Playing Poker on a Prison Island

I started playing poker about a year and a half ago. Nothing really serious, I like watching exploitative strategy and GTO videos (which are completely useless at the levels I usually play... lets clear that "whatching" and "studying" are not the same), but until now I'd never really considered giving it a try.

I've been saving money for the last four months. Now I have $40 in my account (this is the first time I've deposited money; so far, everything I've played in cash games has been created from scratch in the same room with freerolls), and I'm determined to commit.

I live with my wife. I'm 23 and she's 21. We've known each other for two years, but the experiences we've endured together make us feel like we've known each other lifetimes ago. We're a completely synchronized and in tune team, a well-oiled machine... when we work together, everything flows.

My wife recently started working at this place, where she's well-paid. We won't be rich (we never will be in this shitty place controlled by a dictatorship that steals our life), but it's opened a window of opportunity for me to leave my old job, where I had no free time, and take a less demanding one that would allow me time to dedicate hours to poker.

So a week ago, I started working as a night watchman for a restaurant. I work two nights and two nights off, which is enough time to study and play, since I can take my laptop to work and play there too.

I have a degree in economics and I'm completely obsessed with market behavior. After devouring all the good books from major economics schools (which I download pirated because there's no other way to get them in this prison), I started with research papers. Random walks, liquidity, auction theory, efficient markets.

I was 19 years old the first time I saw a trader in action, hunting for a short position on the S&P on his six-screen setup filled with information I couldn't even begin to comprehend at the time. There was something hypnotic about those constantly changing numbers and updating charts. It's been my dream ever since to become one myself, not for the money (although I wouldn't mind being rich), but above all because I'm passionate about understanding how the economy works... I can spend hours and hours staring at the same chart in Trading View, updating (it's almost like watching the world spin), lost in the candlesticks, searching for an underlying cause for what's happening to the price.

I tried a couple of times to raise money to open my own brokerage account, but in the country I live no regulated broker is allowed to operate. So despite my exhaustive research to find a safe place to put my money and fulfill my dream, the brokers either turned out to be scams (by scams, I mean they manipulated spreads and leverage to trigger a stop loss and close the order out of price), or they closed for my country within a few months, and lost my account.

I remember in 2022 I was trading with a broker called Exness. Everything was going well, too well. My father helped me back then by asking relatives abroad for money, who sent me $120, and with that I was able to get started. The first month I made 37% of the account, being quite conservative since the last thing I wanted was to lose everything I had to fulfill my dream (how naive I was). I would wake up and from the moment I opened my eyes until I fell asleep, I would only think about the market. I would analyze the stock I liked and calculate the timing very well. For a moment I thought I would get it, until one day when I tried to open a short trade, my broker showed me the same message over and over again: "Trading is not allowed on this account." Looking through my email later that day, I found a notice from the broker from a month ago that they had updated their policies and with that the list of allowed regions had changed, everyone on the list of not allowed regions had 3 weeks to close their trades and withdraw their money... I lost everything.

That's when I decided I had to wait to escape this prison island so I could live my dream... I had to be free first.

Two years later, I discovered poker (in depth) through a podcast featuring a Spanish player. I remember the first thing that caught my attention was the natural hierarchy that forms within the game's global ecosystem.

In trading, the size of your capital does not matter, whether it is 100 dollars or 100 million, the level of skill required is the same and the profit is proportional to the size of that capital and equal in percentage terms (as long as you do not do anything crazy. Most people who start trading seek to become millionaires overnight with a ridiculously small capital compared to their expectations. They leverage and overtrade and even those who are very good technically and double their account a couple of times, are destined to fail since the statistics are usually against them). But in poker there are levels of skill, like in a video game. You start at the bottom and a linear and predictable progression awaits you. You set the pace, depending on your commitment, but the level required to play at NL2 with $200 isn't the same as playing at NL200 with half a million, and it's a decision you can make at any time depending on your skill and bankroll... let's just say it adapts to your skill level. Without a doubt, one of the obvious advantages of poker for beginners (if we could dare to compare trading to poker, speaking only of a scenario where your only motivation was financial compensation and the profitability of your capital and time. It's a rather poor comparison, but it serves to illustrate what was going through my head at the time) is that a beginner could get much more profit from a small capital than if they started trading with the same amount of money.

