Poker & The value of money (part 5)

Poker & The value of money

I have mentioned the value of money in one of my previous blogs. I got a lot of great comments of other poker players and they wanted to hear more about this. So I'll dedicate this blog to my struggle with the value of money over the years. When I started playing poker I was about 19 years old. With friends we started playing for small amounts of money. It took me about a year to find online poker. I remember feeling massively tilted when I would lose 50$ and I'd lose more money trying to chase my losses. This happened  3 or 4 times (slow learner) before I realized I had to emotially detach from money to prevent this from happening again. This took me a while te master by reading books, reading on forums, talking with other pokerplayers, bakroll management and more. When you start playing poker it can be a very emotional game, you are not used to playing for money and everytime you move up in stakes you have to get used to winning and losing bigger amounts of money. When I lost a big pot I always had to vent to get control of my thoughts and emotions. I had to call friends and talk to them how unlucky I was or what an idiot some guy is who just won my money. So I would like to thank all my friends who had to listen to the countless of badbeat stories I was dealing with at that time. It definitely helped me in my process to get where I am today. I remember the first time I lost a 1k pot. I felt like the floor dropped under me, and I fell in a deep ocean trying to gasp for air. Or the first time I won a small tournament I felt like I was Phil Ivey and I would crush the nosebleeds in no time. I've experienced emotional high's and lows playing this game, emotions I would probably never feel if I didn't play poker.

When I became a professional at 23 years old I was making quite a bit of money. It felt like it was raining money and all I had to do was try and find the biggest bucket I can and try and catch it. It never occurred to me that one day, it might stop raining. Try to imagine you are young, you are making lots of money and it feels like this will never end. What would you do? Most of the money I made in my first years went right out buying shit I didn't need. Eating out 4 times a week, bottles in clubs, expensive clothes etc. I was buying and doing everything I dreamed of doing in the years before but couldn't do because of lack of money. It was like I was playing catch up with my teenage self. In this period money had zero value to me. Every winning month I was already thinking of ways to spend that money. In my wallet I would always have atleast 1k and if I spended that in a day, I wouldn't even remember what I had spend it on. Fulfilling these young adult dreams wasn't very satisfying, but it was a blast. I don't consider it as a period where I wasted money, I just had to get it out of my system before I could move on.

In the years after I slowly regained my sense about money. I realized it's good to be able to do what you want, but if I always want to have that luxury I need to think about my future. When I was backpacking in Asia I wasn't playing any poker. I gave myself a low monthly budget and forced myself to make choices. I would sleep in crappy hostels for 6$ per night or eat streetfood for 1$ per meal. I remember in Thailand I saw somebody selling cookies, I asked for the price and he said it cost 1$. I remember thinking to myself “I want this cookie, but for 1$ I get a meal here, so it's not worth it”. So i suppressed my urge to get a cookie and moved on. In Asia I got to see beautiful places, meet great people and experience new things all on a very small budget. It opened my eyes that so much is possible with very little money if you have the freedom & opportunity to do it. I had more fun sleeping in a dorm and walking to a supermarket to buy the cheapest beer, then I had spending it on a bottle of champagne in an expensive club. I realized that the money I would spend on one “good” night in Vegas could also buy me 2 great weeks in Asia. That was a life changer for me.

I'm not saying that from that point I only lived in dorms and eat streetfood where ever I am. I live in a nice apartment that I share with 2 other pokerplayers. We have a chef that makes our lunch and diner. Sometimes I buy myself something nice. But I am definitely not wasting money anymore. Having a chef saves us a lot of time. We don't have to think about getting grocery's, we don't need find a restaurant and waste 2 hours going there. We have great quality food right at home. I think we save a lot of hours on worrying about what to eat, going to grocery store, cooking or eating out. The time we save with a chef will make us money if we spend it productivly on poker. Our apartment is nice, but we could have gone way more luxurious then this. Obvioulsy we go out in the weekends and we have a great time going to shady bars and drinking beers. I make choices in the luxury I want and that will improve my ability to play poker. Chef: Yes. Champagne: No. Travel: Yes. Hotels: No. With my current lifestyle I spend  approx 30% of what I was spending when I just started as a professional. If you compare my life now with my life back then that seems impossible. I am investing money for my future and I will probably travel around for a couple of years more. I already realized that money does not make me happy, but it gives me the freedom to do what I want, and that definitely makes me happy.

John Lennon said: Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted. I think money I enjoy wasting, was not wasted.

