Jason Su, mental game and performance coach for an increasing number of poker players, returns to the Zoo. While poker is a game (not “just” a game), there is something a touch more serious in this visit. Why is this? Perhaps because the money involved in poker is increasingly scarce and so every edge has become important.

Actually, it’s worse than that. People are leaving the online scene and rolling the dice in live MTTs or private cash games at a new clip. Nick Howard has gone AWOL and become a concierge for desperate poker nerds. Scamming and scammers have never had it better.

So, do you need a mental game upgrade to deal with it all? Maybe.

My first impression of The Joy of Poker is that this is a book about the ego, not in the pop psychology sense, but in the Freudian sense. The ego mitigates the unconscious and reality. The ego is, as Jason would say, present. This mental awareness of ourselves is not only what makes us conscious but helps us deal with all the pressures of our irrational desires and what society tells us. Freudian or not, Jason puts great stock in being in touch with reality and ordering our response to it. Credit to him, you can hear his measuredness, his lack of hysteria, on our podcasts. Ok, so what?

One big assertion he makes is that mental game has made no progress since some undefined point. This seems doubtful to me, but in conversation, Jason seems convinced enough. Still, everyone now has a little meditation app or something now. Everyone knows to breathe. Go crazy, you oxygen addicts.

While I don’t get into on the podcast, as I expect the reader and other pods to handle certain details, Jason provides a methodology to handle the stress of the game. Read the chapter Clear the Path to get down to business.

Instead, I focus in the interview on an introduction to his ideas and on the culminating chapter, Master of Luck which he referred to in an oblique tweet several months ago. Can you make your own luck, really? At first, he seems to mean something else, and that the argument is more semantic in nature: you don’t make luck, but you can experience it. Fair. Then, I stumble onto something more important: a human approach to embracing variance, which has always been the key to the seemingly impossible goal of playing with a sense of peace.

After reading the book I realized the answer to Jason’s supposition that no progress has been made in the mental game department. It’s a slippery area of the game which has been promulgated through so many empty words, true, but progress has indeed been made and Jason is making some of it. Jason means that the way out of pain is not around but through, both in poker and in life. Words are not enough for the human emotional experience; they are signifiers but not actions. Jason wants you to take a sequence of action steps, which you can read about in the book. So, while the field’s methodologies have been dodgy overall, Jason has refined the answers, both in print and in practice.

Processes that allow us a modicum of acceptance are the progress we’ve made, however imperfect they are. We must fully embrace the swings of the game and thus the feelings associated with them, just as we already know we must max out the corresponding and primary challenge of the game, the challenge of poker strategy.

In other words, to interpret Jason correctly is not to merely hear him say, “you must be willing to win big.” No, you also have to be willing to lose. Perhaps he doesn’t say this enough, given that “willingness to win” always sounds paradoxical. And so this is where emotional availability – presence – meets up with Mason’s critique through knowledge alone – and explains Chewy’s curious quote, for that matter. We thus demonstrate a human way forward and it is for those primarily with the proper skills already. Mental game is for those who need it, and those who need it already know how to win.

How to do it is the problem. Tendler’s “inchworm” is here, Mason’s focus on the strategy as answer is here, and the contributions of many other thinkers are in here as well, however hidden. The Joy of Poker presents a strong case for, and argument about, mental game.

Have a listen and find out. You can find Jason on Twitter or here at his webpage.

The post PZ102: Jason Su Wants to Unmisreg You appeared first on Out of Position.

It’s early in the back nine for the Poker Zoo podcast, so it’s time to focus on what we want to accomplish. I have a fitting guest today in Sara O’Connor, a mid-Atlantic player and writer who has gathered some attention through her book, A New Queen’s Guide to Poker, and through some social media expertise. Sara has a lot of drive.

