105: Chris Sparks | Poker All The Way Down, Poker's Black Friday, High-Stakes Poker & Thinking Probabilistically

🎙️: https://atlasgeographica.com/chris-sparks/

🍻☕: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ryanhogg

The following is a conversation with Chris Sparks, one of the OG’s of online poker. Chris has been ranked in the top 20 online cash players in the world, and is now, in addition to many other things, the founder of Forcing Function, which teaches elite poker frameworks to investors and executives in meaningful companies.

Chris is also the host of the Forcing Function Hour Podcast which explores the frameworks he teaches at Forcing Function with an eclectic mix of different high performers.

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Time Stamps With John Perkins

• 00:00 – Introduction.
• 01:45 – Craziest & Degenerate Side Betting Chris Has Seen?
• 25:10 – Thinking Probabilisticly.
• 43:00 – Nassim Taleb.
• 54:10 – Poker’s Black Friday Explained.
• 1:02:21 – Chinese Proverbs & Serendipity.
• 1:12:14 – Has Poker Overoptimisation Driven Away Poker’s Great Personalities?
• 1:16:13 – Dynamics Of The Private Game & Private Games In Austin.
• 1:24:12 – Conversation Between Any Two People Of History.
• 1:27:45 – Afterthoughts & Ambition For The Podcast.

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Links To Chris Sparks

● Performance Assessment: https://www.forcingfunction.com/assessment
● Peak Performance Workbook http://www.experimentwithoutlimits.com
● Forcing Function Hour Podcast: http://www.forcingfunctionhour.com
● Group Coaching Program: https://www.teamperformancetraining.com
● Review Workshop: https://www.reviewandrevision.com
● Media Appearances: https://www.forcingfunction.com/appearances
● Articles: https://www.forcingfunction.com/articles
● Twitter: https://twitter.com/SparksRemarks

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

The following is a conversation with someone who has been described as one of the OGs of online poker. He's been ranked in the top 20 online cash plays in the world and is now, in addition to many other things, the founder of Forcing Function, which is an organization that teaches elite poker frameworks that include the likes of systems thinking, decision making, risk management, and more to investors and executives in meaningful companies. Chris is also the host of the Forcing Function Hour podcast, which explores the frameworks that he teaches at Forcing Function with an eclectic mix of different high performers. Ever since I started this podcast, I've been desperately keen to speak with someone who experienced firsthand the world of professional poker. Someone who has rubbed shoulders with some of the characters of the Poker After the Dark or Higher Stakes Poker series. Lark, Dwan, Ivy, Antonius, and so forth. One of my first jobs was a tournament director around Sydney pubs, and while I never played anything higher stakes than 510, me and one of my best mates were absolutely obsessed with poker, and for a whole year it felt like it was all we did every night. So needless to say, I was thrilled to speak with Chris Sparks. And in this conversation, me and Sparks cover some of the following Degenerate side bets and the nature of thinking about everything probabilistically. Chris covers the events of poker's Black Friday. Something that you'll find surprising about the famous poker players, the dynamics of the billionaire private games, Hannah Sim Teleb has influenced Sparks' thinking, and of course, much more as well. So do hang around to the end uh to hear what my ambition is for the podcast. And with absolutely no further ado, here is one of the OGs and online poker, Chris Sparks. Chris, poker plays are famous for gambling degenerately on side bets.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

Are we?

SPEAKER_01 1:53

I uh I remember back in the Poker After Dark days, you know, Phil Arc and Svandiari going at each other for Lodden Thinks and uh some of these amazing games. Um can you talk to me in your experience about some of the craziest side gambling that you've seen, witnessed, heard about that is sort of legend?

SPEAKER_00 2:15

Sure, yeah, this is a fun place to jump off on. I I think I think setting some framing here is useful. And as you hinted at, poker players see the world a bit differently. And I think this way of seeing the world is actually very helpful. So it would be from people from the outside seeing large amounts of money being wagered on relatively trivial queries seems very strange, odd, and perhaps degenerate, but it serves a very valuable purpose. So as a poker player, and I would argue as someone who wants to be successful in any endeavor, we are constantly calibrating odds. The world is probabilistic. We tend to think in things of black and white, this happened, it was always inevitable to be that way. But what we experience in the world is just one permutation of the many things that could occur. And poker players are very, very aware of this because we are trying to always estimate the odds of something occurring. And there's a really big difference between, hey, this is a 50-50, you know, flip a coin, and this is a 60-40 or even a 55-45. Because when you recognize you have these small edges, well, if you repeat those many, many times, you're picking up lots and lots and lots of pennies. So we have this way of trying to calibrate our estimates of what are the odds of something occurring. And the best way to really drive a lesson home is to have something at stake. So when you when you're hanging out with quote unquote normal people, you'll see this all the time, where someone will say something ridiculous, and they'll they'll back it up, being like, oh yeah, I'm a hundred percent sure. I'm completely, you know, you guys, you guys have no idea what you're talking about. But then you you propose a friendly wager. It's like, hey, I bet you $100. That's not true. Things like anything from obscure sports facts, like, all right, the the leading rusher in 2018 was Ladanian Thomason. You know, I'm not a big sports guy, so I don't bet on sports because I I know there's people who like literally memorize the almanac to hey, you know, you see that member of the uh opposite sex over there, I bet you can go and kiss her or him, and or no, I'll leave you three to two that she's gonna turn around, type of thing. Because you're constantly trying to make predictions about what's going to happen, and your success as a poker player depends on your not only your ability to predict, but your accurate assessment of that ability. So the the game that you refer to, Laden thinks came out of this meta-level. So Lauden thinks it's a fun game to play when you're on a uh a long road trip. You come up with a wager such as how many basketballs could fit inside of a 747, or how many steps would it take to walk across the country? And immediately everyone wants to try to Google it and say, well, okay, like it's it's this number. The actual number doesn't matter because in Laden thinks you are betting on what a third party thinks the answer is. So it's like, okay, how many miles from here to the moon? Well, I know because I've looked some of this stuff up the number, but I'm like, well, how interested is this person in astrology, uh, astronomy? Big difference. And do they, when they estimate, do they tend to overestimate? All this type of stuff. And then you have an auction style betting system where you keep upping the ante to till some you know, price is right style, you think someone has gone over, and you take the under from that. And so that adds another another dimension, another layer at as well. Is okay, the person that I'm auctioning against, is this someone who's gonna get cold feet if I keep just like doing small increments, or can I bluff them by starting a really high number? Yeah, all so that that's what poker is, is everyone thinks, hey, I'm playing my hand, and do I have a good hand in front of me or not? But there are all of these hidden dimensions of the game where you are trying to predict the thinking patterns of other players at the table, as well as to subtly influence those thinking patterns in such a way that they don't realize they're being influenced. So that that's the that's a bit of the metagame of these prop bets, is they're our way of sharpening our thinking. And having been on the other side of these prop bets where I've lost significant amounts of money because I was uncalibrated, you get punched in the face enough times, you start to be a little bit more humble about the things that you don't know. And like, okay, I'm really actually not that sure. As well as the unique phenomenon, this is a classic saying from the old days of con artists is you know, a stranger walks up to you and bets you $100, you know, he can uh squirt some soda out of his left lapel, you better believe you're gonna get an eye full of soda, right? If someone proposes you something that feels completely audacious, it's probably something that like you're you're probably the sucker. So you'll you'll see you'll see this when I when I used to play in um in Commerce Casino. So anyone who hasn't been in commerce, um, you know, it's it's just like a total, it's like a stadium of the generacy, just like infinite tables of people playing, and you have players there who, you know, when I was there, I was 21-year-old, completely naive about the world. Like, oh, you know, everyone here wants to be my friend, and you realize, you know, people aren't necessarily there to be your friend. Uh people who are like very mediocre poker players, but make a reasonable living off of proposing audacious prop bets to unsuspecting tourists and young 21-year-old poker pnoms like myself. Such as the one of the craziest ones that I saw was the guy who bet that he could hop all the way around the building just on his left foot doing 360 circles. You know, it's like obviously there's like he doesn't just like propose this outright. It's this aside, like, you know, he starts like hopping down on one foot in between hands, like waiting for someone to comment. Maybe he has another plant at the table who has like, you know, man, like you're hopping on on one foot. Like, I bet you couldn't do that for very long. And like sooner or later after the course of the night, you know, usually some drinking is involved. Like you have the you have someone take some up on, you know, like, I bet, you know, I bet you five grand you couldn't hop around the building. And he's like, you know, hems and haws is like, oh, that sounds impossible. I'm gonna need some odds on that. Maybe you give me five to one odds, you know, your 25 grand and my five grand, etc. And you know, before you know it, this thing that this he's been practicing for years, you know, he makes a nice five grand and that offsets his his poker losses. So yeah, you you you learn to be very careful in terms of what does this person know that I don't? Why is this bet being presented to me? You know, am I just getting this lucky opportunity, or has this been crafted for my benefit? You think about this in an investing context, like there's always a person on the other side of the trade. So you have to be thinking about all right, why does this trade make sense to this other person? What are they getting out of it? This is something that I think a lot about in terms of poker, is there's a transaction that's always happening, and you hope that the person who is playing poker against you is playing for a reason other than money, right? They're independently wealthy, they enjoy the camblottery and the competition that comes from going against other good players. But if everyone is there to make money and everyone there is really skilled, you're in the wrong game, right? There's there's a problem. So yeah, that that that's a bit of context on why you know these proposition bets from the outside feel so strange, but are it's like you know, young tiger cubs playing. It's a form of survival, it's a form of play that allows us to train for the real battle.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

