Poker Distilled

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

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

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

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

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