Poker Distilled

Pete and Melissa are back for a catch up episode. Topics range from knowing your skill level, to maximising EV in soft live poker games, to Pete's return studying poker seriously in 2025.

Pete and Melissa discuss this episode's philosophy book and how it relates to poker: The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts.

Poker can subject you to periods of darkness beyond what you are normally forced to confront in real life. Do such periods have a long-term effect on the psyche? Is it true that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger or do we emerge out of every downswing with a bit more of the light sucked out of us?

Pete has a proposition for Melissa - a new idea that will change the trajectory of the podcast. Also in today's episode we discuss three ways of strengthening the will covered in Ryan Holiday's book The Obstacle is The Way and how they relate to the poker player.

What if tilt is not actually something poker does to us but something we do to ourselves? In this episode we examine poker as a higher order beauty. Its intricacies exist objectively, even in a realm where humans don't. If we can fix our attention on the objective beauty of the game itself and escape the daily churn of how it makes us feel, we can harness curiosity to free ourselves from the gloom of self awareness and reach a flow state where we can play at our best more often.

Why is it so difficult for humans NOT to look at their short-term poker results. What are the benefits of getting into better results checking habits? Why the feedback of daily, weekly and monthly graphs isn't really feedback at all...and much more.

Overbets and why they're such a fundamental part of No Limit Holdem. Why pot and all multiples of pot are arbitrary. Melissa embarks on an INSANE challenge. Discussion of the Kristen Foxen bust out hand and much more.

Pete and Melissa debate the utility / futility of Range Betting and that mode of thinking before getting into a therapy session where Melissa recounts a recent incident at the poker table where she hit rock bottom in terms of her behaviour and how she's intent on changing her petulant ways.

Pete and Melissa are back with season 3 of Poker Distilled. Season 3 gets underway with a quote from a novel Melissa is reading which sparks a big discussion about how the madness of seeking a perfect theoretical strategy can absolutely ruin your poker progress and how the imperfection of humans vs human play is where the true beauty of the game resides.

Pete and Melissa are back for a one off catch up while you patiently wait for season 3 of Poker Distilled. Topics includes challenging yourself in tough games, how to build armour in poker and in life and why it's so important to have ambition as a poker player. 

It's the end of another magical season of poker distilled and what better way to start 2024 than to hear Pete and Melissa discuss why tilt and gambling issues are two points on the same spectrum and why not knowing how to fight people short-handed in wide range spots makes you a hollow shell of a poker player.

Why being a poker player is like being the CEO of a one person company; why trying to play your range at the expense of considering your hand is almost always asking for trouble; and why calling someone a 'Karen' is a reprehensible act. This episode explains it all.

Today there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that Pete's golf game is no longer as terrible as it was. The bad news is that there is a very high chance that you make poker decisions for irrational reasons. In this episode we discuss the various mental game leaks that cause unsound thought processes and how to go about fixing them. 

Your poker career can be an isolating place. You are solely responsible for your fate and no one else can truly experience your poker journey like you do. What can we do to make poker a less lonely place and what has happened to the lost arts of sweats and study groups. Are we missing out on one of the greatest aspects of learning the game by making so much of our study solitary?

Pete is looking to recruit a new online cash game student who has a bit of a following in the poker world. The new star could be a well known live player. It could be HELLMUTH? Or maybe it could be you? In this episode we also discuss Melissa's epic $5/$10  heads up battle with the cardroom manager. Our final segment is on the concept of trade offs in poker strategy and how humans are quite bad at thinking in this vital way.

Melissa asks Pete about a wild looking call he recently made while streaming before discussion focuses on getting inside the mind of weaker poker players. How do they think and how can we exploit them for it?

Melissa interrogates Pete about the word 'Gherkin' before an interesting discussion about how to manage your live poker career. 

After quite a few years of focussing full time on growing Carrot Corner and coaching, Pete has decided to get back in the mix and generate a big sample of hands in 2024 at the stakes he commonly coaches. Melissa interviews him about the reasons behind this decision as well as his hopes and fears as to how things will go.

Poker can leave us battered, bruised and weakened. It's not whether this happens to you in poker that is the interesting question; but how you bounce back from it. Pete plays the role of poker therapist in this episode as Melissa searches for the road to recovery from an absolutely brutal weekend of terrible variance.

If your ego is too big for your poker ability, it can lead to frustration, tilt, and delusion. Your learning might slow down or stop entirely as you become stuck in the victim mindset, expecting to win. However, deflated ego can also be a big problem leading to a lack of confidence and self-trust at the tables. How do we go about mapping our ego to our ability level and how can we tell when there is a mismatch?

Melissa starts the podcast with a horror story of how she lost $500 out of nowhere in a very unfortunate incident at her local cardroom. The conversation then centres around the different ways in which events can be meaningful and meaningless and where this one falls on that spectrum.

This is not the greatest episode of Poker Distilled, oh no, this is a Tribute. Couldn't remember the greatest episode of Poker Distilled, oh no, Pete's sound was muted throughout. What a boomer. This episode is about the concept of World Favourability in Poker and why having the right vantage point is mandatory for assessing it correctly.

Every poker player leans a certain way when it comes to their default game. These biases tend to come out as soon as tilt enters the fray and impartiality goes out of the window. Sure, we're supposed to mix when we have an indifferent situation and no exploitative read to guide us, but in reality we often let our default preferences decide matters. 