I was introduced to Sara through my friend Jason when he bit off a little more than he could chew in the course of his regular Twitter trolling. While Sara and I discuss many things about her life in poker, her first book is or was the original focus of the interview. I think she has done a great job in acclimating the novice to specifically live casino poker. Explicatory passages such as this could do a lot for the unfamiliar:

The game is played with a dealer in the center of the table and

This is far more practical than many, drier introductory texts. Sara conveys much of the real game and the concerns of its new participants. That’s the “good for poker” stuff everyone yammers on, right there.

When it comes to the strategy discussion in New Queen’s, my response is a little more complex. I think of Dan Savage’s “campground” rule, where he posited that in certain relationships, you must leave your partner better off than you found them. In essence, much of my coaching practice lays in correcting concepts and their misapplication. Does A New Queen’s Guide to Poker and other such novice guides to strategy help or harm the player in the long run? Does she follow the campground rule?

I tend to think the answer is that there is little harm here in the end, and that Sara answered my question during the podcast well enough. Things are going to be wrong, inevitably and everywhere; you’ll recover from your middle school texts no matter how careful they are in addling your brain. The so-called “ladder of learning” is not just straight up and up – the process of learning and relearning also matters. That’s real enough and leaves the writer some reign to describe things that need to be introduced even if those things will need to be corrected later. And of course, I like teaching poker and its theory! Bring on your confusions.

Really, though, I want to skip all that and focus in on what I liked hearing about at the end of the pod: Sara’s coming poker fiction. Ideas start with books and stories, and usually only then proceed to reach popular culture and its bigger, more splashy mediums where huge profits and big picture trends develop. The current debate over poker media is reductive and misguided, as I have written, in both how influence works and what makes it work.

So, if Sara is going to give us some “smut,” it’s good news because she will be generating “content” that really matters to real people with real desires, rather than doing what the poker world flagellates itself to do every few years: weakly manipulate culture with “PR” no one wants. The writer or communicator is the usual if hidden origin point of cultural products and movements because the word is the basic unit of shareable thought.

You can contact Sara on X or at her website.

Coming next, popular mental game and performance coach Jason Su returns to the Zoo with a new book – The Joy of Poker.

The post PZ101: Sara O’Connor Does Things appeared first on Out of Position.

For our milestone episode, I talk with old friend Steve “ChipXtractor” Catterson. I met Steve through the defunct Red Chip Poker forum, and we have been more or less in touch since.

Steve and I go over some stories, but it seems to me that the present in this case is more interesting than the past. Steve is working on his game and that means becoming more interested in the game. Teaching, in turn, makes me more interested in the game. The reason for all this is that when we see what is possible or what we have been blind to, the world regains its color. I’m obviously not just talking poker here. The way to overcome loss is to see what still lives and what you have been missing from the bigger picture.

Less seriously, it’s fun to hear hand histories from South Point, which can be a fun, popular local’s place. Soon Steve will be moving up from the cheap seats and will get involved with the notorious shit regs of the “Jewel.” Good luck with that.

Here’s the hand discussed:

The theme of this podcast is sociability. From Steve’s angle, poker is a part of one’s real, physical, meaningful life. Otherwise hard-tack players need to remember that. I regret my many rudenesses at the table and have been trying to make up for them for some time. For those currently embracing misery and its spread to others, I suggest you rethink your approach. You don’t have to embarrass that old guy who doesn’t want to show his cards. You don’t have to fight over who straddled when. You don’t have to wander the room looking for exact right game to worsen.

Thanks to Dean for all his work on the pod. Thanks to Porter, Julie, Burge and anyone else who put in some editing time. Congratulations us.

If you want to join Steve in relearning the game, use the coaching link or email me.

Have a great week,

Chris

The post PZ100: Poker as Social Good, with ChipXtractor appeared first on Out of Position.

As we roll into 2025 it’s well worth checking in with Zoo member Jason Burge, aka Jambasket. He’s a tough online winner in the active Michigan online games but is also a hidden superhero on Twitter (I’m not calling it X, c’mon), where he trolls the hell out of poker’s puffed-up personalities and various engagement beggars.

Students in the Zoo have a lot of questions about how to Jambasket, so we go through them all. Should be valuable for the aspiring: how do you make a living in your underwear these days?

