👻 Reese's taste awful now. It's time to switch it up. 🎃What King size candy bars should I get for the Trick Or Treaters this year? 💀

Every time you bet and someone calls, ask yourself, "what doesn't he have?" Start with the best hands first. If you eliminate the best hands, then you can bluff more and value bet thinner.

You can bluff almost always versus one player. Often versus two players. Sometimes versus three players. Rarely versus four players. Versus two players or more, make sure you have something that you can play with on the turn. Some kind of backdoor draw will suffice.

Every time you're in position, see if you can raise. Go to 2X the size of the pot. Look for position, bigger pots, superior hands, heads-up... If you have to forfeit anything, take a suited drawing hand as opposed to a premium. Never give up position.

I tried to talk to AI about poker. Wow. I'm going to have a job for a long time. AlexGPT has a much more profitable mental model than what these chatbots are spitting out. It can hammer some fundamentals, but it gets lost beyond that.

"Once the pot gets bigger, they will fight you to the death for it." - My student today. That's more true than it's ever been.

The techniques I teach outperform what I can do at a poker table. I have taught many poker players who have become much better than me. This doesn't worry me. I always knew I didn't have talent. I always knew I was a working class pro. The methods I teach are from poker pros who mentored me. They allowed a mediocre poker player to make a living. They are far far more dangerous when in the hands of someone truly talented.

Sleep in after a long night of fruitless Sunday grinding. Get a handful of lessons done. Watch playoff baseball ⚾ between the sessions. I never realized how specialized my knowledge base was until I tried to get AI to do my job. I gave it some hands and questions my students would ask me. It butchered every single one of them. The other problem AI has is it teaches you an overall concept which is applicable always but never maximizes your profits. It can guess at an exploitative play once you give it all the parameters, but it's still on you to create quality assumptions and make a judgment call on the fly. I have coached dozens of poker players that became much better than me. The reason for that is my coaching sessions revolve around asking yourself the right questions in the right situations. My job is not to tell you what poker player you need to become. My job isn't to tell you what read to have. My job is to give you the tools to make these discoveries yourself. Another large part of my job is making these discoveries and exploratory questions memorable. There has to be a chosen salience with every concept taught, otherwise it's generic and forgettable. I never had a high opinion of myself as a poker player. The game has been good to me, but you would laugh if you saw how hard I had to work at it. I had no idea my thick skull would become an asset in this age. I couldn't understand a poker concept with the first explanation, so I had to go find 20 others. Now, if you're confused during a lesson, I can rotate through the 20 explanations until you get it. If you have a clarifying question, I likely had to ask the same one at some point. If someone paid me $1,000,000 to train an AI poker coach I could help it get a lot of fundamentals down, but the amount of pages in the playbook would eventually become monstrous. Today, I had to reference something from the 2000s that can still be effective in 2026. That concept hasn't come up in months. I wouldn't even think to plug that into an AI unless I was given a rare prompt. There will come a time all of this is doable. A poker coach will have a decade of transcripts to upload. But that model will be dated the second it's published. It will tell you what the coach used to say. It won't tell you the next thing the coach is going to say. A set of exploits designed for 2025 can be wildly ineffective in 2026. I never understood why human intelligence is needed until I worked with AI for years. Unfortunately, unlike an AI model, I break down easily. I need ten hours of sleep to coach. I need Ketone IQ. I need coffee. I can only do so many hours. A human mind has severe limitations. But I'm starting to see humans are still going to be needed in this new world. Which humans are going to get further with AI, and which ones are going to get wiped out?

