Tricks clickbait that fuels the mediocre and parasitical poker training industry – APT is still, almost unbelievably, shockingly grabbing novice dollars – Jen has flown through the ranks and is now profitable at all the cash games stakes she has tried.
Of course, nothing is that easy or simple. Jen already has the advantage of being both more hard-working and more curious than many poker players. She also has the time and leisure to play and study on her own pace, having retired to Las Vegas after a busy and successful career serving the law and the people in southern California.
On today’s pod, we talk about her process of coming to be a winner. We go over the Las Vegas low-stakes scene, which has its hot and cool spots. Jen talks about the Sahara game, now coming to a pause after nice long run: can its success be duplicated elsewhere?
(Unfortunately we missed covering her rungood at slots and such – how do they do it? No one knows.)
We finish by reviewing an ambiguous spot from her run at the Monster Stack in this year’s WSOP – with competing incentives, how and why do fundamentals solve our problems for us when we are potentially destined to lose no matter what?
Monster Stack WSOP 300/500/500 9 handed 50Ke me
5 1500
7 c
9 c (villain)
1 c QJss
2 c
Flop Jc9s6d (8000)
Xxxxx
Turn Ts (8000)
1 3000
2 f
5 f
7 f
9 c
River 4s (14,000)
1 6000/?
9 18,000

Few are able to get themselves banned from social media sites like Abe Limon, guru of west coast live poker and advantage gambling. Our last pod with Abe was a little rough on the ears, so we make up for it this time with good conversation ranging from his online arguments, why the WSOP is not meaningful for poker, his take on abortion, and even to a little split-pot strategy sideshow.
It’s incredibly funny to hear that Abe, while wandering the social mediascape in the midst of a lifetime ban from Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, found himself in Gab Social’s animism of Christianity, social conservatism, and white nationalism, one which operates under a flag of free speech. I’d really love to read those threads he speaks of and find the abuse he doled out, but it’s a hard slog and I’ll need a few more hints. Torba does seem to have absolutely scrubbed the @limonpoker handle, but what of his other ones? Censoriousness always sucks yet left and the right each appeal to its short-term utility far too often, and usually while professing the virtues of open discourse. The regrettable secret is that it’s hard to maintain and often plain bad for business. Further, as the curious “Carl Beijer” Twitter and Substack account has made clear there is a nice game-theory argument as to why the sides of a debate have a prisoner’s dilemma-like incentive to further censorship if one side is “cheating,” not to free us from it. The world may break everyone, as Hemingway wrote, but maybe their principles are what crack first.
Briefly freed under Elon’s simultaneously more liberal but messier and controversial regime, he is presently serving another short ban. Why must he do this? Why can’t we all just get along? Because lies deserve “no quarter,” Abe explains, an old-fashioned and noble answer. Yet how do we know what’s a lie? What does he get to be so sure? One way is to set terms, and to bet on it, and that’s where, agree with him or not, Limon shines. It’s a good approach and one about which we in the poker world may claim some credit.
When we close, it’s to talk about the same hand I discussed with Matt Ossi. I don’t describe it very well this time, as we talk mostly in useful generalities, but Limon bets in position and gets raised and reraised on these flops to a committing SPR: what to do. I also don’t do a complete job in describing the strategy, however. To be clearer, the flop bet is a potential mistake, but calling off now expecting better than two-to one likely breaks even or is close- we’re behind overall but have a price. Bankroll matters and bomb pots put huge pressures on financially limited players. Limon isn’t one of them – should he have gambled with his whales or is making tough decisions with a good attitude still a part of a host’s gameplan?
What additionally matters in this case is that when we do take our half we’re not the ones being quartered given our exclusive nut draw on top rather than commonly shared straights on bottom. Nuts Exclusivity is big in split pot games and is part of what makes this hand both marginal and compelling. Either way, my original point and one reason I contacted Abe is that I’d much rather not make this flop bet and instead use position against my opponents on the turn rather than have to gamble – in a way, this whole situation is about the difference between expected value and equity.

Despite what they tell you, PLO, NLHE, and their bomb pot variants are deeply linked in themes and mainly differ only in micro-level implementation.