Poker & Life balance (part 4)

The last blog I wrote is already 6 months ago. In the past half year a lot has happened in my life and I have made some changes. I have met a lovely woman who is now my girlfriend. I travelled to countries like Russia, Guatemala and Mexico. Seen beautiful places and met interesting people. Last time I wrote I planned to go to Colombia, and that's where I am now writing this blog. In my previous blog I was searching to find my way in life. This blog will be about how I have found balance in my life in the past year.

I remember when I started playing poker as a professional I was a bit obsessed with it. I grinded many hours and when I wasn't grinding I was studying poker or at least thinking about it. I neglected many aspects in my life, like the relationship I was in, friends, family, health and probably more. I was making money doing something that I loved to do. So during that time I thought I found happiness in poker and I thought it would be enough. It was enough, for a little while..

On the other hand I had periods where I wouldn't play at all. Either sick of the game, or sick of my current life, I would sometimes spend days, weeks, even months not playing poker. During that time I would mostly travel and enjoy the (financial) freedom this lifestyle offers. Once I would be in that state of mind, it would extremely difficult to get my ass back to the digital tables. The tables where I have to sit at to make some cash.

These two “phases” are the complete opposit of eachother. I have spend the last year of my life finding a balance for poker and my life. To explain how i tried to find life balance and how I achieved it I would have to seperate it in two catagegories; Internal & External.

Internal:

• Mind: Challenge yourself intellectually VS. Give your mind time to rest
• Health: Eating healthy food, exersize VS. Rest and treat yourself with snacks
• Heart: Give love VS. Recieve love

External:

• Poker/work: Set goals and try to achieve them VS. Realise my fortunate situation and enjoy it
• Fun: Find time to do the things I want VS. Doing everything I want immediatly!
• Social: Seeing friends & family VS. Spend some time on my own

So how does this work in my life right now?
Internal:

• Mind: With poker I constantly challenge my mind to calculate on the spot and make accurate decisions. I try to keep devoloping at other area's, by reading books, watching documentaries or trying to learn something new. Right now I'm studying Spanish. I also have enough time to give my mind rest by watching TV shows or just chill. I also meditate on a regular basis, which is great to give your mind the rest it needs.
• Health: I eat healthy every day, I exersize regulary. In the evenings I mostly relax. Obviously I treat myself to a snack on regular basis. Damn I miss the Dutch junkfood!
• Heart: I am fortunate enough to give & recieve love from my girlfriend, friends & family

External:

• As for poker I have a fairly balanced life right now. I put in enough hours to grind and i have study time, although this varies per week. I have set longterm and shortterm goals and I am working towards them. I also explore the world and the various things it has to offer. I am not solely doing one or the other, but I think I have found the right combination between poker and enjoying the freedom it gives me. So this is a combination of the extranal factors Poker & fun.
• When I am in The Netherlands I make sure I see my friends & family. I make regular trips to Holland to make sure I see them often enough, even though it is still not as much as I would like it to be. When I am not in the country of Cheese and Tullips I spend a lot of time on my own. Ofcourse I meet travellers and some months of the year I share a home with roommates. I still get my fair share of “me time”. This is how I try to balance the social aspect of the external category.

So at the moment I have a fairly balanced life. How did I achieve this?

Last year I travelled for 3 months through south-east Asia by myself. I took the time to reflect on my life and my state of mind. I felt like I was neglecting certain aspects of my life and I tried to figure out how I can give those area's more focus and attention. I tried to be as honest as possible to myself (this is hard, because your mind is always biased) and tried to figure out how i could spend more time and energy on the neglected area's, without neglecting area's I was currently happy with. This took some months of trial and error, but right now I feel like I have a well balanced life. I have spend countless of hours thinking about positive things in my life, and how I could get as many positive impulses in a day as possible. And ofcourse I tried to think about what was negative in my life, and got rid of those things. I can only speak for myself with this statement; “poker is a source of a lot of negative energy”. If you do it for a living it is a very stressfull job. Probably in the same range as stockbrokers at wallstreet. It is a very lonely job, since I am staring at my screen all day. It does not give me any satisfaction at all. I found ways to balance this by focussing on the positive things it provides me with like freedom and money. If you spend your money in the right places, you can get a ton of possitive impulses from it. At the moment I am satisfied with internal & external aspects of my life. For the first time in my life I am looking forward to the future.

I have not been unhappy since I became a poker pro, but I have never been as happy and at peace as I am now. For years I have lived “in the moment” and not give much care or think much about the future, but I guess we all mature at some age. It just took me a little while longer than most. I am 28 now and I just started making solid plans for my future, with a realistic timetable in which I want to achieve certain goals. I used to have a picture in my head of what my future would look like, and having a timetable to achieve that between 5 or 20 years. I narrowed it down to making plans for the next 2-5 years. I don't live on a day to day shedual anymore, but I make plans for 2-3 months and make sure I achieve my set goals in that window of time.

