Graphs-->Winners Tilt-->Downswing -->Depression--> Commitment-->  Info--> Upswing--> Freedom It was April 15th 2011 ( Poker Black Friday) and I had been a professional poker player for 2 solid years now and I had just lost 100 lbs for the 1st time ( I did it again in 2017-2018) and I was riding high! I was primarily a  HEADS UP LIMIT online player but as 2011 progressed the heads up limit scene was dying off slowly. There was still action but  it was nothing like it was in 2009 when I started and more players were open sitting at heads up limit tables than ever before. For instance,  when I started sitting 3-6 HU LIMIT in 2009 there might be 3 of us seeding these games on @pokerstars  and as Black Friday approached some days I would guess there was a dozen players sitting at this stake and maybe as high as 20. It was similar at the higher stakes and it was getting very competitive to get the best seats at the table and it was clear things would be getting tougher in the months ahead. So as my bankroll grew I would sit at limit stakes as high as 100-200 on various sites or try to be the first one in on games where players were seeding 6 max and ring games to get direct position on the rec players and this was the main recipe to build a bankroll and avoid a lot of variance and these games would go off very consistently. More or less what you are doing in this scenario is literally hunting. You have maybe the best player or one of the best players in the world sitting at a poker table and then as soon as someone sits with them you have to click on the seat directly to their left (some people had automated seating scripts) and you now  are in the most favorable seat at the table as this player was usually the worst player and you get to make your decision after they do. My bankroll was at an all time high and I was crushing these games and then I opened up the Stars and Full Tilt lobbies and BAM the domains had been seized and all of the money in the accounts were frozen. I thought no big deal this will be cleared up soon and I will get back to grinding. But as the day wore on and I spoke with more people this was going to be terrible for the poker industry. Fortunately for me I did not keep a lot of money on these sites so I do not think my exposure was over $15,000 off memory. @toddwitteles ALWAYS preached that this money was NOT YOURS until it hits your bank and I was aware of sites that had folded up shop before so I was overly cautious and would cash out as much as possible and leave bare minimum online for the games I was playing.  Other players were not so fortunate and treated these sites as their personal banks and a lot of lives were destroyed because of this. So I had 3 choices now because of Black Friday... 1. Move out of the country 2. Play live 3. Stay around and see what happens Moving out of the country seemed like a drastic move because I knew that the majority of the rec players were from the USA. Playing live would have been tough as the nearest casino was @foxwoods and it was close to a 2 hour drive one way. I was in the early stages of a relationship at the time with my current wife and she had a son who I was bonding with and I made the decision to stay in the states and see what happens with the rogue USA sites. For the remainder of 2011 and even into 2012 my work ethic just hit an all time low. The balancing of relationship + gambling was difficult and I just wasn't as committed as I once was. I was not focusing on seat selection anymore , I was probably playing in baddish games and just as a result of not being focused 100 %,  my bankroll was now getting close to an all time low as was my volume. So I believe it was late 2012 when I sold a package where I would be staked and investors would get like 30 % of the total profit. Now that I had other peoples money on the line I had to really step up and plug those leaks and I did and everyone was making money whom invested. I ran a few of these packages off and on  till this guy named Jerry who was buying pieces basically told me he would just take all of the action when I wanted to sell and we agreed I could quit anytime and it was a great relationship. We communicated via email and I still have every update on file that I sent him every day and this relationship started in mid 2014. Now I am playing for Jerry exclusively and then I went on a pretty big heater playing for him and  I won about $40,000 over a couple of months which meant I got to keep around $28,000 and I ended the stake and went back on my own. I quickly won another $20,000 now on my own and I am riding high but things were about to get REALLY UGLY. I had just won $60,000 in a short period of time in mostly 6 max  but there were 2 problems going on here and 1 of them I faced every year based off of memory and I have chatted with other pros about this before. The first thing is a lot of this money that I won was on @bovada while the @WSOP was going on so I am playing against weaker players online and this seemed to happen every year followed by a downswing. The 2nd issue is I was on such a heater that I started playing sub-optimally but I was