We also talk poker culture. One thing that’s important this month is the Global Poker Awards and their coming award show on February 22. Anyone (who is fair) can see that Eric Danis and company do a pretty damn good job overall. I have no complaints and enjoy helping out by voting. Because the awards are really the promotional arm of a poker business rather than some non-aligned committee, it’s easy but incorrect to get upset when some corner of the industry isn’t included or perhaps is passed over.

One of those debatable corners is the podcast scene, where the usual suspects keep shuffling in and out of the finalist nominations. Those selected are worthy candidates who serve the needs of the poker industry. Yet one of the few podcasts of any real lasting worth, Sessions, isn’t likely to ever make it out of the first round, never mind win the award itself. Jason and I talk lightly about this problem for a bit.

After seven seasons of diary-meets-storytelling, Billy is still in a tough spot, but he continues to stretch out a grand story arc. His is not really a podcast in the sense GPI voters mean, but a kind of oral history, one which represents an entire vein of the culture. It’s hard to compare Sessions to a half-hour interviewing the latest tournament donkstar, in other words.

Jason and I also go over the recent Faraz Jaka queen-nine of diamonds hand, tournaments in general, and a few other fun things as well.

Jason has made several appearances on the Zoo, here’s another one to check out.

He also has a series of amusing trip reports documenting his days in Las Vegas, check them out through searching my website. Here’s one.

Hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.

Thanks,

Chris

The post PZ99: Jambasket FAQs, GPIs, MTTs, & LOLs appeared first on Out of Position.

The five things you need to do to win in 2025. The roadmap to poker success in 2024. Three tips for crushing poker in 2023.

They do it all day, every month, every year, but what if we turn them on their head and listen carefully:

You’re not winning 20 bbs/hr at your live game because you didn’t listen to us. You’re not trading pots with NL500 regs because you didn’t take our program. You’re not heads up because of our ICM class that you skipped.

Sirens, our poker masters, yet sirens who compete heavily for our sailors. The proliferation of information and poker knowledge has never been greater, and so the big poker educators say with more and more confidence and more and more fear, we have the way to win. A few authors pitch in, too: look at this fresh batch of Poker for Dummies.

I’m sure they all bring some value. Yet the exact same people say, out of the other side of their mouth, that only a select few actually win. In other words, come to be vetted and culled. Is this how coaching should work?

If all these poker educators are doing their advertised job, we should, by 2025, be seeing the Great Evening of Poker, where win rates plummet and loss rates improve, but the evidence is not clear. Instead, the migration to tournaments may be the ultimate expression of the Evening and its tighter margins, where more and more money is agreed to be flushed out of the player pool and into the supportive but parasitical industry. Hey, here’s a mystery bounty, dummy! Come over here!

My win rate, for instance, is the same now as it was then; the Evening of Poker is not affecting me in some respects. In fact, certain faces never seem to leave, while newbies come and go like the tide. Moreover, the primary public-facing success of the poker industry, the story of the tournament luckbox semi-genius, continues its tale of an unstated minimal return floated by an increasing volume of staking cattle-calls. Further, while the channels do change, the themes do not: just as we once loved Andrew Neeme’s tour of how soft 5/10 Vegas was, now Marc Goone fascinates us by showing deep 5/5 games which seem to be as full of fish as the Hudson was in 1609.

So how do we resolve the essential contradiction of the poker educators, who break the rule of good business and prefer to promise more than they can deliver? After all, the best students are those already destined to win, but they compose a tiny fraction of the student pool.

What about the try-hards, don’t they count? More importantly, what if that try hard is you?

Today our guest is James Tichenor. He’s played poker over a long time period. He’s getting there, but it is a struggle many of us can identify with. Almost everything he was doing when we started working together, I considered backwards – yet he didn’t just make it all up on his own. No, he came from all the usual schools and classes and coaches and poker celebrities.

Didn’t the tips work? Did he not read the menu? Are we supposed to blame him or them? Is everything that simple? What happened and what’s next?

