The Good Life - EmanuelC16's Blog/AMaA

Originally posted by pleno1
omg i may love you, this is insanely good, thanks bro <3333

just me, or does this seem really random?

im more focused on MTT by now

ahah yeah france maybe more secure

Originally posted by Spungeh

Originally posted by pleno1
omg i may love you, this is insanely good, thanks bro <3333

just me, or does this seem really random?

Manu saved me!!!

A few words on improving...

I've been getting ideas the last couple of days of how things could have been different for me if not for a few key events in my life the past 2 years or so. One of the events I'm talking about is getting into 'Politehinca' University of Timisoara after high school and quitting it just 2 months afterwards.

First of all, getting into that University was not surprising but I badly wanted to study abroad in UK, Denmark or France. None of those happened for financial reasons and so I applied for a hotshot Romanian Uni which basically means nothing internationally. This wasn't what I expected nor what I wanted. The course was shit for me and the environment was worse. I expected to find mediocre value in lectures and Uni work but expected to find a lot of coding hungry students. All I found was random people that had nothing better to do than go into this Uni since it is respected in Romania. In other words, they had no business with the specialization they chose.

After around 2 months I had made up my mind to quit Uni and focus 100% on poker although I was playing NL5 back then and my mindset was awful. I also got in a fight with one of my mates which basically sealed the deal as far as Uni was concerned. When starting this poker journey I wanted to make sure I do everything better than when I chose the University. I didn't think of it as clearly as I see it now but what I instictively did was make sure I don't bring into poker what I hated about Uni:

1. Fixed schedule. Uni shcedules are all over the place. They can fuck up your whole day. You have to get up at 7AM and can end up back home at 8PM. If you add to that you live in a shitty place you will never be able to perform your best.

2. Potential. The potential for a Uni grad in Romania is extremely low as I've been repeating excessively around here. Think of it this way: average RO wage is around $500/month, probably less and someone graduating will rarely get more than that. In some years, you could obviously earn more but I'm rather confident at capping it at $1.5k/month in Romania as a simple employee.

3. ENIVORNMENT This is the topic I will continue this post on. As I previously mentioned, I expected to find new friends hungry for the same knowledge I was. I didn't! This was probably the biggest reason why Uni blew. I felt I was the only one with big goals and with ambition to actually work towards those goals. Too many preferred to be lead by what is commonly known as fate. Too many were simply following instructions from parents, teachers, brothers, aunt, uncle and so on.

When you are in an environment that is not actively driving you towards your goals then it's holding you back! It's impossible or extremely inefficient to improve in an environment that is against it. The environment can be your room/office, your house, your town, country, etc. but most importantly your friends and people you interact with.

If the people you interact with don't add value to your life then they are probably holding you back from becoming your best. When it comes to poker, it's almost impossible to move up if you don't have friends with the same goals as you and even better, players that are already ahead of you.

I didn't have this environment problem in high school where there were 2-3 people interested in working hard on coding skills and my neighbour and probably best friend then was one of them. We were constantly pushing, learning from each other. He went to another Uni and is now working for Hewlett Packard ( but makes less than I make with poker ) so all that interaction when it comes to programming disappeared when I went to Timisoara.

After I quit Uni, I still used to hang out with friends I knew from school but man, they were such timewasters! All they did was use their parents money to hang out at caffes/pubs. Apart from that, they were very 'standard' when it comes to poker:"Haha, like you'd ever make it, you're not Daniel Negreanu!". This is felt like complete poison to me... They were happy to bathe in mediocrity while I was not.

I slowly started to lose touch with them until I eventually spent like 80% time of talking to others only on Skype with poker friends. I love poker and didn't have anyone I could talk about it in real life so obviously I went with Skype. I tried as much as possible to get in touch with people I regarded as better than me. Why? Because I know I would push myself to as good or better than them. I knew I wouldn't necessarily acheive that but I also knew it would maximize my potential.

Since my experience is specifically with improving with poker I will continue like this but I think this can be applied to anything.

Most struggling players are looking for coaches to teach them how to win. Although I did get some coaching, I think the main benefit for me was making friends (albeit only over Skype at that time) with other poker players. Improving is not just about theory and reviews. It's also about how good you feel about poker and everything it means. I quickly made friends with 2 players that were playing higher than me at the time: supeyrio and THESHade. I think I did less than 5 sweats/reviews with them over 2 years but having someone to talk about poker and other stuff was of great help. It made poker a whole lot more fun. This is how I started getting in touch with a lot of people that add value to me. Although they were mostly just a name on Skype, I've also started meeting them in person and it felt way better than when hanging out with my, let's say 'ex-friends'.

Before that though, there was a period of almost a year where I didn't really go out with any friends, it was just family stuff no real partying like one would expect out of a 20 year old.

Now, I'm only in touch with 3 friends I knew from high school, none that I knew before and loads of people I knew through poker, although they don't all play poker for a living. Some would call this a sacrifice but to me it seems like the best way of improving. I think it's the first step to becoming the best I can. I know I look like a weirdo from many people's perspective, especially those that were around me in life until recently but I don't care.

Looking for higher stakes players will always push you up as well. When trying to create such an environment you either get dragged higher or you lose touch. Losing touch is not a disaster but getting dragged along higher is always great. On the other hand, if you have an unproductive environment, what I found to be happening is that you either lose touch or you get dragged back at a very high rate.

There you have it. My take on improving. Whatever you do, people around you are one of the keys to success. I did try to manipulate my environment by getting friends into poker but it didn't work. Poker is not for everyone but this is because you need to be way above average to be even remotely successful in poker. I found some freakishly smart and capable people in the poker community and I believe it's the best place to recruit for any business. They aren't all super high IQs but they know what they want and work towards that as best as they can, even if poker is/was just a hobby for them.

Manu