running so good that even hands I am going in as a 2-1 dog pre-flop I was crushing these spots but that cannot last forever and it ended badly and really badly especially as the pros returned to the online scene after WSOP! Eventually the winners tilt that probably helped to propel me to a quick $60,000 upswing caused me to lose back $60,000 in less than 30 days and by the time it was over I was @ rock bottom mentally and was majorly depressed. I barely left the bed for a week and I remember just watching House of Cards Season 2  and barely doing anything else besides the absolute minimum with lots of sleep and it was like I was in a trance I could not get out of. I contemplated quitting poker as well during this week. I was unqualified to do anything but work in kitchens which I had done prior to 2009 but I was dead set on never going back to the kitchen. I sent feelers to a friend to see if I could get a job making maybe $40,000 a year doing janitorial type work and I was even turned down there. I looked around for jobs and eventually I just stopped. I believe if I had I gotten any type of real world job I would have found my way back to poker quickly playing part time and eventually full time. I was in survival mode and just trying to figure out how I was going to get through as I now have a family to support. So how did I break out of this depression and move forward? I used @google and it spit out something like this. Get Some Exercise. ... Challenge Negative Thoughts. ... Regularly Eat Wholesome Foods. ... Get Adequate Sleep. ... Drink Plenty of Water. ... Make a Change in Routine. ... Get a Routine. ... Laughter. So I took the core of these principles and things slowly got better. Jerry and I hooked up one last time around September of 2014 and I decided I wasn't going back on my own until I was sure I was beating all of the games and had a proper bankroll.  I made it my mission to get the "nut" seat in every game that I played if it was not heads up. I made it my mission to outwork every player in the aspects I could control even if they had advantages over me in poker skill. I was going to show up now every day during peak hours and just try and outwork everyone in specific areas which is mostly getting prime position on the worst players. This was the only way I was going to thrive and survive and I have more or less kept this mentality since. STRIKE FIRST , STRIKE HARD, NO MERCY but you cannot do that if you do not show up EVERY DAY!!! The first month of the stake started off poorly and I was very self aware that I might need coaching for the first time in my career. Heads up was easy money and those games were getting close to extinct. When you are playing 6 handed with 3 stone cold killers and one decent player and one rec you better know what the fuck you are doing or it will end badly if you do not have that "nut" seat. In this aspect I was stubborn over the years regarding coaching because the heads up probably offset a lot of downswings but now I REALLY needed it. I was researching coaches on @twoplustowforum and I came across this thread and it changed my life. The first time my life was changed was when someone suggested to play heads up for a living and now we have maybe the best 6 max limit player of the last several years retiring and dropping all kinds of info in this thread. forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1… To some people in the limit game this thread might be trivial but for me it was monumental. This guy posted his 6 max opening hand chart and when I saw that alone I realized the massive mistakes I was making pre-flop. I remember some of my friends who were pros were pissed that he was posting this type of content but not me! Not only did I get to eradicate a lot of my pre-flop mistakes I also was able to pick up on 3 or 4 nuggets that helped me IMMENSELY in other areas. Immediately just by playing certain hands preflop I was able to  "surprise" some opponents because they were probably using a lot of these tendencies against me. The first 2 months with this "new info"  I won 1000+ big bets and that graph is attached as well as my graph from that time period. I stuck with Jerry for close to a year and I tried to re-negotiate to a higher rate and he passed so I went back on my own. As time went on the Merge Network got aggressive at banning winning players. When I say aggressive it eventually was basically me and a mega whale and another guy I knew who was a semi pro but he had a full time job. We were the only 3 regulars playing every day and a few other guys popped in from time to time. So from late 2015 to some time in 2017 the majority of my action came either heads up or 3 handed vs the same player. I made it my sole mission to be online by 7 PM EVERY NIGHT of the week and I would sit online till 2 or 3  AM waiting for this guy to arrive. I would guess 13 out of 14 days he did show up. When I went on vacations or had something to do I would beg my friend to seed the game because it was a major fear that he could maybe try a new game or go to a new network but he never did. The reason I was never banned like the other players