I think it's important to balance all different aspects of the internal & external categories to feel fullfilled and happy. You can focus on one or two aspects more for a period of time if you feel that is very important to you. But in the course of life it's important not to neglect any part of these points I have discussed above. Most grinders will say it's important to have a balanced poker game, I find it more important to have a balanced life.

Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others. – Buddha

Poker and emigration (part 3)

It has been months since my last blog and a lot happened in my life. I broke up with my girlfriend, so I decided it was time to travel and clear my mind. After that it was difficult to get back on the grind, but now I’m almost back on track. But that is not the topic I want to write about. This blog will be about why I moved to another country and travel around and how this affects my life. Do I feel at home everywhere, or nowhere at all.


The obvious reason for immigration are the bad taxes in my country. But I think I always wanted to live abroad, explore, discover and find adventure. I settled on Italy, it's a beautiful country, good food and a nice-sounding language I can’t speak. I figured I would try to learn it but life got in the way (as usual). I live in a small village with approximately 2000 residents, and probably about 20 that speak English. You can imagine it is difficult to build a social life here, I am doomed to live like a hermit, or learn the language --> Hermit it is!


At the moment a poker friend lives with me with whom I lived before, so I have someone to actually talk to in real life. But even if I live here alone or travel around by myself I don’t feel lonely. For some reason Facebook, Whatsapp or Skype is enough for me to keep loneliness away. I’m used to no human interaction, I’m not sure if this is a positive or negative development. In the movie Cast away Tom Hanks turns his volleyball into a person to communicate with. My phone is my Mr. Wilson. Without it I think my life will be a lot more difficult and more lonely. I remember the scene he loses Mr. Wilson, I imagine I would feel the same emotions losing my phone even though it’s not completely the same. Through my phone I connect with friends and family but it is still just an object even though it feels different to me.


Right now I’m planning to travel to South America for a while in 2014, start in Colombia and go from there. My Spanish is better than my Italian, I am going to force myself to take some Spanish lessons while I am there. Even though it seems like I’m living the dream by going anywhere I want and do whatever I want, when I want it. It doesn’t feel like that to me. I don’t really have “dreams” anymore. I just do whatever sounds like fun or new to me. I don’t think I appreciate the options and possibilities I have got as much as I should. I have no clue how to change that. I try to “stop and smell the roses” in small moments, like a beautiful sunset or on a nice autumn day like today when I can see the vineyards changing colors. I know happiness is in the small things in life, and that’s what I am trying realize on a daily basis. But I want to enjoy the highlights of life too. I realize I am in the prime of my life, and I’m doing all the things people dream they could do, or would have done in their life. And it’s frustrating that I can’t find joy or happiness in that. Don’t get me wrong, I am not depressed or unhappy. I just feel I’m not getting maximum value out of my life. I’ve thought about going back to Holland, but I am scared that in the future I will regret all the opportunities I missed. Also I’m not even sure I will find peace of mind and happiness there. I rather regret the things I did do, than the things I didn’t do. This makes me kind of restless.


Because I moved to another country I have lost some friends, and some ties with family got lost. But the friendships I maintained grew stronger. I make an effort to keep in touch and when I visit Holland I spend quality time with them. Some friends already visited me abroad, and I’m sure more will follow. I have a small brother and sister (13 and 9 years old) and I regret that I have to see them growing up through facebook. A couple of months ago I was in Holland and my brother suddenly had a lower voice. Which made me happy because slowly he is growing into a man, but at the same time made me realize I am missing their childhood. But traveling around the world also gave me the opportunity to meet many interesting people. Some of them I am happy to call my friends. While traveling you meet a lot more open minded people, people with a similar way of life, people with similar views on life.


Traveling definitely gives me a unique life experience, even though I’m uncertain it will be useful in my future life. It made me practice my social skills. Talk to strangers every day while traveling and I still do, now that I’m back in Europe. During my travels I also found a new way of life which fits me well for now: “life begins at the end of your comfort zone”. If you stay in your comfort zone life will become boring. I need to reach out of my comfort zone to feel excitement and to feel alive! Even though I see so many new places and things, it all feels the same. It’s because I am already comfortable going from place to place and live in strange countries so it in my comfort zone. I have to find it in different more extreme things or I will be bored out of my mind very soon. But it can also be in very simple things. Like start an awkward conversation about something that bothers you or makes you curious. Or you see a good looking girl on the street and you just walk up to her to say “hi”. The more things you do that are out of your comfort zone, the wider your comfort zone will grow.