Today, we find out.

The post PZ98: Behind the Facade of Poker Education appeared first on Out of Position.

We are happy to close our best year of interviews with Poker Zoo stalwart Greg Porter. We not only cover his swingy year in the games but address the many interesting things that happened in 2024 poker culture.

First, though, remind me what they were again?

One thing that does actually matter to a serious player who needs to produce is dealing with the increasingly gatekept public/private games. Greg tells us about his experience managing expectations and keeping the games alive. That also brings up the inevitable novelty games that help sustain the action, such as the notorious Stand-up, aka Nit Game. (And look at that friendly guy in the podcast photo – don’t you want him in your game?)

For those dealing with the stress of performance, Greg talks about hiring Jason Su for mental game coaching. Here’s our interview with Jason that I mention, and here is that essay on mental game from way back.

Two notes on the close of the podcast. While we joke around about some of the foolish “women in poker” discussions that happen among the thinkfluencer types, it’s worth underscoring that there is no inherent reason for women to play worse (or better) than the men do. There are always, however, personal issues for both men and women and these are far bigger hurdles than immutable characteristics. To that question, Greg provides some classic, unheeded, and excellent advice on how to get to his level – it’s the theory, stupid.

(If you need a more in-depth discussion on why there are so many bad takes on the woman in poker subject and why it is women are slow to take up the game as their hobby, I wrote heavily about it here.)

Second, I meant the question of what is the good poker book or good poker writing of 2024 rather literally. I’m out of touch on this subject after a year of closely following politics instead of poker. Other than yet another solid Dara O’Kearney intro to strategy text, is there something great I should check out before the GPI Awards process starts? Let me know.

Here’s last year’s interview with Greg if you want to hear more from him.

Thanks for listening and putting up with me. Special thanks to Dean for all his work and to SDJen for the recording space and her general helpfulness in all Poker Zoo matters. Have a great 2025, readers and listeners.

Chris

The post PZ97: Relax, Greg Porter is Not a Poker Pro appeared first on Out of Position.

Merry Christmas from the Poker Zoo! To celebrate, we bring on (depending on your point of view) gadfly or pest Norman Chad. Mr. Chad is indisputably one of the true co-pilots of poker commentary and the boom itself. There are many myths that surround the poker boom, such as it being triggered by the 2003 world series champ, but we’re not going into that today, because Norm is still alive and kicking and screaming and yelling at the clouds, here in post-Covid, dumpster-fire America.

One problem he’s having is that the technology of the social media age allows the audience to yell back. Fortunately, Norman has broad shoulders, or at least a funny suit jacket, and is weathering Elon’s version of twitter and the 2021-24 reaction to the censorious centrist politics of the past decades fairly well. Norm, ever the grumpy contrarian, takes up the cause for institutional standards on a daily basis on X, but also on his revamped show, Gambling Mad with Norman Chad.

Gambling Mad is being promoted on YouTube under the preferred two-pronged strategy, leading with a long video and following up with clipped-out “shorts.” For the moment, both are unloved and underappreciated by humans and algorithms alike, but this is a favorite to change; even as this is being written, one of the shorts I mention in the podcast seems to have become a hit on the TikTok platform. Norm has little quit in him and everyone can eventually find their correct YouTube pitch. As I delved into Wolfgang’s extraordinary success, the short form is about precision – every nanomoment truly counts for the “shorts” viewer. The spoiled-for-choice make instantaneous decisions on tone and expectation – literally within seconds – and so far, Norm needs a little more time to fire up his best rant.

For this reason, the full show is Norm at his best. We talk about its origins today, including the interesting set he films on.

Also, for everyone who does not enjoy Norm or who flames him on Twitter, he invites you to go here, the “worst restaurant in Las Vegas.” However, it might just be that no one ever taught Norm how to handle the tableside music: you don’t pay for the accordionist, you pay for accordionist to go away.

Hope you enjoy our show. Dean and I are talking about how we might continue and improve the Zoo. Help us by letting one of us know what you’d like to hear and who you’d like to hear from.