was because my rakeback provider @ the time was close with the network and I got a tag on my account on the back end that said DO NOT BAN so it took a while for them to ban me and I believe that was when they took on new ownership. They banned the whale as well for what I assume was because he was costing them so much money in deposit fees and probably wasn't shooting off in the casino is my speculation. Or they maybe banned him from poker so he could shoot off in the casino only but I will never know. I will post my graph and the whales graphs on his 4 accounts (Merge had like 10 skins) but these are incomplete as I stopped saving hands at some point due to often playing a lot on the mobile client. This guy was by far my favorite player to play against in my career. We barely spoke in the chat logs but we both knew the other would be showing up every night to go to war. I don't know exactly what % of the HU matches I won vs him but I would guess it was in the 90% + range. My goal was to break him with the littlest variance as possible and his goal was to beat me for as much as he could in 1 night playing like a complete sicko maniac capping every preflop hand and jamming the shit out of any flop turn or river he had a piece of. I countered this by playing kind of tight preflop with my middle hands and even at times limping to see cheap flops and rarely putting money in without pairs. ( Shout out @philgalfond attack by checking). I knew my edge in this match was to control things preflop and when I have huge edge on flops and further streets that would be where I would do the meat of the damage until I ultimately broke him. It sounds easy but I do know a lot of pros who had trouble adjusting to him when they tried to fight fire with fire. So in the end I am grateful for having a guy like Jerry in my corner who believed in me. I am lucky Piranha dropped that chart and other wisdom. Things like this are some of the major reasons why I try to help as many people as I can when they ask me questions or advice about gambling or whatever. I am fortunate that I got to play a guy I had about as big of an edge as you can have vs someone for a long period of time. The combo of all of this allowed me to support myself and my family and kept me in the game for a while. The next chapter in this series will be the transition to full time sports betting and the failed attempt to live poker which is the best thing that could have ever happened. If you enjoyed this piece of content please like and retweet. #onlinepoker #poker #wsop #sportsbettingtwitter #gamblingtwitter

4 Words- The Most Crucial/Sustainable Piece of Gambling Advice I Have Ever Received (Spoiler- It was Poker Advice) It was 2009 and I had been gambling hard since the late 80s and I was a sure fire loser at every form of gambling I had tried up until this point and the list was long. I got crushed buying and selling baseball cards which I got into at the age of 10 around the year 1987. I got crushed betting sports. I got crushed playing blackjack or other carnival games at foxwoods. The lottery (scratch offs) took a lot of money from me. I'm sure there were a lot more I failed at but this was the major list. I think the only form of gambling I was surely profitable on up until this point was local card games but there was just no liquidity there for that circuit to be sustainable as a lot of these games ran pre online era and the player pool was tiny. I had found edges in later years in various spots like @RASPicks or action point bets or stale nascar or college hoop lines lines but they would dry up too quickly or I would just bet too much over my roll when things were going good and I would bust and sometimes go into debt on payment plans with local bookies. But the hard truth is a lot of my losing in gambling was due to putting the pedal to the metal with my favorite mix which at the time was alcohol and cocaine and I would sometimes go HARD for multiple days at a time. But now here we are in the year 2009 and I have been sober since late 2008. I was playing online poker A LOT since 2004 but I could never gain any traction because I would just run it up and move up stakes and bust over and over again. So here I am with a clear mind for the first time since around 1992 and I had been recently laid off from a job as a sous chef. I had no direction in life but I did have some ambition for poker. I was not a winning player but playing those long drunken and drug fueled sessions over the past 5 years online taught me to hand read and I was pretty good at it. I was flat broke and I took a $100 loan @ 20c vig from an MTT player named "Shipdachips". I played $1-$2 limit cash online and I ran it up to $1000 or something and I think I eventually started playing $3-$6 limit and now I was up to about $3000. I staked @LukeBlindert in an $11 tourney and he scored for like $6000 and we chopped it up 50-50 and he eventually ran his roll to the moon off that stake! Not long after that I had around a $10,000 bankroll and I declared that I am going to try and play poker professionally and make good decisions. My plan was to play 3 or 4 tables