The Poker Zoo Podcast

T.S. Eliot famously stated that “there is no method but intelligence” when asked about his craft. Poker is like this, too, so when a savvy player doesn’t make it work, the postmortem is always interesting.

Nate Serisky, the “new pro” DGAF dubbed “Tom Brady Jr.” in one of his session reviews, stopped playing poker at the end of 2024. A staked and studied mid-stakes reg, he was not who you wanted to see at your Wynn table. Nate liked taking his time and took every hand, it seemed to me, very seriously. Yet the story behind the story is always complicated. Beyond appearances, Nate was in fact struggling to establish a satisfying win-rate. We get into it on today’s Poker Zoo.

(I say today’s Zoo like I’ve been just pumping out podcasts.)

I respect the people around Nate and am sure he had all the help he could ask for; I met Nate, after all, through Chris Konvalinka and Christian Holden, each talented players with some role in the story, no doubt. Yet I wonder about Nate’s references to study and so does he, referring to theory and what was best for the live games. Nate sounds like he could have been falling into the trap of thinking outputs are theory. We can become consumed by the microfibers of equilibrium data when more basic and flexible ideas are what we need for the real and very different equilibria around us.

A major theme of this blog for the past year has been variance and the misinterpretation of it. Swings in poker are difficult to accept and might not even mean what we think they mean. In our first podcast, Nate spoke of taking a lot of time off to recover from rough outings. Looking back, he questions this. “More volume,” he says, was surely one of the answers. Maybe so. How to persist is one of the hardest tasks to master in poker and seems like a big part of what happened here. Overprep is a dangerous thing when the joy of the game lies in confronting the challenge simply and at ease.

Still, signs point to Nate returning to poker. He sounds like someone who is processing an experience, not leaving it behind. We cannot know the future until we know what we want. When he calls his current gig as a slot stalker a “profession,” we know he is not taking himself too seriously, given it is not a profession. We all go through periods of just needing income. Of course, the transition could simply be to his current preoccupation, music. That’s a glorious way to live, of course, but a way with just as many or more demands.

In any case, I hope you enjoy this bookend podcast. So many are going through struggles and changes; really, all of us.

The post PZ103: Persistence, Real and Fake, with Nate Serisky appeared first on Out of Position.

Jason Su, mental game and performance coach for an increasing number of poker players, returns to the Zoo. While poker is a game (not “just” a game), there is something a touch more serious in this visit. Why is this? Perhaps because the money involved in poker is increasingly scarce and so every edge has become important.

Actually, it’s worse than that. People are leaving the online scene and rolling the dice in live MTTs or private cash games at a new clip. Nick Howard has gone AWOL and become a concierge for desperate poker nerds. Scamming and scammers have never had it better.

So, do you need a mental game upgrade to deal with it all? Maybe.

My first impression of The Joy of Poker is that this is a book about the ego, not in the pop psychology sense, but in the Freudian sense. The ego mitigates the unconscious and reality. The ego is, as Jason would say, present. This mental awareness of ourselves is not only what makes us conscious but helps us deal with all the pressures of our irrational desires and what society tells us. Freudian or not, Jason puts great stock in being in touch with reality and ordering our response to it. Credit to him, you can hear his measuredness, his lack of hysteria, on our podcasts. Ok, so what?

One big assertion he makes is that mental game has made no progress since some undefined point. This seems doubtful to me, but in conversation, Jason seems convinced enough. Still, everyone now has a little meditation app or something now. Everyone knows to breathe. Go crazy, you oxygen addicts.

While I don’t get into on the podcast, as I expect the reader and other pods to handle certain details, Jason provides a methodology to handle the stress of the game. Read the chapter Clear the Path to get down to business.

Instead, I focus in the interview on an introduction to his ideas and on the culminating chapter, Master of Luck which he referred to in an oblique tweet several months ago. Can you make your own luck, really? At first, he seems to mean something else, and that the argument is more semantic in nature: you don’t make luck, but you can experience it. Fair. Then, I stumble onto something more important: a human approach to embracing variance, which has always been the key to the seemingly impossible goal of playing with a sense of peace.

After reading the book I realized the answer to Jason’s supposition that no progress has been made in the mental game department. It’s a slippery area of the game which has been promulgated through so many empty words, true, but progress has indeed been made and Jason is making some of it. Jason means that the way out of pain is not around but through, both in poker and in life. Words are not enough for the human emotional experience; they are signifiers but not actions. Jason wants you to take a sequence of action steps, which you can read about in the book. So, while the field’s methodologies have been dodgy overall, Jason has refined the answers, both in print and in practice.

Processes that allow us a modicum of acceptance are the progress we’ve made, however imperfect they are. We must fully embrace the swings of the game and thus the feelings associated with them, just as we already know we must max out the corresponding and primary challenge of the game, the challenge of poker strategy.

In other words, to interpret Jason correctly is not to merely hear him say, “you must be willing to win big.” No, you also have to be willing to lose. Perhaps he doesn’t say this enough, given that “willingness to win” always sounds paradoxical. And so this is where emotional availability – presence – meets up with Mason’s critique through knowledge alone – and explains Chewy’s curious quote, for that matter. We thus demonstrate a human way forward and it is for those primarily with the proper skills already. Mental game is for those who need it, and those who need it already know how to win.

How to do it is the problem. Tendler’s “inchworm” is here, Mason’s focus on the strategy as answer is here, and the contributions of many other thinkers are in here as well, however hidden. The Joy of Poker presents a strong case for, and argument about, mental game.

Have a listen and find out. You can find Jason on Twitter or here at his webpage.