Best wishes,

Chris

The post PZ96: Cloud Yells Back at Norman Chad appeared first on Out of Position.

This year we have focused on very broad issues in poker, both in poker theory and in its statistics, but today we are going to get very specific. Scoop! is a series of detailed books focused on one game in two variants: PLO8 and Big O. Its author, Greg Vail, makes a living playing and teaching these games alone.

In Hold’em, there are often cards on the board that are considered to be blanks or bricks that should not help anyone’s hand. This is almost never the case in High Low. Since there are so many combinations of hands in play, most cards on the board are going to help or connect with something or someone. Therefore, we must consider how the “best” hand can fare against the entire deck and the entire run out. Once this is done, the “best” hand is the hand with the highest equity. Most of the time, this is not the hand that a Hold’em mind would consider to be “ahead” right now.

Vail, Greg. Scoop!: Big O and PLO8: Winning High Low Concepts for the Hold’em Mind (p. 13).

For whatever reason, splitting the pot into two simply blows away many poker players. While I have been preparing a modest class for Double Board Bomb Pots in particular, the Scoop! series by Greg, soon to be completed with volume four, is the seminal contemporary text for big bet omaha games and is emphatically built around split pot concepts.

Play for the scoop. We wouldn’t draw to chop in Hold’em, so why would we in split pot games? We will gain most of our profit by exploiting players who do exactly that. We’ve all seen someone River an inferior Flush in Hold’em, pay off a large bet to the nut Flush, and say, “I hate it when I was drawing dead and got there.” That happens all the time in split pot games. Do not be that guy.

It is a conceptual series but also a detailed one.

Breakdowns like this, of the entire combo, help clarify what you are looking for in a split pot hand.

A few more links:

Here’s the software Greg mentioned.

Greg can be found at doublesuited.com.

Here’s a Zoo episode where I argue with Limon about a split pot double board spot. What would Greg have to say about it?

Basically, this is a great series, I don’t have a lot to add here. You should just buy and read the books if you are going to play Big O and PLO8.

Enjoy the interview!

As for sourdough, I use allrecipes.com for everything these days. Maybe Dean will write out his own recipe and post it here.

The post PZ95: Greg Vail, Split Pot Expert appeared first on Out of Position.

The straddle is a third blind added to the traditional two blind structure of hold’em and other related games. It’s not always a neutral proposition. The extra blind can help stimulate action or inhibit it, depending on the players and stack sizes. More controversially, the straddle often gets put into play with a certain amount of social pressure. For this reason, in the games I host, I allow unlimited straddling but never allow it to become mandatory – because there is always That Guy who doesn’t want to straddle, and I don’t think a good host forces people to do things.

Our guest today Brent Jenkins is that guy who is tired of what he calls “stakes terrorists” prodding him into putting on the straddle. Not a big deal you say? Just say no to straddles, Nancy reminds you – you have the option. Well, as we all know, it’s not that simple. Pro-straddlers can be pushy and unpleasant. There is a social stigma that if you are against the straddle, you are somehow against a “good game.” Objecting to the straddle becomes a form of poor behavior – it is stigmatized.

Brent doesn’t think it should be like this and has written what he titles The Anti-Straddle Manifesto. For the TLDR crowd it’s going to be a heavy lift, but I can assure you it is fairly straightforward and marshals many good arguments for his case. In the introduction he even lists the headers for the points he’s going to make, at pains to be clear.

To really understand his argument, we have to separate the social pressure aspect and the straddle itself. Brent makes arguments against both, but the former is what is most important to him. Poker is constantly concerned with “what is good for the game” and he makes a fairly reasonable case that “stakes terrorists” are not acting in its best interests.

The straddle itself, on the other hand, is going to be a less clear subject. Most players who love it confuse the correlation of action they bring with the incentive the straddle adds to the game, and therefore are under the delusion that they are the “good guys” here, when it is really much more of a grey area. Straddles halve the effective stacks and limit actions, while providing third blind complexity. Tradeoffs.