So when will I be done with traveling and where will I settle? These are questions I ask myself every day and I can’t come up with a satisfying answer. I know traveling is currently just a way to kill boredom and honestly I am just making sure I wont regret not traveling for when I no longer can. . I made a very long bucket list with countries I want to visit and things I want to do, which should keep me occupied for at least another couple of years. This should give me enough time to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. Maybe I will just fall in love somewhere and just stay there forever.. That actually sounds like a pretty solid plan to me.


A friend send me this quote by Imam Shafi’l RH this week. I found some comfort in it and hope my restlessness is normal in some way.


“The intelligent and refined find no rest in dwelling in one place,

So leave your homeland and travel far away!

Travel and you will meet new people replacing those left behind,

And tire yourself out, because it makes life worth living!

I have seen that water stagnates when it stands still,

Yet when I runs it is sweet and pure.

And if a lion left not its land,

It would not catch its prey

And if the arrow left not the bow,

It would not hit its aim

And if the sun moved not across the horizon,

People the world over would have tired of the sky”


- Imam Shafi’I RH

Poker and my future career (part 2)

I never had a real passion for any field of work. In school I didn’t really excel in a particular area, beside math. I tried a couple of different bachelor studies, but nothing could interest me longer than 1 or 2 years. Then I found poker. It started out for fun with friends but once I realized I could make a living doing it, I spend almost all of my spare time on this. I would wake up with it, and go to bed with it, and even dream about it. I wasn’t just dreaming about winning the World Series, I was processing the information I didn’t have time to process in the day. When I gave up my job and study to do this, I was very happy and confident. I thought I had found my dream job which I could make a lot of money with and do this for the next 20 years to come. Boy was I wrong! Poker has some big upsides, but also a lot of downsides. I think people underestimate how stressful it really is. I might die of a heart attack before 50 if I keep doing this. I plan to live at least a couple of years longer than that. So lately I have been thinking what I could and want to do if I leave the games for ever.




Poker has spoiled me in a lot of ways. I’m like a small child that didn’t have to go to school and could eat all the candy he wanted. Now I have to go to school, sit still in a chair and listen to somebody who orders me around. I can only eat my candy in breaks or playtime. How do we expect this child to adapt? I think this child would get in fights with his peers and teachers, and will be suspended from school very fast, where he can go back to eating all the Mars ice creams he wants. I’ve enjoyed absolute freedom the last couple of years. I have nobody to answer to. Only thing I have to do is make enough money to cover my big spending habits and save some for the future. Working for somebody and with other people seems to be something I will never be able to adapt to anymore. Of course when I’m flat broke and have no other choice, I will be forced to do something I don’t like or want to. But when I still have a dollar in my pocket, I can still play Heads or tails to build back my roll.




I live in a digital world. This might sound a bit crazy for people who don’t do this for a living, but 75% of my day is spent behind a computer. I eat breakfast and lunch behind my desk and sometimes even diner. I have an online social life. I have online friends, who I never met in real life, but who I talk with for hours every day. We discuss poker related things but also intimate private things. I would trust those friends with large sums of money without hesitation. Some of them might know me better than real life friends who know me for years. You bond easily when you have the same line of work and they also live in this digital world. I live in a country where I don’t speak the language (yet), and English is hard to get by here. This makes me even more committed to the World Wide Web. How will I ever break free of this and join society again? Is there a red pill I can take to unplug from the matrix?




The value of money is also a very big issue. I’ve lost the value of money, and don’t know how to get it back. As a poker player you can’t be emotionally attached to money. It is just a number on your screen. This way you will not tilt easily, so it’s very important. If you play mid stakes poker, you will get used to losing and winning big amounts a day. I can lose or win a decent month salary in a couple of minutes. How can I ever get used to earning a year/month salary with a job? I can write countless stories where I wasted big amounts of money on seemingly ridiculous things, but that won’t help me finding back the value of money. You get used to spending big amounts of money very fast, and the people you hang out with have the exact same problem. But we don’t see it as a problem, we think we are cool.

My girlfriend can stand in a supermarket and think about if she wants to buy a $ 3 or $ 2,20 product. This in my eyes seems ridiculous. In my mind that $ 0,80 difference is not worth the time. But this is a normal sense of the value of money and I want to get that back. I want to start caring again about 80 cents! That is the only way back to normal society.




