LFG
I was a professional poker player in my twenties. I played online cash and tournaments and traveled internationally to play big live tournaments. I was successful, but never achieved the lofty expectations I’d held from the start. While every gambler goes through highs and lows, my career was less stressful than most. I casually built a bankroll in college and it was never really strained. Eventually I grew both nonchalant and nonplussed by my own lack of growth and a bro-ey culture celebrating every big moment with “LFG!”
I always knew I’d eventually do something else, and used Black Friday to make my transition. I taught elementary school in my thirties, though the bulk of my income came from daily fantasy sports. Poker stayed adjacent to my constitution: I taught it in math class, I played sporadic tournaments, watched it on TV and studied during the pandemic. Around my 40th birthday, I decided to move on from DFS. I also knew I didn’t really want to teach school all day, then come back to my own kid, who was born two years ago.
I thought I’d reinvent myself as a Data Scientist. I studied Python for a year and a half while raising our baby boy. I got my daily gaming fix playing heads-up online games of Agricola with my friend John. Meanwhile, I made a series of scores in poker tournaments in Black Hawk, CO. This spring, to distill my data science path, I took part in a career design fellowship through my college, Macalester. I learned a lot about myself during the fellowship. First, I determined what I really wanted to do was write a Substack leaning on some soft data analysis. Then I realized the thing I most wanted to write about was gaming strategy. I pondered what games people would be interested in reading about and wrote a preliminary post counting down my 25 favorite games (coming here soon). Spoiler alert: poker tops the list.
One night, smoking weed on the back porch pondering my Substack, I had an epiphany of the obvious. There exists a game I love, a game you can make a living at, a game millions of people around the world play, love, analyze and read about, a game of depthless strategy and intrigue. I think it would have hit me earlier if I hadn’t played professionally before. There is nothing I would rather do than compete at a game for a living. The low-grade remorse I felt for playing professionally has been washed away by a decade of teaching and the needs of a family. Rather, it is a great privilege to have an opportunity to compete for a living. Writing about it is icing on the cake.
During those bleary days spent changing diapers and grinding DataCamp, the things I most looked forward to were my next move in Agricola and the next poker tournament in Black Hawk. I realized both were games governed by strategic precision. I realized the pursuit of strategic precision is my absolute favorite thing in the world. It turns out poker’s dominant strain, No Limit Hold ‘Em, features depthless levels of strategic precision. It turns out the world’s most dominant players are those most devoted to the pursuit of that precision. More than anything else, that’s why I decided to become a professional poker player for a second time.
I’ve felt a fresh serenity and excitement since I decided to rededicate myself to poker. After I made the decision, I found myself repeating one phrase over and over - when I’d learn a new concept, when I’d see someone torch equity at a WSOP final table, when I’d win a big pot, when I’d think about writing this Substack, when I’d contemplate my new existence:
Let’s Fucking Go.