I I love the um idea that a lot of things could be analogous to poker generally, just because over enough hands, it actually doesn't even matter what the cards are. Like the true amount of steps across the United States, it actually doesn't matter at all. How well do you know the other guy? And how well do you know that he knows you? And how well do you know that he what mood is he in? X, Y, and Z factor. But what you sort of started to explain at the end there was like, that's just a con, right? That that isn't sort of fun prop betting. In my in my mind, I was thinking like uh back in the sort of either the high-stakes poker or the poker after the dark days, I'm not sure, but there was this uh match where Ivy and Antonius had a little clipboard going, and in between each hand they would they were going on it, and it came out after that they were doing a hundred thousand per hand on whether it was a red or a black flop. Now that's the type of degenerate gambling and and uh and side bets that I think creates that that romantic idea of the crazy poker guy. Um these sorts of examples have you experienced yourself or seen and that are just legend in the poker community that a civilian would never get to hear about or see, for example.

SPEAKER_00 13:02

Sure. Yeah, I I think that's an first an important point that yeah, like these aren't all just con jobs. The the vast majority of people that I know and associate through poker are some of the most stand-up ethical people that you'd ever meet. And I would vouch for them over many others that I know from outside of poker. And when we were doing this as friends, the the amounts were never large enough that it was like going to ruin someone's day. Like typically these were in the hundreds or you know, low thousands of dollars, and it was a in this sense of like let's make this a little bit more interesting type bets, right? Where you're playing, you're playing basketball, you know, we would live in Vegas for the summer and we have a basketball court and a putting green in the back. And it was like, you know, what odds would you give me on this half court shot over my head? Or uh what odds would you give me on making this putt from across the street type stuff? Just like fun things where, you know, hey, you know, you lose a couple thousand dollars, it's like not great, but it's it's all in good fun, right? No one's taking advantage of anyone. Where you see it kind of get out of hand uh is when someone gets stuck and is trying to get even. So one example I can think of, this was my 21st birthday party in Vegas. So, small bit of background here. Uh, I started playing poker pretty young, around the age of 16, and turned professional around the age of 18, um, right after I graduated college. And, you know, was essentially spending my entire day inside on the internet. My whole life revolved around poker and being, you know, an 18-year-old in a new city. Uh, there wasn't really much to distract me. So I was on AOL Insta Messenger talking with all of my poker friends and realized that my 21st birthday was coming up. And hey, wouldn't that be awesome to go to the place that started it all, go to go to Vegas and have one of these debaucherous bottle service type weekends. So uh I got uh 18 of my online poker friends together for one of these Vegas weekends. And so just to picture it, like imagine uh, you know, 18, you know, 21 to 25 year olds who uh, as I've told in a joke before, like haven't seen the sun or felt a woman's touch in a very long time, uh, living in some form of you know parents' basement, you know, longtime gamers, uh a little bit in and over their heads, you know, very, very nerdy, quirky, but like very sharp in a you know, somewhat on the spectrum way. So anyway, uh after um, you know, on our second night, we are out at one of the clubs, I think it's Tau or something, and you know, you have 18 guys crowded around the same bottle service table, not having a lot of success, getting a little bit bored around 2, 3 a.m. Drinks start flowing, and um a couple of the guys start flipping a coin for $100. You know, it's like, you know, just like $100, $100,000. Just pure. And um one of the guys uh wins a few in a row, and all of a sudden he's up a thousand dollars. And my roommate uh who I move into LA later is a bit notorious for when he's losing, when he's stuck, he will keep going until he gets even. So he the joke is you know, he he if he could only start off down 10 grand, he would play much better because he just gets this hunger underground, underdog fire energy of like, I'm gonna stay here for days if I have to until I can get to even. Well, he's like double or nothing. And the gambling etiquette here is if you are winning, you don't get to decide when to finish. The person who's losing has to walk away. So pride comes into play a little bit, and he's like, okay, double or nothing, I accept. Well, he loses. Double or nothing, loses for two grand, loses for four grand, loses for eight grand, loses for 15 grand. And I'm at this point, I'm like, I can't watch. Like you guys, like you guys are drunk, like let's stop. Like you're gonna regret this in the morning type of thing. And you know, we're not quite on Phil Ivy level at this point, right? Like we're doing extremely well, but like 15 grand is really gonna hurt the next day. And you know, we're trying to like break it up as best we can, but this is this is conundrum, right? If you are ahead, the other person has to walk away. And my roommate's the type of person who's just not going to walk away. So I'm like, all right, I'm wiping my hands of this, I'm out of here. Wake up the next day. I uh I see my roommate as he wakes up as he's want to do around 4 p.m. And I'm like, so how did it go last night? Uh turns out that he lost his entire net worth flipping coins, that he lost 12 straight coin flips, 12 straight heads. Yeah, and you know, woke up the next day, uh, you know, quarter million dollars less in the bank and had to go down to the lowest stakes and rebuild his bankroll. And to his credit, this is one of like the all-time comeback stories. He was back at that quarter million point within a few weeks, just like did not leave the poker room for a few weeks straight. I don't know if he showered during this time, but like found a way to dig himself out of a hole. So, yeah, that's one of the cautionary tales that I give is don't create one of these narratives of I'm losing because you become insensitive to the scope of the loss. And before you know it, you wake up the next day with a lot more than a hangover.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

It was interesting to hear that maybe you uh you know didn't like the language of addiction. Because that's a bit of a contrarian take. You know, that's definitely not sort of status quo. People definitely I I think from my view of whatever people might uh think is that they want to be able to label people as addicts or not.