I’m pretty sure I can rule out working for a boss in the future. And I’m pretty sure I need to earn around $ 80k a year to cover the lifestyle I’ve grown a custom to (even if I cut back on a lot of things). So what options are left for me? Trading stocks? That seems to have similar downsides to it as poker. I hear a lot of poker players say they want to start something for themselves when they are done with poker. And I think I have to think in those lines too. I still have no passion for anything else than poker, and I will have the next couple of years to find something I am passionate about. All I know now is that I will not play this game for the rest of my life. I will try to play it for 3-5 years more to figure out what I can do with the rest of my life. I know chasing money won’t make me happy, even though I thought it would.




“Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.”

Benjamin Franklin

Poker and a relationship (part 1)

Let me start off with a short introduction of myself. My name is Morten and I’m 26 years old. I was born and raised in The Netherlands and moved to Italy with my girlfriend in 2012. I’ve been a professional poker player for about 3 years now, but as most players this game has been my obsession since 2005-2006. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how poker affects my relationships with other people, my way of thinking about the future and life. So I decided to start a blog where I can share my thoughts on how poker as a profession effects your whole life.




Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. I think poker players are from a different galaxy, and we cruised our kickass baller space ship into The Milky Way, and decided Mars looked like a nice sunny place to stay for a while. We seem to blend in just fine with the Mars men, but we’re different. How different are we, and how does this affect our relationship with our significant others? To play this game for a living I’ve developed a specific skillset to cope with the high stress full environment. “Skills” to suppress emotions under stress and to try and rationalize every decision are two important skills to have. I think I’ve had those skills before I got introduced with poker, but this life has definitely made me train those daily. This is not a skillset I have an “on/off” button for. So when I’m having a discussion with my girlfriend, for some reason I try to find a solution to whatever problem she has at that moment. But these women from Venus usually don’t want a solution and I find it extremely difficult to understand her emotions or to talk about mine. I’m used to suppress all emotions while grinding, how do I change that? And how can I expect my girlfriend to understand that? Did you ever find yourself in a spot where your girlfriend is upset, and you’re thinking “what is the best line I should take here?”. I think poker definitely made it more difficult for me to express my emotions towards my girlfriend, and also made it more difficult for me to understand hers or how to deal with hers.




As a poker player I enjoy absolute freedom. I eat when I’m hungry, sleep when I’m tired, wake up when I’ve had more than enough sleep. I don’t need to plan anything in my life. I just need to make sure I get enough hands in every month and that’s basically the only planning I do, and want to do. I’ve always thought I would be the easiest guy to live with. I don’t care when we have dinner, don’t care what’s for dinner, and don’t care if we go out to eat. I’m always up to do something fun, but don’t really mind what we do for fun. I don’t mind to just relax every night either. In reality I’ve learned that apparently this can be very difficult. My girlfriend wants me to make decisions on what time we eat and what we eat. She finds it very annoying that she has to ask me what I want to do every day and that my usual reply is “I don’t care, whatever you like”. So in my mind I’m easy-going, but in reality I’m difficult. Or are we both easy-going, and is that the reason things are difficult? Like a double negative makes a positive?




To play this game for a living, you have to be a little obsessed with it and highly competitive. I enjoy winning, but seriously hate to lose. And a few big loss sessions can stay stuck in my mind, repeating hands in my mind, going on skype sharing thoughts with other grinders, going into my database to check for a leak. Obviously I understand the variance, but lots of buys ins is often not only bad variance. And that can stay stuck in my mind, like a broken record. This means that when I’m in a downswing I find it difficult to focus on anything other than poker. When I’m not behind my computer and just relaxing with my girlfriend, a part of my mind is still thinking about poker. Which means she does not get the attention she needs and deserves. A downswing can go on for many hands. It can last days and even weeks. How can I expect her to cope with that? A woman has her needs too, and how can I satisfy those needs when my mind is in another place? Obviously a downswing can’t last forever, because eventually you would go broke. But how can I force my mind to stop obsessing about poker, and focus on my girlfriend?




I always loved the quote from the movie Rounders: “In a poker way of life, women are the rake!”. I’m sure a lot of poker players agree with this. And I’ve always smiled and felt some sort of recognition when I heard this quote. But now I think these women that take care of us “easy-going” grinders, they are the Casino! They make sure we have a comfortable chair, that there is enough food and drinks we need, and they stack our chips very neatly. They make sure everything is set for us to just grind, and if they take some rake for their trouble, that’s just simple economics.




I guess I have to accept the fact I’m not as easy-going as I’ve always thought I was. This life has it’s downsides too, like any other profession. For next time I will try to think about how poker has changed my future career path/choice forever.




Morten