My Life at the Table: A Poker Journey
The theoretical work on this site is grounded in nearly two decades at the table - and a lifetime poker profit just shy of six figures. Most of that came in the Limit Hold’em era, live and online. The detailed records lived on a retired MacBook Pro and went the way of limit hold’em itself, but the story is straightforward: heavy volume, disciplined execution, and a professional mindset that turned long days into real income.
I cut my teeth in live 10/20 Limit Hold’em - incremental edges, relentless focus, and no safety net. Sessions were long, sometimes extreme - there’s a 24-hour marathon that still sits in muscle memory.
When the ecosystem shifted online, I followed. On PokerStars and Full Tilt I played 10/20 and 15/30 LHE, where the meta-edge included volume and rakeback optimization. I hit Supernova on PokerStars and stacked Iron Man medals on Full Tilt. There were stretches I played to pay rent, and that clarity forged my operating principle: emotion out, math in. Mollitia exitium est. Softness is ruin.
An inflection point arrived through Bryce Paradis on CardRunners. His treatment of Minimum Defense Frequency and range-based reasoning flipped a switch—from “play good hands well” to think in equilibria. That shift - from tactics to strategy architecture - runs through everything I write here.
As limit hold’em faded, I rebuilt for No-Limit Hold’em - a full technical and psychological reset. Since 2014, alongside a primary career in data science, I’ve logged 1,000+ tracked live NLH hours for +$25,000 (about $25/hour). It’s a smaller sample, but it confirms the same lesson the limit years taught me: a principled framework finds exploitable patterns and holds up under pressure.
One insight rose above the rest: humans mismanage tension. I watched technically brilliant players collapse under stress while “less gifted” opponents weaponized it. I felt it myself when poker money kept a roof over my head. That’s why my research focuses on adversarial pressure, psychological realism, and white-box models - not just pretty math.
Today, poker is my laboratory. I test theory against reality, combining structured review (Run It Once), literature study, and simulation work (PokerSnowie). The journey - limit to no-limit, online to live, grind to research - funds the philosophy here: first principles, measurable edges, and strategies that perform when the pressure is highest.