SPEAKER_00 19:35

Um It's very it's very it's very convenient to label things. Uh famously, uh you know, Richard Feynman, one of my intellectual heroes, he has this antidote when he's a little kid about kids making fun of him because he doesn't know the name of something. And it's we know the name of something, and that stops all of our thinking about what it actually is. Um when I when I speak with my um my I work with a teacher in Buddhism, he has this story where you know two Buddhists are sitting there laughing, and the joke is they call it tree. So they're looking at a tree and but they're actually seeing it. The structure of the tree, what it means, but a lot of people just point and say tree, and that's where the thinking stops. We put a label on something, and then because we're cognitive misers, we don't actually want to do deep thought on things. We can say, Okay, you know, done. That's why we we when we meet someone, hey, where are you from? What do you do? Okay, I've put you in a box. Now I can now I can my brain can take a take a break. And this might not surprise you, but poker players are very attuned to having these like walls where their thinking stops. And we try to like pull those out by the root. So poker players as a whole tend to be very contrarian thinkers. Like we have grown to be very skeptical of status quo views because everyone everyone just takes the majority review and says, hey, well, I guess they've done the hard work and thinking. I don't need to do any thinking. But the problem is everyone else has done the exact same thing. Now, I'm not saying that poker players are right more often than not. Like they're contrarian in ways, often that I think like are completely ridiculous. But even if the rationale in my mind is completely Terrible sometimes. They're at least doing some original thinking. And that's the key to arriving at a place where you actually understand what's going on, is that you're thinking from first principles. If the thought is originating on your own, like you're you're not identifying with it, you can actually update it in the face of new information, right? It's like always be calibrating. It's like all the time we're wrong, but we adjust when we're wrong. We don't like retrench and say, like, oh, okay, that's that's just one study, all that type of stuff. So I think there's a real advantage in like, well, hey, like that is an interesting opinion. Uh what about what if the opposite were true? Like, all right, that that that's like could you argue the opposite as well as you can the other side? That's a good one. Or here's another good exercise from improv is someone suggests something outlandish, and the question is, all right, well, let's assume that's true, for instance. Like, what else is true if this is true? And you start to build upon that and you see if that foundation actually can hold water. So it's it's these these exercises, and again, having large amounts of money incentivizes having this level of metacognitive awareness, but to just not take things at at face value and try to do your own thinking.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

Uh in in addition to uh that something that stood out before when you were explaining the prop bits was how you're always calculating the probability of something, and you're always you always instinctively think you have an informational advantage over the other person, which is why you're willing to give X odds over him.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Um that feeling I don't I rare can I can I pause I very rarely think I have an informational advantage.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

Then how do you calculate your odds?

SPEAKER_00 23:55

No, I I I only bet when I know I have an advantage. Okay. Right? Or I have or I have a high degree of advantage, or the amount at stake is just for fun and it doesn't matter. Like it's not that I know more, it's that I put more money in the middle in the situations that I know more. Does that make sense? Yeah, of course. It's like you're maximizing it's not it's not conservative, it's smart.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

But it's like less risky, i.e. conservative, right?

SPEAKER_00 24:28

I I think that again the the I think that language is really important. So if you think about conservative, what is that what is I don't know my definition for this is being not politically, I think in terms of risk is being risk averse. Risk averse. So anything that I do, I'm thinking in terms of a bet. So um in poker we say expected value. So this is this is just a a mathematical shorthand EV for does this bet have positive expectation? On average, when I make this bet, do I do well? Do I make money? Do I have positive expectation? So across all the times, if I did this bet a million times, would I make money on average? And so having that estimate of what is my edge at all times, and this is not just monetarily, this is down to should I go over and talk to that person? Should I cross the street, you know, should I jaywalk right now or not, or should I wait for the light to turn? All that type of stuff is like, does this have positive expectation? But the thing is, if in your terms, if I'm not conservative, all the time I'm making bets of negative expectation that on average I'm going to lose. And this means that I'm diluting my overall expectation because the bets that I have that I'm losing on average take away from the bets that I'm winning. Now, this is a really interesting dynamic in poker, is that poker, if you are become known as someone, the the word in poker is a knit, who doesn't give action, who only bets when they have a great hand. Um I may I make fun of my my wife Marianna a little bit for the about this because she is extremely well calibrated, but is a little bit um is a little bit risk-averse when it comes to prop betting. So anytime, and this this happens maybe like once a month, not very often, compared to me. I'm a little bit more like bet and then huh, maybe do I want to bet that. But she's like, I'll bet you, I'll bet you $100 is true. I'm like, you're like 100% sure, like no way. Like you absolutely know what's going on. She gets no action. So you she doesn't get she doesn't get any action because she's just too good. So in this sense, like if you only put the money in the middle when you have the nuts, when you have a really good hand, everyone's going to fold. So you have to occasionally bluff. Bet in time, you know, bet in times where you're actually not a clear favorite. You don't know if you're a clear favorite. But that's the thing, is you only make these negative expectation bets in order to get action on your positive expectation bets. And it gets really, really meta, especially when you hang out with poker players all the time, is that your whole life becomes a way of diverting that you are only putting in the money in the middle when you have it. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 27:37

No, I mean that that whole idea of the meta games is a super fascinating thread.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

One of my favorite movies, The Illusionist, um, really great uh movie when thinking about like what does it take to be the best? Uh there's this um there's this magician who has this trick. He's very he's very old, he walks with a limp and a cane, and he has helpers. And one of his signature trick, this is the 1800s, he pulls out a full um fishbowl, like a giant fishbowl from between his legs and puts it on the table. And they're like, how does how does this super old man get this fishbowl out of midair and put it on the table? Well, they start following him and they realize that the limp, the physical disability is all fake. It's all part of the act in order to divert attention from this guy is incredibly strong and does the entire magic act with a giant fishbowl between his legs. Uh and that that's a little bit of a little bit of a metaphor with poker's like.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Isn't that the prestige? Because he's the old Asian guy and it's huge.

SPEAKER_00 28:52

Oh, you're right, that's oh yeah, good good catch. Yeah, yeah. Uh the prestige.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

And Christian Battle moves the whole life with the same weight over his head. He lives the trick because no one knows about his twin brother. Spoilers.

SPEAKER_00 29:09

Exactly. And the other guy who has a silver spoon can't imagine the trick because he's always won by just hiring the best people versus the sacrifices necessary to pull it off. Yeah, the illusions is a magic movie that also excellent at Edward Norton that came around at the same time. But yeah, the prestige is the one we're after.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Yeah. Um, so the idea of always in your formative years, early 20s, mid-20s, everything you're looking at through the lens of probability. What's the potential outcome here? What are the incentives at play that's going to influence the odds of an outcome? That is, I think, from like I said to you off a same formative years, not playing poker nearly at the stakes you were, but enough so that this was how I was thinking, always calculating odds. Whether they were wrong, informed, missing a lot of value is another question. But nonetheless, thinking about constantly uh calculating the odds of stuff. How has this affected you? How has this influenced the way you see the world? Because I'm thinking particularly relationships, um always calculating big trade-offs, big opportunity cost, these type of things I imagine become more acute because you're constantly looking at probabilities in the formative years.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