Hey everybody, today we’re going to talk about limping in straddled pots and when you can do it more or less. Let’s get right into it. 1. Know the bad games to limp in First, let’s talk about the bad games to limp in when there is a straddle on. If there is a pro there who has been trying to get the straddle on, and that pro has been regularly raising people in straddled pots, be careful. They literally pay their bills by taking advantage of people in straddled pots who limp with too many hands and call way too often out of position. Those might still be situations where you can limp occasionally, but if you see an isolation raise from the pro, do not pay them off. They are not going to pay you when you hit. That is the whole problem. They get you to call too much before the flop, and then they do not give you the implied odds you need after the flop. 2. Standard implied odds rules still apply in passive games Standard implied odds rules still apply in passive games. There are a lot of games where the straddle goes on and everybody goes from being an okay but not great aggressive player to a really bad passive player. That is when the straddle becomes really valuable. If you are calling $6 to get access to just the straddler’s $300 stack, that means you are potentially getting 50-to-1. That is powerful. A suited two-gapper flops two pair or better about one time out of 20. So as long as you do not get trapped with mediocre two pair, you can usually get away with playing a lot of these pots. You are not limping because limping is great. You are limping because the implied odds are massive and the players are passive enough to let you realize them. 3. Look at who is getting ready to raise behind you Look at who is getting ready to raise behind you. I am always stunned by how many people miss this. There are plenty of times where the straddle goes on, everybody looks at their hand ahead of their turn, and you can see someone getting chips ready to raise. You can fold much more comfortably in those situations. In fact, I have even trapped a few players doing this before. If someone is clearly preparing an isolation raise behind you, you do not need to limp in and donate. Pay attention before the action gets to you. The information is usually sitting right there. 4. Occasionally limp re-raise against pros who isolate too much If the pro is raising limpers pretty frequently, and you do not look like you could be a pro, go ahead and limp some of your suited gappers and mediocre hands. But just once, limp aces or kings. When they make the isolation raise, look really annoyed. Then re-raise, but not too much. Maybe make it 2.3 times what the isolation raise was. A lot of times, pros who overestimate themselves will try to outplay you. They will think you are some recreational player getting emotional. That is exactly what you want them to think. Do not overuse this play. But against the right person, in the right game, it can work beautifully. 5. Usually, raising is still better Usually, raising is going to be better than limping. You want to limp behind when an isolation raise would have to be really large, and you do not expect it to thin the field much anyway. The best hands to limp with are hands that do really well multiway. You want hands that can make sets, flushes, and straights. Those are the hands that break people who overvalue two pair and top pair because they have watched too much tournament poker. The hands that do best here are suited connectors, suited gappers, pocket pairs, suited aces, and suited broadways. Those hands can make hidden monsters. They can win huge pots. But if your hand does not make the nuts or something close to it, be careful. Straddled pots get big quickly, and one-pair hands can get expensive fast. That is all my time for today. Be sure to check out Master Straddled Pots in One Class! assassinato.gumroad.com/l/Ma… It is $39 for a limited time for over four hours of training. After this Thursday, it is going to be $99.99, so do not delay. This training package comes with a 100% money-back guarantee. If you do not enjoy it for any reason, just send me a polite email saying, “Refund please,” and I will get you back every cent.

In 2006, someone told me poker is dying. USA poker will always be soft.

Play online to get your fundamentals down. Play live to learn bigger plays.

Black coffee is proof God exists.

Need more coffee, Esme?

If he river donk bets large, then he has it.

Think every day about how to get more folds in tournaments. Think every night about how to get more calls in cash games.

Don't check overpairs on wet boards at low stakes. They'll keep calling with bullshit.

The simplest way to beat aggressive three-betters is to only open hands that want a three-bet. No one does that though because it's too boring.

I turn on fight sports. Like I do damn near every night. My dad could box his ass off. He always had the fights on. That was what got to me the most about my father's passing a year back. He and I were talking more. I forgot how much I loved hearing him talk boxing. He saw so many details the average fan wouldn't see. One day we were talking classic fights and he was sending me YouTube clips. The next day he couldn't even talk he was so sick. And I never got to talk to him again. Be kind to your folks, man. My dad and I had our differences, but I still regret the times he and I didn't talk much. I put on Whittaker vs. Wallace 🔥 🥊 🇬🇧. Fight sports strip away a lot of the bullshit that drives me insane in ordinary life. Two people agreed to be there. The rules are explicit. The stakes are visible. If someone is tired, scared, hurt, underprepared, brilliant, disciplined, reckless, whatever—it shows. There’s very little room for everyone to talk themselves into a different version of what happened. Whittaker is being a pompous ass, and I love it. People hate these fighters, but I'm all about young working men getting their money. Floyd Mayweather played the villain and got paid. Muhammad Ali played the villain and got paid. You can't knock a young man for following a template that worked. Boxing fans can say they hate it, but it's their own damn fault. They didn't buy Andre Ward pay-per-views. Now, this is what they get. Man. Whittaker and Wallace get into a legit firefight late. 🔥 Wallace, a middle-class athlete, exposed Whittaker's gas tank and chin tonight. Whittaker might have gotten the win, but there is no chance this man beats a technician like Beterbiev or Bivol. I'm betting the house if they fight. Catch some October baseball ⚾. It's a beautiful time of the year. Sleep until noon. Wake up and run some errands. Call my brother and mother. Cook up some eggs. Make a pot of coffee. Fire up some tournaments. Drop five buy-ins in the $1,000,000 Guaranteed without cashing. That went well. Feed my cat. She don't give a shit how I'm running. She's still going to tell me what time it is. I cash a $55 Bounty...barely. And then I bust even more tournaments. Fun night. It happens. You become a professional when nights like this don't piss you off or change your play.