Speaking from that perspective, we could say that my first motivation for researching poker was purely money. Back then, I knew nothing about the game. To me, everything surrounding the world of poker was a mysticism straight out of movies. Deception, body tells, casino games. In my head, the person who was the best at lying won at poker.

That's why I was so curious about going online. How can you lie in the same way while playing without seeing your opponents? There had to be something else going on, something I wasn't seeing, and like most people outside of that world, I was missing.

You can imagine my surprise when I started consuming poker content and realized not only that you could become good at playing poker and make a living from it... but that there were also some really good people already making a living from it.

The impact of watching professionals play 10 or 12 tables at the same time was similar to the one I had when I first saw a trader, but more dynamic, like a chess player who meticulously calculates each split-second move in his head thanks to a mix of experience and skill.

It was already clear to me that poker was something I could learn and that it was scalable. I've always been very competitive and have always thrived on challenges... but a part of me didn't want to leave the world of trading.

That's how I've been these past few months. In an internal conflict between continuing to study stock speculation and simultaneously consuming poker content. I had some good results in NL10, but until now I haven't dedicated myself to it seriously. I've never dedicated myself to it completely.

At the end of last year, I had a capital of just over $100 that I had built from scratch by playing freerolls and then cash games in NL2 and NL5 mostly. But due to life circumstances, I had to withdraw it because power outages broke my computer, and I had to replace it.

But now I've made the decision. I can't continue devoting hours to trading, not while I'm stuck in this place. I'm not going to let it go; it's my dream and my goal to be a good trader... my passion. But I have to hold off until I'm in another country with a decent amount of capital for it.

My wife and I live on a socialist island called Cuba. The average salary is around 20 USD per month. My salary is 38 USD per month (but it's getting less every day due to the inflation of the Cuban peso. At the time of writing this, I'm earning 15,000 CUP, which is 38 dollars at the current exchange rate). My wife is earning a little more, 45 USD per month. It's barely enough for us to keep from starving to death.

Many people will tell you that starting out in poker to make money is something that always goes wrong. And I understand. But I want to clarify that I'm thinking about this in the long term.

My goal is to become one of the top regulars at NL100/200. Then, I'll be able to cash out and get my wife and I out of this prison. And then perhaps my poker journey will end (although never completely, but it's likely I won't continue playing the same volume that got me to those levels). I'll be able to trade in another country where we're free.

In the meantime, I'm not planning on withdrawing anything. Our salary is enough to keep us alive, and that's enough for me until I reach that goal.

And that's what this vlog is about. It's about my journey from zero to those levels, playing conservatively and studying only free content.

International payments aren't possible on this prison island. That's why, even if I had the money, I can't buy courses or access a professional coach. I've always been self-taught and I'm very good at finding valuable information on the internet (like a scavenger), and I'm certain I can do the same in poker. For the same reason, I also can't access any professional Solver or HUD services. I have Hand2Note, but I think it's only free up to certain levels.

I'll fix the HUD part when necessary (starting at NL50), and I don't think I need GTO solvers to play the levels I'm going to (although I'd appreciate feedback on this if anyone who plays at those levels or higher gives me their opinion).

The only way we have in Cuba to access international services is through cryptocurrency. That's how I deposited and withdrew money at the broker and on the poker site where I currently play. So if anyone knows of any such services (solvers, HUDs, coaches) that I can access with cryptocurrency, please share them with me.

And that's it. This introduction is getting too long. On Monday, I'll start the first session. I'll upload the graph of each daily cash session I play, starting at NL2 with 20 buy-ins. For now, the plan is to play every day except Sundays. I'm going to play 10,000 hands at NL2 and 10,000 hands at NL5. I will then play 20k hands at NL10 and from there evaluate what the requirement will be to advance to NL25.