I think it's been very positive. Um I think obviously everything is double-edged, right? So there are there are trade-offs of if it's hard to calculate something, perhaps I'm a little bit slower to move than some. And I think you know, a lot of progress is kind of moving quickly and figuring it out as you go. But I I think that this being able to estimate probabilities makes me very sensitive to what's worth doing and what feels risk, but really isn't, and what is actually risky, but people are not weighting the risk high enough. So in a way, like it gets a little bit strange. Things like I'll do things that are really fun and look really crazy, but I've done the math, and it's like, oh, it's actually not like something like skydiving. Everyone's like, oh my god, I wouldn't go skydiving. Hey, it scares the hell out of me. But if you look at the math, it's like, well, it actually is a lot more dangerous to drive to the skydiving sky than to hop out of the plane. Um that that by the way, that there's this concept of micro morts that I think is really interesting, is what is the what is the how uh so one micromort is a one in a million chance of death. So think about how many micromorts is this activity? And the most dangerous thing that we do on a regular basis is pull out of our driveway. Like what the best thing we could do to live longer, assuming that someone who's listening to this is in reasonable health, is you know, under the age of 50. The the thing you could do is to just like not drive if you want to live longer. But because we've normalized driving, hey, let the you know, this is a side, like you know, US was at its its peak power in the 50s and 60s. So you have interstate highway systems, suburban life that we've glamorized, you know, the freedom of the road. Uh hey, it's normal to do this incredibly dangerous activity every day. And thus, as like one small example, I tend to live in places that are walkable and take public transportation or a bike that has bike lanes, all this type of stuff. And you're like, wow, this guy, like what a what a life knit. Like he doesn't want to drive. It's like, well, no, I can do things that are a lot more fun for a lot less risk. So that is a calculated trade-off. It's that's it's calculated trade-off. But again, if I know that something is a good bet, I can go in, like all steam ahead. And if you actually like someone who's listening to this is like, again, like using your words, like, oh, conservative, like doesn't have fun, this type of stuff. If you ask my friends, like I'm someone who's like super adventurous, like I spend most of my time traveling around the world, like doing doing pretty wild things, like at least from the outside, but it's all it's all very it's like calculated chaos. Like I'm doing a lot of thinking and planning in order to be able to take these risks because I'm mitigating the downside. Uh, so it's it's hard to comment further. Like things like relationships, uh, you'd probably have to ask people who are close to me. I think a lot of people find it, you know, quirky and fun. Uh, but it's I I can't really change it. It's just the way that I see everything. No, I get it.

SPEAKER_01 34:07

It's very personal, but like, yeah, for sure. I mean, I I just get the sense that you would be the type that is you'd hate to admit it, but you're making trade-offs, opportunity cost trade-offs. It's tough, it's like a temptation, you gotta put it away sometimes. But it's like by being in the world of poker for so long and hanging out with so many people that thought the same way, I just thought maybe it would have shifted your thinking towards like the tail end of the distribution of people that are constantly looking at trade-offs.

SPEAKER_00 34:39

I I led to comment on that. I mean, man, there's so many fun fun ways we go down. You know, I mentioned opportunity cost. Uh, that's always my trigger for the biggest cost in life is opportunity cost because what you're doing in this very moment is coming at the expense of everything else you could be doing. So that's the true cost of half-assing of doing things that you don't enjoy that are low value is you you could be doing whatever the hell you want, but you're choosing not to in this moment. So I'm very aware of opportunity cost and knowing what are good bets um in terms of where I invest my time, attention, energy, who I invest those things with, what I choose to pursue is very intentional because I know the real cost is doing something that is not as good, and that's a very high cost. I I also will say that I have really tried to move more in the direction of intuition. That that's been a very clear lesson of mine. So, you know, short backstory, I I retired from poker and from everything at the age of 23 in 2011. Uh, there was this big event called Black Friday that some people might be familiar with, where poker was no longer viable, at least within the US. And I took five years off from poker completely. Um, a couple of those years I were spent traveling around the world. Um, I did some investing, worked in startups, just did a bunch of bunch of classes, a bunch of random, random stuff. Came back to poker in 2016, and since then it's been a part-time, well-paying hobby where I play for about half the year. I usually take this the summers off as a sabbatical. Um, but these days I consider myself semi-retired poker player. Anyway, since leaving poker full-time, where I described before, at a very young age, my entire life was consumed by poker, trying to be much more balanced. And especially in later years, my emphasis has been primarily driven around what it means to live a good life. And that a lot of this comes from perceptions of being fulfilled and doing things that make me happy. And a lot of those things cannot be quantified, and that you know, trying to quantify things usually gets in the way of those small moments in life that that really matter when you're thinking on the timescale of a life. So as I as I become a little bit more spiritually, psychologically inclined, realizing that like the guy in the gym who never does leg day, I I overdeveloped my brain. I was just too cognitively focused and at the expense of things like feelings and and just just the the aspects of lasting happiness and fulfillment in life. So I've really tried to move more in this direction of operating by feel rather than math. Obviously, there's some internalized experience in terms of like I still do things that I think are going to be positive expectation, but I try to just feel it a little bit more and to do things that feel good and seem interesting. So it's it's definitely been a corrective process over the past few years. I I had gotten the feedback um post-poker that I was a little bit too intense, and so I've really tried to like dial it back, be more, be more humble, be more relaxed, all that type of stuff. Um, so it's a it's a it's an ongoing process. Um, I will say that when I think in productivity terms, everyone automatically goes towards their weak points. Like, what are the things that I wish I were better, and tries to fix those as if there were problems. And I find that the way that we accomplish the most as individuals, and I would argue the the way that a society would be optimal is if we had people who were just like more outlier-y, that were more just like continuing to dig into the thing that makes them absolutely most unique. So knowing that I have this outsized skill set of calibration, estimation, simulation, pattern matching, I actually think that the best approach is to continue to lean into these idiosyncrasies because they're the things that other people find very, very difficult, but come very naturally to me. Whereas like a lot of things that other people find very natural come very difficult to me. And so, my again, thinking in terms of bets, the best bet is to put resources into the things that are easy and natural and continue to lean into those. So that that's a little bit of the counter there, is like professionally, I like continue to lean into this side. Personally, you know, when I take this poker player turn executive coach hat off, and I'm in my life, I I try to turn that part off and really lean into the like feeling overthinking and seeing and observing rather than you know needing to find some sort of probabilistic certainty.

SPEAKER_01 40:15

Spoxy, we've uh I've only asked one of the questions that I had prepared uh on the poker. Um, but obviously we've gone down a bit of a tangent, but just to bow this and then hopefully return to specific poker questions. Uh there was someone that you've mentioned quite a number of times, but you're talking about acting instinctually and thinking probabilistically, which are two uh sort of prods that don't necessarily sit in symbiotics that people might think. But nonetheless, it's what this great man Taleb uh does, it's how he thinks, it's how he writes. You've mentioned him a few times, so I assume it's someone that you're quite interested in. So I'd just love to ask you what you've learned from the sim Taleb.