The notoriously bitchy, micro-edge seeking culture of the 5/10 scene at Wynn and other casinos has led to that leading room now removing the straddle from the game in favor of a big blind ante. Brent is obviously pleased by this contiguous development. We’ll want to watch and see how it all plays out. Brent argues the lack of straddles will stimulate players to play at their appropriate stakes size, and anecdotally already reports some of that happening. Conversely, I’ve heard negative rumors as well.

In any case, whether you are a die-hard straddler or one of Brent’s acolytes, hopefully today’s podcast makes you think about this hidden big deal within cash game culture. Enjoy the pod.

N.B. Dean is occupied, my apologies for the stripped down podcast and any balance issues.

The post PZ94: Brent Jenkins is That Guy appeared first on Out of Position.

One of the common twists of fate in poker is the change in personal relationships on account of strategy and results. At one point now nearly forgotten, the entrance of Alvin Lau into the Red Chip Poker forum caused a whole chain of events to unfold.

One end result was the rise of Alvin’s first poker teaching and programming, Overnight Monster, as ambitious RCP and other players flocked to his initial offerings. This established Alvin as a strong coaching prospect for low stakes online players. The forum feuding and questions of etiquette in turn led me to become more independent, as I could not deny Alvin’s superior strategies and reasoning in the forums. This interaction later became a series of interviews with Alvin which would become the most popular of the Poker Zoo’s first episodes, as we both agreed and sparred over a whole series of subjects and ideas, from Pluribus to race identity.

Today Alvin returns after several years in the Texas poker scene. It’s been a minute for sure, and he’s changed quite a bit: our far-reaching conversation reflects both personal and professional changes. As a coach who has a very straightforwardly successful and straightforward program, he has become popular with those who are absolutely committed to moving up fast online and live. While coaches and players do grumble about their competition behind the scenes, Alvin belongs in a special tier of slightly less-known experts you can count on probably better than anyone in poker yet are still accessible, a unique tier that includes player/coaches like Upswing’s Gary Blackwood, Peter Clarke of Carrot Poker, and now Marc Goone of Hungry Horse.

While Alvin had earned a reputation as a difficult person to deal with, relationships work both ways; I was not persuaded his apparent harshness was always unwarranted. Further, his many success stories bely the trouble he’s run into – even with students from my own community. He has also had an obviously huge impact on the vlogger with the highest number of subscribers ever – Wolfgang.

We talk extensively about Alvin’s work with Wolfgang today. Being the coach of a near-celebrity poker player means the spotlight is on the student. Alvin, however, is more than ever okay with that, even writing about it on his Youtube page.

Yet that’s not the real surprise today, because Alvin discusses a likely reason he has sometimes struggled in the coaching relationship, despite his passion for it: autism.

Does this self-diagnosis resolve everything? Alvin, a fierce solver and simplification advocate at the time, was hard on RCP and on a semi-related book project. Under the weight of Alvin’s public fire, the project collapsed, and the forum was retracted as RCP reorganized itself to catch up with the times. Was Alvin unnecessarily cruel or was he just stating the facts, an inevitable agent of the marketplace of ideas?

Through the lens of his diagnosis, it was neither. Instead, it was the manifestation of indifference or unawareness of social behaviors that is often the outcome of his condition. I’m not a fan of the medicalization of personality issues that seems to plague contemporary society and especially parents – why can’t he just have these traits without a diagnosis – but it struck me during our talk that if a diagnosis of a trait can bring understanding and peace to a person, and even change their behavior for the betterment of all, who am I to question the label or the process?

Our talk goes quite a bit beyond this and Wolfgang, as we get the real deal on the state of Texas NL, the real reason not every great poker mind plays high stakes, and even some strong live poker tell stuff.

I hope you enjoy Alvin’s return.

A few links:

Alvin mentioned Wolfgang’s ownership stake in Home – The Fort Card Room

Alvin on the Poker Zoo.

The post PZ93: Alvin Behind the Scenes appeared first on Out of Position.