In 2010, Pete was part of a thriving poker community getting told off by professional poker players for his sloppy thought processes. In the modern age, good poker communities are hard to come by and lone learning has become commonplace, but how destructive is this isolation for your poker community and what can you do about it?

Melissa recounts the story of her dramatic recent encounter with an old man coffee . More serious topics this week include Pete's experiences with some rare anti-social/unpleasant poker students and some strategy talk about playing at low stack to pot ratios.

After falling out about Pete's disdain for live poker, Pete and Melissa reconcile by launching into a deep conversation about the importance of becoming obsessed with a discipline (like poker) to draw real meaning from it. 

After some recap on Melissa's experiences using the mental game techniques from the previous episode, Pete talks a bit about some of the most difficult experiences he's had as a poker coach including dealing with students that have no hope of succeeding or even those who have gambling problems related to poker.

Poker has a harsh way of making us attached to pots, winnings, progress, graphs and more before viciously snatching those things away in a bout of negative variance. How can we manage our own attachment to cope with this mentally taxing element of the game. 

Mistakes provide one of the most essential and valuable resources for growth in poker but how do we get into the right mindset to make use of them with the bonus effect of playing poker becoming a happier and more fulfilling experience?

Solvers can be extremely powerful tools, but what if I told you that for many people solvers make their game WORSE not better. In this episode we give you practical advice on how to get the most out of tools like PIO Solver and GTO Wizard while avoiding the common pitfalls that snare unsuspecting poker players. 

The final Episode of Season 1. Poker Distilled will return for season 2 in August 2023. Encountering wild maniacs at the poker table can be unsettling and disconcerting. We know these spots are highly profitable but how do we get into the right frame of mind to take full advantage?

Getting better at spots where your fortunes suddenly change in a negative direction is one of the most challenging elements to self-improvement in poker. Melissa brings up two spots from her weekend grind where she was on either end of extreme fortune reversal. How do we navigate this extremely difficult-to-process phenomenon in poker?

How do we set the right goals in poker in the short-term, mid-term and long-term. Achieving goals as part of a deal with future you and for the game itself as a higher power and object of intellectual beauty. 

Recently Pete played a weekend of live poker. How did the slowing down of time affect his  psyche and can battle-hardened live grinder Melissa soothe his pain?

In some ways tournament players have a clear mission which is mentally simple to carry out. Stay in the tournament, build your stack, and try to win it. For cash game players,  some sessions you will be down money all day/week/month long. How do we break free of this debilitating way of perceiving results and treat the dreaded feeling of STUCK.

Poker is a game of short-term delusion and long-term discovery. How do we know when we've gathered enough knowledge and skill to consider ourselves good players and how do we the avoid short-term illusions created by the swings.

Pete and Melissa dive into a few mental games topics starting with an examination of the role played by superstition in a poker player's career and ending with an endorsement of envy. Yes that's right. Envy can be good. 

How should we process the idea that we might be being bluffed? What about when we're shown a bluff after folding in a huge pot? How does this topic relate to what Pete calls 'the three modes of poker thinking'?

Live tells were once the biggest component of a live poker player's thought process. Since the GTO boom, we have moved more into the technical realm but have live tells been unjustly discarded and how much extra EV can they add to our game if wielded correctly?

We all have our own collection of 'poker knowledge' but do we really know the things we claim to?  Which poker beliefs can we trust and where do we have to be more sceptical about our own poker thoughts?

Poker car crashes. IRL car crashes. Good and bad reasons to quit a poker session. Do you have quitting leaks in your game and what can you do about them?

Are we naturally poker optimists or pessimists and what can be improve in our poker journeys by making an effort to see the game through more a more positive lens?

Playing your A-Game in poker can be a magical feeling but one that can seem elusively rare. What steps can we take to ensure we play our A-Game more often and what version of ourselves should we bring to the poker table? Which virtues learned in the outside world can we bring with us into poker in order to play our best more often?

If poker had the same timeline as human civilization, where would be on it? Are we still in a sort of dark age or has the advent of solvers hurled us into modernity? What do the recent feuds between coaches and prominent players tell us about our place on the poker timeline?

Is bravery in poker just about having the stones to put it all on the line. Are big bluffs and big calls the hallmark of the brave poker player or is it something else entirely? What are the crossovers between bravery in life and bravery in poker?

Melissa asks Pete about a harrowing recent experience he has struggled to deal with as a segue into the topic of adversity in poker and how it can be an integral aspect of poker success.  

Where do we draw the line with bum-hunting? Does poker do any good for society or is it an immoral choice of profession? What virtue can be found in a poker career?

Melissa makes Pete contemplate poker death and whether there could be a life beyond it. Does our conception of life after poker affect our behaviour within the game? How do our fears of ruin impact our poker careers?

Chaos and Order are inescapably connected and integrated within every fibre of human life and poker is no exception. This episode addresses the fine line between an orderly poker existence and a chaotic one as Pete rants to Melissa about one of his student's mental game journeys; his own battles with maintaining order in his poker career; and a disturbing dream he had where undead legions invaded his house. 

In the very first episode of Poker Distilled, Melissa brings Pete three things she wishes she could have unpacked from her poker backpack early on in her journey. Sometimes less is more, so what are these unwanted poker thought processes and habits and how should we go about shedding them?