SPEAKER_00 40:56

Antifragile is one of my go-to books. Um I think that Taleb is a very good example of the hedgehog, someone who knows a lot about one thing, but unfortunately thinks he knows a lot about a lot of things. And just thinking culturally, uh you don't necessarily need to take everything that someone says at face value. You know, you can have you can say, hey, this is the thing you're an expert in. I want to know everything you know about this, and then try to take the other, try to put the other stuff to the side. Um, you know, the I I think that he's he's controversial in that way because he has the personality type who is very argumentative and wants to, you know, wants to try to dominate in areas that he might not be an expert. But where he really is an expert is this idea of tail risk and understanding the role of randomness in in life. And Brycey. Yeah, and and I think it's a very, very powerful message because societally, just the way the incentives work, we are very results-oriented. We think that the way something has happened is the way that it's going to happen. And Taleb is very big on like, hey, you have this huge, huge risk, maybe be existential, it has like 0.01% chance of happening. And most people would be like, well, that's basically zero. Let's not even think about that at all. But when you look at the utility of it, right, he's thinking about the area under the curve. So when you think about expected value, it's the percentage chance of something happening times the utility of it happening, right? How good or bad is it? So something that is very, very low chance of happening, but blows up the planet, that has a very, very low expected value, and that's worth thinking about uh versus the things that could happen all the time, but aren't really that bad when you when you multiply them out. So how he's really influenced my thinking is it's not just the probability, but it's the outcome and the size of that outcome. And this idea of fat tails, where he says all the interesting things happen on the fat tails, is that you the things that don't happen very often have the biggest impact. So when I think about being an investor or succeeding in a rapidly changing marketplace as a business owner, you have these very low probability events that occur that change everything. So I think COVID being a very recent example, not going to go down that rabbit hole, but like, hey, this is something that people didn't think could happen, but once it did, it had massive ripple effects on everything. And so whoever's Able to adjust to that the fastest is able to surf the wave or avoid the wave crashing on them. He also has this concept of anti-fragility that I find very useful is that the default state of people is to be fragile to volatility, which just means that when things that happen that are unexpected, they are negatively affected. Think about this in an investment context, that people are short volatility, meaning that if there are volatile events, people are hurt by it. And he had this um contrarian view that hey, if everyone is on the side of short volatility, why don't I be long volatility? Where if really crazy things happen, which I've done all the research to say that really crazy things happen a lot more often than we expect, it's not that each individual crazy thing happened happens a lot, but that on average there are a lot of crazy things that occur. And it seems that the timeline is getting more compressed. So crazier things are happening more and more often, if you look, because everything is more interconnected, like all yada yada yada. Uh so hey, why don't I take the other side of the bet where most years I lose a little bit of money because nothing crazy happens, and then occasionally you have a COVID and I make a hundred X return. And just applying this to life, and how can you be someone in terms of your mindset, habits, systems who benefits from things that happen that are unexpected rather than someone who's threatened? Right? So if you put yourself in a position that, like, hey, my cash flow is so tight that if there's a downturn, I'm gonna have to fire employees, you're really fragile. But on the other hand, if you have excess capacity and there's a spike in demand, you can serve that capacity. And so you see this all the time is like people don't plan for these rainy days. But if you're prepared for them, you don't know when they're going to come, but when you recognize them when they're happening, rainy rain becomes an opportunity. You're sitting there with a bunch of umbrellas. Um, the the the example that really, really drove this home for me was Black Friday. So investors talk about this all the time. The one domain, maybe history is another one, where you really want to talk to the old guys is investing. Because everything in the world happens in cycles, they've seen it before, and it's hard to learn about cycles by reading about them. You have to experience them yourself. So, Black Friday, hey, I was at the absolute peak of my poker career. I'm printing money, and so my cognitive incentive is to say, hey, status quo is great. This is this party is gonna go on forever. But meanwhile, there were these signs that all was not right in Oz. So player deposits are getting seized. Uh, like there's like all these like whisperings behind the scenes that, like, hey, maybe the sites aren't completely solvent, but you know, I I want this party to go on forever, so I'm ignoring it. And then Black Friday occurs, and everyone is just like smacked in the face with it. It's it's Lebusa was a black swan. But I don't think there really are such things as black swans. There are there were signs there that something could occur. We just chose to ignore them. And so I overnight I found myself without my profession and source of identity and with about half of my net worth seized by the government. And and then I'm sitting there saying, okay, what what do I do now? And my reaction was just to crawl into a crawl and you know, put my head under a rock and like want it to go away. At one point, people were selling their account balances for 20 cents on the dollar. So it's like, well, if you think there's at least a uh, let's say a 30% chance of people getting paid back, right? You need some margin of safety that, like, hey, this person won't just like take your money and run. Uh, you should be buying that. Or if you think the chance is less than 30%, well, you should be selling it. But you should be taking one of the sides of that trade. Well, I took neither side because I was just so overwhelmed. And I realized that like this being prepared for crisis is so essential because that's when all the interesting stuff happens, is you have to have your line in the water. And and I really learned that is man, like more and more unexpected things are going to happen. So I can either stand here and say, Well, I hope it just sun, I hope it's just sunny forever. Or I can say, Well, I don't know when it's going to rain, but when it does, I want to have an umbrella. And and and so that that's really kind of encapsulates the way that I think about you know how Taleb has influenced me. I'll I'll give another example of this from uh from a sports performance context. Um I have a podcast as well, uh, it's called Forcing Function Hour, where I interview a variety of top performers in a number of fields. Um, I was recently interviewing a world champion gymnast, and she was describing going into a competition where there are so many variables in terms of the venue. So this is a judged competition, so you have judges who are saying you want or not, but just little things in terms of, hey, the surface might not be exactly like the one that you've trained on, or the lighting might be in your eyes, or the crowd might be hostile. All these variables that you can think about, these are all the ways that things could go wrong. And that's one way that we approach things is like, man, I hope it doesn't rain on my wedding type of stuff. But what is the how does the the the top performer approach this? Is this another opportunity to differentiate myself. So if lighting is a potential factor, training in a variety of types of lighting. So you could train anywhere from the dark to a stage set. And hey, if like a hostile crowd could be a factor, simulate that. And all this means is that these factors change from threats to opportunities because you've trained in it, it becomes a relative advantage.

SPEAKER_01 50:52

That was a phenomenal response just off the top of your head for how Teleb has influenced you. Have you written that down before or thought about that, or is that just from the gut?

SPEAKER_00 51:03

I I don't want to toot my own horror. There's just from the gut.

SPEAKER_01 51:08

Especially no, especially the explanation of um expected value. Uh just a really, really well-articulated answer. So, okay, cheers for that. There is um I guess there's a lot of uh yeah, a lot of threads I'd like to pull as well, um, because it is Taleb. But instead, I think it would be wrong to not return to poker because that was the that was the agreed upon uh uh topic of the day.

SPEAKER_00 51:34

Anywhere you want to go, I'm happy.

SPEAKER_01 51:36

Okay, well then before we I I want to ask you about some of the OGs. But before we do that, you brought up Black Friday. This was a question that I wanted to ask you about. Could you explain it in more detail? So the um audience now knows that this was an extremely uh monumental day in the world of online poker. Um, but if you could explain it in more detail, uh that would be fascinating to hear from someone who experienced it firsthand.

SPEAKER_00 52:04

Yeah, I I think that I think that this would make an amazing Harvard case study. So the online poker landscape, um 2006, there was this obscure act called the Wire Act that they decided to enact, pushed through by Vegas Casinos, who saw online poker as a threat. And this caused um with at the time the market leader, Party Poker, to withdraw from the U.S. market. And because uh full tilt poker and poker stars um were publicly traded um and had lawyers who gave them favorable interpretations of the law, that they weren't affected, they decided to continue to operate in the US, which quickly became 70% of the global market, um, in large part due to partnerships with places like ESPN, which poke poker on television and created it essentially as a cognitive sport. And so with that liquidity coming in from the US, um, those two sites essentially took over the world gaming market to be you know majority leaders. Um and things kind of went status quo-wise for five years, where there was always this obscure law sitting there, but it had never been enforced. But um slowly, starting like 2009, 2010, going into 2011, uh these sites began having a harder and harder time getting money to and from players. The way that they found was a bottleneck. Uh, most of capitalism is like a protection racket where these these choke points and the government discovered that, hey, like we don't have any leverage on these private sites, but we do have leverage on the banks because the gambling transactions are all the poker stars and full till do, but are such a tiny, tiny percentage of what the banks do that we can use the banks to enforce this wire act, which was supposed to be about horse racing across straight lines straight lines.

