About Paradis

I write here as Paradis.

The name is a nod to Bryce Paradis, one of the old Limit Hold’em crushers whose videos on CardRunners changed the way I thought about poker.

But the first thing that really hooked me was Small Stakes Hold’em by Sklansky and Miller.

That book was my first proper introduction to the idea that poker had a mathematical foundation. Winning was not just guessing someone’s hand, reading their face, or listening to some old live pro explain how he “put him on ace-king” because of a feeling. There were reasons. Pot odds. Equity. Protection. Value. Free cards. Thin edges that mattered because they repeated.

That was it for me. Once I saw there was structure underneath the noise, I wanted to understand the structure.

I started in live Limit Hold’em.

Fixed bets. No dramatic all-in river overbet. No solver-approved bet-size tree. Just streets, discipline, boredom, ego, and small edges that had to be pushed again and again until they became money.

I played live Limit Hold’em up to 10/20. For a while, poker paid my rent.

That sounds cleaner than it was.

Live poker was strange. Sometimes it was Russian oligarchs splashing around like money had lost all meaning. Sometimes it was people being wheeled out of bathrooms after overdosing. Sometimes it was a PLO player completely losing his mind, grabbing his opponent’s chips, throwing them across the room, and screaming, “You want free money? Any of you want free money? Free money for everyone!” while security came in from every direction.

God bless PLO players.

But most of the time, the hard part was not the chaos.

The hard part was folding.

It was sitting there for hours, before earphones were allowed, folding every hand pre-flop while the table laughed, drank, needled, splashed around, and gave you every emotional reason to get involved. Then walking away feeling good, not because anything exciting happened, but because you knew you had made the correct decisions.

That is one of the first things poker taught me. Discipline is not always intense. Sometimes it is excruciatingly boring. Sometimes the best decision looks like nothing at all.

Back when the room still allowed it, I would sometimes grind 24-hour sessions. Not because it was heroic. It was not. It was ugly, tiring, and always involved too much bad casino coffee. Did I mention tiring? But if the game was good and I could still think clearly, the decision was simple: stay disciplined and keep making better decisions than the people giving their money away.

Poker taught me that edges are not always clever. Sometimes the edge is just being willing to do the correct boring thing longer than everyone else.

When the live Limit Hold’em games dried up, I took the plunge into online poker.

That was a different world. Faster, sharper, less forgiving, and significantly more technically advanced. You either improved or you got run over.

Eventually I played online Limit Hold’em up to 15/30, became a PokerStars Supernova, and also earned Full Tilt Black Card status. That period forced me to think much harder about the game. Volume mattered. Rake mattered. Table selection mattered. Tilt control mattered. And the old live instincts were not enough on their own.

That was where Bryce Paradis and the training-site era really mattered to me. The game was not only mathematical in the Sklansky and Miller sense. It could be thought about through frequencies, equilibrium, exploitation, indifference, and game theory. Poker was deeper than I had realised, which made me like it even more.

I liked that there was always another layer. First you learn not to play trash. Then you learn pot odds. Then you learn equity. Then you learn ranges. Then you learn that your opponent knows you know ranges. Then the whole thing becomes a hall of mirrors with money in the middle. Then you learn it is all a mathematical equation to solve.

That is still the kind of problem I like.

I also spent time as a medic in the Army Reserve. I came first in the Eastern Region courses Camp Med Assist course for 5 Brigade. I do not mention that because it belongs on a motivational poster. It was another place where I learned that competence is built through repetition, standards, and doing the work properly when no one particularly cares how you feel about it.

Later, I ended up in data science. In hindsight that makes sense. I already liked messy problems where the answer was not handed to you cleanly. Data science gave me better tools for questions I already had: Python, statistics, machine learning, validation, simulation, messy datasets, and the habit of turning a suspicion into something testable.

I eventually became a senior data scientist at a top data consulting firm without taking the neat path there. No degree opened the door. A lot of late nights did. I studied after work, filled gaps, rebuilt foundations, and kept moving in the direction I wanted to go.

That is also why I started working through the MITx MicroMasters in Statistics and Data Science. I did not want the certificate as a decoration. I wanted the foundation from the best source available. I wanted to understand the material properly. So I looked for the best probability and statistics education I could access and started working through it.

I do not think of that as inspirational. It was more practical than that.

You cannot control how smart you are. You cannot control where you start. You cannot make the world hand you the clean version of the path. But you can control your direction, your standards, and how many hours you are willing to put in.

The one variable I can always control is how much I can grind.

That is mostly what MathematicalEV is.

It is not a personal brand. It is not a brochure. It is not me trying to sound polished.

It is where I put the questions I cannot leave alone.

A shuffling machine that everyone treats as random.
A poker model that breaks at the edge.
A chess position where keeping tension creates more pressure than resolving it.
A model that works beautifully until you ask it the wrong question.
A game where the interesting question is not just what someone has, but what they are forced to do next.

I like mechanisms. I like knowing what is happening underneath. I like pulling apart claims that sound too clean.

“It is random.”
Fine - how?

“The model works.”
Fine - under what conditions does it not work?

“That is just how the system works.”
Fine - why?

That is why the site moves between poker, shufflers, probability, decision-making, data science, chess, and whatever other weird corner catches my attention. They look like separate topics, but to me they rhyme. They are all about decisions made with incomplete information, inside systems that are usually messier than people want to admit.

I do not want everything here to be too polished. Some pieces will be technical. Some will be speculative. Some will probably be wrong in ways that later become useful. That is fine. The point is to think honestly, follow the thread, and keep going until the idea either collapses or turns into something real.

Away from the table and the screen, I live with my partner and our black German Shepherd, Panda. I cook, lift, run, study, play poker, and spend too much time wondering whether some ordinary-looking system is hiding something interesting.

The phrase I keep coming back to is:

mollitia exitium est - softness is ruin.

Not because life should be grim. It should not. I like good food, good wine, dogs, jokes, games, and good conversations too much for that.

It means comfort cannot be allowed to make the decision for you.

That is the standard I am trying to hold myself to here.