of $3-$6 6max limit and run up lots of player points on @pokerstars so I could get to the second highest tier which at the time was Supernova. I reached my goal of Supernova so I would get good player rewards and the games were so juicy then but now the problem was I was starting to lose. I think I ran my roll down to about $3000 and I was starting to question why I was losing all this money so fast. But the answer to why I was losing was very simple and it was because it was SO HARD to beat the rake in those small limit games. There were probably 3 players who were beating these games before they factored in rakeback so it was NOT an easy grind. But then one night I was in an AIM chat room complaining about bad beats or something and a player named SetofKs said the magic 4 words that I needed to hear! He said hey china, "JUST PLAY HEADS UP". I thought to myself Me? Heads up? This might be the most foolish thing I had ever heard as I know nothing about heads up. I had watched a lot of heads up online up until this point and I thought to myself how swingy this is and how fast I could bust and this was the polar opposite of my initial plan of grinding for rake and moving up stakes. I saw guys like @philivey AND @TomDwan beating people down every day and just couldn't picture myself being the terminator but the truth is if you are playing vs weaker players it is very rare for you to swing down and more likely you are going to swing up. Not only are you swinging up but the more you win the less likely it is you go broke because as wins pile up the losses become trivial in the grand scheme of things. But then Setofks went on further and said, "I think it could be really easy, they have this site called Pokertableratings where you can look up who you are playing, and it will show you all of their stats and you can just play vs bad players" and at that point a MASSIVE alarm bell went off in my head. So my next move was to subscribe to PTR and sit heads up. I sat @ 3-6 LHE on pokerstars and within 5 seconds someone joined me and I looked them up and they were losing about $60 per 100 hands after rake at these stakes and I destroyed them. I would estimate that at the time 80% of players who sat vs me were losing at least $30+ per 100 hands. But it couldn't be this easy could it? Yes it was! Back then there was so much liquidity in these player pools that you could just open a table and sit and a player would join you within 10 seconds and then all you had to do was look them up and decide whether you wanted to play them or not. Now came the part of the process which involved a little bit of math and this is what I came up with by just throwing #s off the wall. I said to myself "At worst I am a breakeven player in these games so I will just play anyone who is losing $24 per 100 hands after rake @ $3-$6, and if they are even slightly losing less than that I will NOT PLAY. " I set a hard line and this proved to be the perfect system for me as there was very little variance and eventually I could play someone for 10 hands and within those 10 hands I could with pretty certain accuracy tell if this was a profitable match for me. I also was now in possession of a job that would pay me a minimum of $50,000 a year just playing @ $3-$6 stakes and I went on to become the all time profit leader @ pokerstars $3-$6 limit from all of the data I saw. I also expanded and started sitting on multiple sites so I could play vs more people and was playing stakes as high as $100-$200 pre black friday. I walked into an absolute money printing system that would be pretty sustainable over the next 10 years and would ultimately be the foundation of building a bankroll which allowed me to crossover into sports betting where I took my gambling career to another level using a lot of the same principles I learned from playing poker and by collaborating with some of the very smartest people I have ever met thru poker. It wasn't without its ups and downs though. While I never went broke I did have a couple year stint where I was staked. I was still largely profitable but in hindsight I should have just held all of my own action until I went completely broke but with a family now I felt I was doing the smart thing. There was a 2 year window in there where I nearly went broke but the key was I stayed in the fight and ran it back up and then fortunately I dipped right out of poker at around the time the golden age of sportsbetting was starting to take off in the USA and I was able to find edges bigger than I could have ever imagined across multiple sports. I'm still relatively sober these days as well. I have not been drunk in a few years and 99% plus of my days since 2008 I have been sober. I have not been perfect as I have had a few stints going overboard but the key is I stay in the fight of life and I reset when I have to. And that is the same principles you have to have in gambling. Reset - Refocus and search for that next edge because the majority of edges will either diminish or dry up eventually so you have to stay a step ahead of the game. #pokeronline #WSOP #sportsbettingtwitter #GamblingTwitter @ASchwartzPoker