SPEAKER_01 54:18

And what what's the what's the purpose of the Wire Act in the first place? What's it supposed to achieve?

SPEAKER_00 54:24

It was uh the specifics, it's been a while, but it like it came out in like the 50s or 60s, and it was rehashed in 2006 as the Vegas casinos were looking for a way to try to slow down online poker as they saw as a threat. But it was originally not intended with poker in line. Yeah, okay. Exactly. Okay, go on. Yeah, yeah. Lobbyists write all the laws. This is this is very common knowledge. So the what happens is the banks uh stop processing gambling transactions. And so the online poker sites have to start going through intermediaries, payment processors, which process the the transactions on behalf of the poker sites, and essentially, you know, some people would call this laundering. I don't know if I would use that language, but essentially obscuring the nature of these transactions. Where if I put a deposit on poker stars, it would show up on my credit card statement as golfballs.com, for example. So, hey, you know, I bought I bought $5,000 worth of golf balls, apparently. But as these as these transactions started getting seized by banks figuring I was going on, the poker sites were forced to operate with shadier and shadier payment processors to at the point of 2010, um, poker sites were paying 40 cents on the dollar just to get money from a player. Sorry, like poker start, like poker sites are making hand over fists, it's a very, very high margin business and being able to pour all that money back into poker shows and like just different forms of marketing. But all of a sudden, because all these transactions were getting seized and the fees were getting so high, it was becoming unsustainable just to get money back and forth from players. So the player, the site had the sites had a you know an inspired idea of, hey, if the banks aren't going to process our transactions, let's buy a bank. And so that's what they did. They took, they, they took a struggling bank, made a very large investment in the bank, with the, you know, say they put $10 million in, I forget the exact figures, for the implicit agreement that they would route all of their transactions through the bank, which not only collects on all those fees, but agrees to look the other way. And so this goes on for a couple of years. There's a high-profile case where one of these leaders of a bank, I believe, got caught in like a kiddie porn ring or something crazy and brought a lot of attention to his bank, and then thus all of the places he was processing transactions for. And then finally in 2011, you have an attorney general in New York who was very politically minded, you know, a modern-day Rudy Giuliani who decided, hey, I'm going to make a name for myself and go after these poker sites in the main name of protecting American consumers. And so on uh April 15th, 2011, uh shut down the websites and seized all funds. And there were two major sites, poker stars in full tilt. It was it's generally been agreed that poker stars operated in a much more above-board manner. Notably, poker stars had player funds segregated, meaning that if you deposited $10,000 on PokerStars, for example, that $10,000 was sitting in a separate bank account and not used for operating expenses. On the other hand, and again, this is via lawsuits, not first comp first uh person knowledge, full tilt had all of the money sitting in the same bag. And so, you know, as expenses rose, they took from Peter to pay out some Paul. So you deposited $10K on full tilt, and they're like, hey, this maybe this will go towards our marketing budget this week, all that type of stuff. And and full tilt also was paying out large dividends to the players who are original owners. Um, you know, this is sometimes the case that poker players don't make the best operators of companies. And so the original owners of poke of full tilt poker, who were very hands-off at this point and who were very happy to collect their channels. And huge profiles as well. We're continuing to get huge profile guys, um, were continuing to get millions in dollars of dividend checks, despite the fact that full tilt poker was no longer profitable. So this is why the the site was called a Ponzi scheme was that these dividend player dividends were essentially paid out of player money. And because full tilt was being regulated as a bank, bank rules say you only need to have fractional deposits on hand. Meaning, I forget the exact percentage, you only need to have like 10 or 15 percent of player deposits. Well, this works great until you have an event like Black Friday and everyone tries to cash out at the same time. So what happened is full tilt goes bankrupt, and everything's sort of in limbo. And PokerStars, because it was a lot more financially solvent and trying to buy some goodwill with the government and potentially take over the entire online player market, um, agrees to buy full tilt and take all of its debts on about three years later. And that's how you got paid out. This was this was that's how we eventually got paid out. But at the meantime, you know, April 15th, you try to log in, the site's blocked, all your money is gone, and you're sort of like, okay, I guess it's done. You know, yesterday poker was amazing, today poker's done. So it was very, it was very traumatic.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:11

Fascinating, amazing explanation. Thank you so much. Um uh and that was also a catalyst for you, wasn't it? Because you had I forget the amount of money you said, I think you did say sp exactly in one other podcast, but you just went from oh shit, okay, and then traveled the world for five years and um then another five, ten years later, here you are.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:37

There's uh there's a famous Chinese proverb that I'm I'm sure I'm not I'm going to butcher, but there's a uh you know there's a farmer, there's a farmer in a village who has a son, and the son is riding a horse, and he falls off the horse and breaks his leg. And the neighbor says, Oh, that's such terrible luck. And the Chinese farmer says, Good luck, bad luck, who knows? And China gets into a war as it you know was wont to do in those times, and they come around conscripting the army, but seeing that the son is has a broken leg, they decide not to draft him. And the neighbor says, Good luck, bad luck, who knows? And the story goes on. But it was one of those events that, hey, you know, part of this is a reframing, like having you know, this big event where uh I essentially retired from the game, had a lot of financial uncertainty for a while, needed to kind of explore and find the next thing. It felt really unlucky. Again, it wasn't unlucky. I could have seen the signs coming along, but it became an opportunity to pivot to do other things that I hadn't when I was sitting on my computer all day, diversify my identity, have great experiences, make friends outside the poker world, start working with amazing founders and investors and you know supporting them in their dreams. It ended up being a good luck situation, but again, good luck, bad luck, who knows?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:08

Uh in line with that Chinese proverb, I uh asked three questions to the same uh at least I try to ask the same three questions ever again. So one of them is this what what is an amazing moment of serendipity that sort of defines your life? And we could maybe say Black Friday is an odd example of serendipity, but along the same vein of good luck, bad luck, who knows, I I'd love to hear you reflect on whether there has been in your life just completely unpredictable uh moments, or one that is specifically coming to mind, of unbelievable serendipity that uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:49

