My journey to mental strength - A 6 Max NL Blog
My name is Joscha (31). My poker journey started when I read my first book, "The Poker School" by Jan Meinert.
I already experienced a lot on this journey. From grinding up a bankroll with freerolls and 1c/2c games on Everest Poker in 2007
to play the main event and some 10/20$ and 20/40$ cash games in Vegas in 2014.
What happened in 2016 then shaped my life and my poker career to this day. And not in a good way. Out of sheer curiosity and wanting to experience more of life,
I went to a 10 Vipassana meditation retreat. 10 Days of Meditating, 10 hours a day, and no talking. What would happen during and after this retreat is tough to put into words. Some call it a "spiritual awakening", others psychosis and mental breakdown.
Today, I look at it more as the latter.
The years after that were mostly me trying to stabilize my mind again. I spent a lot of time in hippie communities and not playing much poker. At least I felt that these people saw me, understood me, and didn't judge me. At some point, after my finances had kind of eroded, I decided to get an education in social work and look for a real job.
I was coping and trying to get my feet back into life.
Fast-forward to today:
- My mind has mostly recovered
- Back to poker for the last two years (crushing small stakes NL for 8bb +)
- A part-time job in social work, part-time poker
Goals and Steps:
- Break into midstakes NL
- Give back to the community through creating poker content
- Give coaching to people who need it and will benefit from it
Recently, I started making some reel content on Instagram on the account https://instagram.com/iwinthisonepoker. The process is enjoyable for me even though I still don't really know what I'm doing haha.
If you want to give me a follow I would highly appreciate it.
This blog:
I want to mostly share my thoughts and feelings during the poker journey. I won't talk much about hands or strategy in this blog. I was mostly attracted to the game because of the psychological aspect and not the theory.
I would say I am reasonably good at theory but it's just not where my passion lies.
Thank you for reading and all the best!
add me on Discord # joschachristopher if you want to have a chat
Results from the last 3 years on various sites
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Well, I realize I took an unintentional 6 month break from writing this blog.
I am a bit embarrassed about it but what can I say? I will just get back to it and try to be more consistent in the future.
So what happened for me in the last months:
I quit my part-time social work job in October
I moved up in the app games and I am currently playing stakes around 1k NL
Moved out of my apartment
Starting to travel to South East Asia very soon
When I look back at my goals and process from July I realize that I didn't walk towards those goals but more away from them.
Which is quite interesting looking back.
I think my main rationalization for this was that I needed to spend my time making the most amount of money in the shortest period of
time playing in good games that might die tomorrow.
It is kind of working but I also feel like my life happiness dived down in the last months.
I am currently feeling quite obliged to play these games because of the "EV".
And those games are not all that fun or strategically interesting to play.
They are played in a different game format and blind structure than normal NLH games.
I think this is also why I felt like it doesn't make sense to make poker strategy content while not putting in hours in a normal game format that
a potential audience would have an interest in.
For me to make content I need to get back to playing normal cash games so that I face interesting spots regularly and can make content out of them.
Well good to know that and remember myself of it.
For the time being, I will travel, enjoy my freedom, and live a bit of a digital nomad lifestyle.
I will keep on playing the apps with the plan to quit within the next 2-4 months.
Take a bit of the cake and then get out.
It will be a hard decision but necessary. It's not worth it just follow the short-term money.
I am happy to see what the future brings and also happy to proactively find ways to do things differently.