I feel like my life has been one serendipity after another, and clearly part of this has been created. Uh again, I I think you you create the conditions to get lucky, and a lot of success is recognizing an opportunity, recognizing good timing, and leveraging it and really seizing it. Um, but man, I've had a lot of serendipity, and I think I'm definitely ended up in one of the uh uh more interesting, favorable alternate universes that I could have been in. That's a good way to look at it. There's so many that the very first one that comes to mind, I think I I hinted at this one before. So my my dream growing up was to make television commercials. I never thought thought I'd be sitting in this seat as a poker player. Uh so everything that I did um through college was geared towards this. I had internships where I worked on large campaigns, I was able to help make a Super Bowl commercial. Uh, I sold advertising for the school newspaper, you know, studied psychology, did all these things that I thought were setting me up. Uh, I had the serendipitous occasion of being discovered by MTV to be on this reality show. Uh I think the videos are still online if you really want to deep cut. It's called uh MTVU Quad Squads. And through this show, I had the opportunity to meet the the head of Team Detroit, so the president of Ford's advertising agency. So at this time, you know, Ford was spending more on making television commercials than anyone else in the world. So, and this is the guy who was in charge of making this happen. So was able to meet him, build a rapport, and through that, coming out of college as a you know 20-year-old with no experience, was on the track to make television commercials essentially in a management role. Um, and so this was very serendipitous. I thought, hey, I've I've I've hit the jackpot. Um, you know, meanwhile, I'm paying my way through school um in my spare time playing poker, particularly in my senior year, as I start to coast a little bit, and I start to have some some mild success. But it was always like, hey, this is a just a temporary vacation until I go into the real world and fulfill my dream. Well, for those of you guys who were around in 2008 know that this wasn't the the most auspicious time for the auto industry. So the week after I move up to Detroit to to work in advertising, and the week before I'm supposed to start in my role, um the auto industry and the economy along with it collapses. And Ford is placed on a uh government mandated hiring leave where I'm not hired, I'm not I'm not unhired, I'm in this purgatory. And so I'm sitting in Detroit with nothing to do. So I say, hey, um, why don't I just start playing a little bit of poker? But you know, since I didn't have any classes or really anything else going on, I had the my first. First opportunity to really dedicate myself to the game and be a total professional at it. I never actually wondered, I never actually tried to say, hey, let's see if I give this my full effort. It was just a way, a way to pay my way through school. Um, oh, another serendipity with this. Um, a month a month before, I had this experience where I misclicked. So this is a common phenomenon in poker where you click the bets, is you try to bet, click fold, and you actually click call. And you have to figure, okay, how do I win this hand that I'm not supposed to be in? In this case, I misclicked and I entered into a tournament by accident where first place in the tournament was an all-expenses paid trip to Brazil. Wow. So again, keep in mind, I'm uh, you know, 20-year-old, has really never left the country other than you know, Canada and Mexico, and all of a sudden I'm like traveling across the world to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Um, so get my visa. And um I I would I can never forget this moment. I walk into this five-star hotel to see in the lobby, you have these huge waves crashing in the background of Copacabana, all the beautiful people in swimsuits, and then you have a bunch of pale white guys like hunched um pro-Magnum Man style over their laptops in the lobby. And my first reaction was, what the heck are these guys doing? They're in paradise. But then it clicked for me is that this is just another day for them. That being at a five-star hotel in paradise was so normal that they could just sit in the lobby on their laptops. And I was like, I'm a pale white guy, I can do this too. And so it was that serendipitous experience meeting other professional poker players who I realized I had a lot in common with. And as we talked, poker is like, oh, I actually know a lot more than these guys, and they're making a lot of money. And my dream job falls through. Again, bad luck, good luck, who knows? It's like, I could be a professional poker player. Why don't I do that? And so that gave me the confidence to dedicate myself to it full time. A couple months later, I'm making when my annual salary would have been every month. You fast forward again another 12 months, I'm one of the top 20 players in the world. Wow. And who knows? I don't think I would be sitting here in like middle management at Ford. I'm not saying that that might my life would have gone that way, but if I hadn't had those serendipitous occur occurrences, I never would have given myself permission to see if I dedicate myself to this full time and set my sights to being one of the best players of the world, who knows if I would have ever ended up there.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:43

Man, unbelievably uh beautiful, honestly. It's like a um it's an amazing story, and uh to echo to Lev as well, you know, how can you predict a future of infinite possibilities based off your finite experience of the past? Who knows if you did stay in that Detroit job and you didn't accidentally win the tournament to go to Brazil and realize that there was this world of just dorky online poker players that you could seamlessly fit into? Who knows what it could have been? Um, and that's you know, that's that's the that's the amazing sort of magic of serendipity, and your friend David Perel, I think, writes about it really well, talking about serendipity vehicles and so forth. But um uh Chris, I'd love to finally transition back to poker. Um has the super optimized poker performance uh style of game in poker driven away the great personalities? Where are the Hansens, the Duans, you know, the Antonius Lark, S. Fandiaris? Where are the great Mike the Mouth, Helmuth? I know they might be still around, but they're kind of like novelties now, they're not the main event. Um why has the overoptimization of poker driven them away?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:59

Celebrities are created. So there it's not that these guys uh had great personalities, uh, not that they have bad personalities, is that they happen to be around and visible and have some level of skill and notoriety and notability when the industry needed heroes and villains.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:25

So these characters were very much created because, especially in the early days of ESPN, like people weren't interested in poker as much as the drama of things taking place in the arena of the Felt. So you needed guys like Helm Youth and Mattisau to step up to be heels, and you needed other players to step up to be heroes, and those who accepted their roles and played them up got more attention and got endorsements and got more exposure and created this positive feedback loop. So that I always get asked, like, hey, have you ever played with these guys? And I'm like, in in some cases, yes, but like the players that you know, not only are they like not the best players, in a lot of cases they're not very good, and they're probably not even winning players anymore.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:18

Can you can you give some examples?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:21

I'm not gonna give any specific names because I I still play in these spaces and I don't want to get in trouble. But the best players in the world, you don't know their names. Yeah, really. This is partially because as poker is no longer in its boom phase, is no longer on television, there's less need for personalities. And there's less of these budgets where back in the day, like if you were willing to shill and like wear all the gear and like be really loud and obnoxious, you could have all of your tournaments and all of your expenses paid for. And those marketing budgets don't exist. So the the incentives to clown just aren't really there. You go to the World Series of Poker and you see lots of clowns, and they get like one day of exposure, and then the next day everyone forgets about them. There's not these like lasting personalities. The personalities are still there, there's just not the media frenzy feeding it. Yeah, cool. There's this other angle too, is incentives. All behavior responds to incentives. So when there's lots of endorsement money floating around, it pays to be a personal poker personality. When there's not this endorsement floating around, it doesn't pay to create attention. Why is that? Is because hey, tournaments, anyone can win. But most money in poker is happening in cash games, and particularly in cash games that are invite only. So you can't just sit down and play unless you are invited. So that's where the biggest money is that is where the biggest money is fascinating. So if you are loud and obnoxious, you won't get invited. If people know how good you are, you won't be invited. So your incentive is to, you know, maybe not do a lot of interviews like this one in general, because a lot of attention is bad attention.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:25

And you've uh given uh you've explained in other podcasts the sort of metagames of how you can be on the private game circuit and so forth, which is fascinating. And I don't want you to comment on that. Leave that for another for the leave that with the other podcast that it's in. But let's talk about a specific private game. I know you won't admit to any details, but if you could speak generally, um the All In podcast has several characters, um, a few billionaires, Jason Calicanus, uh uh Chamath Paleapatia. Uh, do you they play with Phil Helmet, for example, right? So I I don't know, do you have any insight into what some of the massive games are? Uh even the people who are the big fish, like the Gila Liberté back in the day, that are coming in just to play and give their millions away. Um, do we even know who they are? Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:12

Trying to think where to go here. So you mentioned Guilla Liberté. Uh, he he he's the person I've won the most from in online record back. How about that? But he got scared off essentially because everyone started to talk about what a whale he was. So he started to change his screen names, and eventually he got so embarrassed that he went underground and only plays in in private games, which is a loss to us all because he was very he was very fun to play with. Um it's it's clear that those who are very successful in a lot of areas of life, let's say someone who's a hedge fund manager or a, you know, they were born into maybe even they were just born into the right family. For whatever reason, they're very financially successful. But a lot of times as someone who's had a lot of business success, they're self-made, they enjoy the competition of playing with really good players and bettering themselves. And a lot of these guys who are recreational players are extremely savvy and good, but not all the times. Uh, but what a lot of these guys don't like is attention and publicity, and they tend to have very big egos. So they certainly don't want to be known as someone who is losing money, and either that they have some form of addiction, as we were talking about before, which I think is rarely the case, or that they're just someone who's not good. So, what that means is that these games tend to take place behind closed doors. So if you want to play, generally it means you have to bring something to the table. You know, say you want to play in a hedge fund game. Well, if you're in the hedge fund industry, it's a lot easier, right? I I know like a giant a game of that's all like YouTubers who are extremely successful, but hey, if you don't have a big YouTube following, you're not gonna be able to play in the game. That type of thing. That's the type of game you want to join, isn't it? Hey, anyone listening, if you want to play, if you enjoy my my sense of humor and stories, and you want to play with a former professional, currently semi-retired player, I I would love to play with you because these are these are these are the funnest games to play in, and they're also the most lucrative. So those are the games that I love to play in, but they also can be very difficult to play in because there's a limited number of seats, and they tend to go to other not so good players. Um, I I can't know specifics because I'm not in these games, but it I've heard rumors of games where like skyscrapers exchange hands. Like at a certain level, like what someone considers a stake that makes it interesting, like they call it nosebleeds for a reason. And the phrase that I like is you can be a little eager, but if you're playing in a t-ball league, you're the MVP. So all around the world, there are million-dollar poker games with a bunch of t-ballers. Like I've had this happen on rare and amazing occasions where someone wanders in from a different part of the casino, you know, sits down with thousands of dollars, and it's like, how do I play this game? Let's figure it out. And you know, you're you're you know, that that's the form of of tuition. So I I don't know if that's like the answer to to your question. The reason, you know, Phil Helmuth makes a career out of playing in these games. And like there's been this rise of streamed games. So um, everyone, I think a lot of people are familiar with Twitch where people play games on and they stream it. This has been a big boom in poker where really high-produced shows happen, and there's this metagame of players will come on and play intentionally badly so that other people see them play badly, and maybe they get an invite to games. Um, not a style that I like. I I I try my hardest everywhere, every time I play, but it it opens up these these interesting dimensions of you know, no longer in poker is poker skill the number one factor for how you win. I talk about this in what I consider kind of my magnum opus article, article called Play to Win, Meta Skills and High Stakes Poker, is that the skill is being good at poker. Obviously, you can decompress that game tree into a lot of a lot of different skills, but the meta skill is getting into good games. And that that is the the magician in the prestige of carrying around your goldfish in order to get in. And and again, that that's very interesting, but it's a very different type of game.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:59

Uh well honestly, what I am looking for uh very selfishly is like the salacious gossip of pros and billionaires exchanging millions of dollars and misbehaving and so forth. But I guess I I think you have to maybe be in the world to be able to get uh the the insight on that. But that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:17

Um speaking of uh as as a as a friend of mine, as a friend of mine, Garrett Adelstein likes to say, many times it makes sense to be Switzerland.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:27

Nice. Look, you're living in Austin part-time now, you're you're mates with the likes of Chris Williamson, David Perrell, and presumably many other fascinating people in that area. Austin is clearly a place that's attracting shitloads of wealth, celebrity, but then as well people on the edge of the culture like Williamson and Perell, who will one day be the celebrity wealth and so forth, but interesting characters. Are there a lot of cool private games happening in Austin right now?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:54

I hope so. Uh if they are, um, hey, if you're if you're in Austin and you like to play poker and you have a game or want to play in a game, uh, you know, come find me. I'm very easy to find on the internet. Twitter at SparksRemarks, um, forcing function.com. The the scene in Austin is primarily driven by the card rooms, the the largest card room that I think is making a lot of moves right now, um, and is extremely well managed. Um, uh there's poker players who have come in there and really professionalized the operation, um, notably a guy named Doug Polk. And those are the biggest games in town right now. So they have a lot of public games that you can sit down and play, and they have an extremely well-produced stream that runs four times a week, which is a set lineup, meaning that um they they choose who gets to play. And they're very fair about especially if you're visiting Austin or if you're local and you want to play occasionally, they can get you into the game. But because there's more people who want to play than number of seats, um, there is a selection that that happens there. So I love I love the to play in this game when I get the opportunity to play because in Texas the games are very large, and because it's televised and everyone has their friends and lots of viewers at home, you know, people do pull off crazy bluffs and we do lots of fun prop betting. So they tend to be very fun and lucrative games to play uh when I do get to play. That that's about as close to the private game scene as I've been, as a general rule, unless it's someone that I trust really, really well. Um, I don't like to play in private games because of things that can happen. Um, whereas playing in somewhere that's that's regulated, um, there that risk doesn't exist. But because I sit at the games and because this is a common topic of conversation, I know these games are certainly happening. Um, so again, the the goal is to be someone who's invited, so you have that that deal flow. Um, but unfortunately, I've only I've only been in Austin for a few months. Uh I I don't feel integrated enough to say like these are the games that are happening. And to be honest, if I was in these games, I probably wouldn't talk about that.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:22

Yeah, fair enough. Understood the the Switzerland line. Um well look, Sparksy, I think we've come to the end of our time, so I'd just like to leave you with one question that I try to ask as many guests as possible, and that is if you could witness a conversation between anyone, two people from history, dead or alive, no language barrier, so a podcast, who are you listening to?

SPEAKER_00 1:22:48

I'm witnessing a conversation between any two people in history. Oh man, you're you're ending with the stumpers. Uh I could have prepared a really good one. Um it probably be two people who have very opposite viewpoints, but are actually open to changing their mind. So you it's it's no fun to have two people who are in complete opposite camps who are just shouting at each other. So it would probably be someone who's like a complete materialist, like a Daniel Dennett. I don't know. He's not the most exciting to listen to, but I mean I like the way that his brain works. And then someone who's a total spiritualist, um, you know, perhaps like uh you know well-spoken uh Buddhist monk type thing. Okay, cool. I yeah, I I I historically speaking, uh Man, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I have a great a great answer to that one. I was like, you know, I love Carl Sagan, he would be really fun to listen to. Uh Daniel Deutsch is a contemporary, has a very fascinating brain. Um I I like hearing people who don't have aren't professional speakers, haven't written books, but have very unique life experience. So it'd probably be a couple people who aren't household names, but their their experience has given them a very specific worldview. Uh yeah, that's all I got.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:36

Unbelievable, mate. Well, thank you so much for giving me uh so much time this afternoon. And um yes, thank you, sir.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:45

It's been a pleasure. Um, thank you for having me on, Ryan. Uh I'll just end by saying if you you're listening to this and found what I had to say interesting, you might find what I do interesting as well. So my my company is forcing function. That's forcing function.com. We have a library of wonderful articles, resources, as well as my podcast, forcing function hour, on there. The first place that I send people, if you're interested in achieving peak performance, is my performance assessment. This is a free quiz that we created to let you know how you're doing on your performance and what your next best action is to become a peak performer. If you want a direct distillation of all of my top recommendations and best practices, you can download my 90-page peak performance workbook for free. The name of that is Experiment Without Limits. So experimentwithoutlimits.com. You can download that and check that out. Um, if you want to reach out, I'd love to hear from you. Chris, at my website or at Sparks Remarks on Twitter.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:53

Unbelievable, mate. All of that will be accessible in the podcast description. Awesome. Thanks. Thank you again, Mr. Sparks. Absolute legend. So, what is my ambition for this podcast? My ambition is to corner the podcast market for eclectic curiosities in whatever country it is that you're listening in from. Now, unfortunately, there isn't a genre or a category that you can filter by in the search function for eclectic curiosities. Instead, it's more general interest, entertainment, science, tech, etc. And so because there is no general interest category to rank for, the only thing that you can do to help this podcast and to help me achieve whatever this uh ambition might be to corner the podcast market for eclectic curiosities is to leave nice, healthy, pumped full of juice reviews. So if you're on Spotify, that comes in the form of just a simple five-star rating. If you're on Apple, it also comes in the form of a comment and the star rating. And if you're anywhere else where there is a potential to review, just pump good positive vibes and juice into that algorithm. And as well, if you know anyone who would be interested in this or liked poker, or would be interested in Chris Sparks, please do forward this to them as well.