The post PZ102: Jason Su Wants to Unmisreg You appeared first on Out of Position.

It’s early in the back nine for the Poker Zoo podcast, so it’s time to focus on what we want to accomplish. I have a fitting guest today in Sara O’Connor, a mid-Atlantic player and writer who has gathered some attention through her book, A New Queen’s Guide to Poker, and through some social media expertise. Sara has a lot of drive.

I was introduced to Sara through my friend Jason when he bit off a little more than he could chew in the course of his regular Twitter trolling. While Sara and I discuss many things about her life in poker, her first book is or was the original focus of the interview. I think she has done a great job in acclimating the novice to specifically live casino poker. Explicatory passages such as this could do a lot for the unfamiliar:

The game is played with a dealer in the center of the table and

two to ten players. Seat numbers start from the dealer’s left at seat

one and usually end at eight or nine but may go all the way up to

ten. Currently, my favorite seat is seat five, but never become too

attached to one seat. You never know which seat you’ll have to start

playing at, and attachments can lead to feelings of jinxes which

must be avoided. That said, you can ask for a seat change button if

you’re horribly uncomfortable and playing a cash game. With a

tournament, you’re stuck with the seat you’ve been given. We’ll talk

about the nitty gritty details of each of these table positions later.

This is far more practical than many, drier introductory texts. Sara conveys much of the real game and the concerns of its new participants. That’s the “good for poker” stuff everyone yammers on, right there.

When it comes to the strategy discussion in New Queen’s, my response is a little more complex. I think of Dan Savage’s “campground” rule, where he posited that in certain relationships, you must leave your partner better off than you found them. In essence, much of my coaching practice lays in correcting concepts and their misapplication. Does A New Queen’s Guide to Poker and other such novice guides to strategy help or harm the player in the long run? Does she follow the campground rule?

I tend to think the answer is that there is little harm here in the end, and that Sara answered my question during the podcast well enough. Things are going to be wrong, inevitably and everywhere; you’ll recover from your middle school texts no matter how careful they are in addling your brain. The so-called “ladder of learning” is not just straight up and up – the process of learning and relearning also matters. That’s real enough and leaves the writer some reign to describe things that need to be introduced even if those things will need to be corrected later. And of course, I like teaching poker and its theory! Bring on your confusions.

Really, though, I want to skip all that and focus in on what I liked hearing about at the end of the pod: Sara’s coming poker fiction. Ideas start with books and stories, and usually only then proceed to reach popular culture and its bigger, more splashy mediums where huge profits and big picture trends develop. The current debate over poker media is reductive and misguided, as I have written, in both how influence works and what makes it work.

So, if Sara is going to give us some “smut,” it’s good news because she will be generating “content” that really matters to real people with real desires, rather than doing what the poker world flagellates itself to do every few years: weakly manipulate culture with “PR” no one wants. The writer or communicator is the usual if hidden origin point of cultural products and movements because the word is the basic unit of shareable thought.

You can contact Sara on X or at her website.

Coming next, popular mental game and performance coach Jason Su returns to the Zoo with a new book – The Joy of Poker.

The post PZ101: Sara O’Connor Does Things appeared first on Out of Position.

For our milestone episode, I talk with old friend Steve “ChipXtractor” Catterson. I met Steve through the defunct Red Chip Poker forum, and we have been more or less in touch since.

Steve and I go over some stories, but it seems to me that the present in this case is more interesting than the past. Steve is working on his game and that means becoming more interested in the game. Teaching, in turn, makes me more interested in the game. The reason for all this is that when we see what is possible or what we have been blind to, the world regains its color. I’m obviously not just talking poker here. The way to overcome loss is to see what still lives and what you have been missing from the bigger picture.

Less seriously, it’s fun to hear hand histories from South Point, which can be a fun, popular local’s place. Soon Steve will be moving up from the cheap seats and will get involved with the notorious shit regs of the “Jewel.” Good luck with that.

Here’s the hand discussed:

The theme of this podcast is sociability. From Steve’s angle, poker is a part of one’s real, physical, meaningful life. Otherwise hard-tack players need to remember that. I regret my many rudenesses at the table and have been trying to make up for them for some time. For those currently embracing misery and its spread to others, I suggest you rethink your approach. You don’t have to embarrass that old guy who doesn’t want to show his cards. You don’t have to fight over who straddled when. You don’t have to wander the room looking for exact right game to worsen.

Thanks to Dean for all his work on the pod. Thanks to Porter, Julie, Burge and anyone else who put in some editing time. Congratulations us.

If you want to join Steve in relearning the game, use the coaching link or email me.

Have a great week,

Chris



The post PZ100: Poker as Social Good, with ChipXtractor appeared first on Out of Position.

As we roll into 2025 it’s well worth checking in with Zoo member Jason Burge, aka Jambasket. He’s a tough online winner in the active Michigan online games but is also a hidden superhero on Twitter (I’m not calling it X, c’mon), where he trolls the hell out of poker’s puffed-up personalities and various engagement beggars.

Students in the Zoo have a lot of questions about how to Jambasket, so we go through them all. Should be valuable for the aspiring: how do you make a living in your underwear these days?

We also talk poker culture. One thing that’s important this month is the Global Poker Awards and their coming award show on February 22. Anyone (who is fair) can see that Eric Danis and company do a pretty damn good job overall. I have no complaints and enjoy helping out by voting. Because the awards are really the promotional arm of a poker business rather than some non-aligned committee, it’s easy but incorrect to get upset when some corner of the industry isn’t included or perhaps is passed over.

One of those debatable corners is the podcast scene, where the usual suspects keep shuffling in and out of the finalist nominations. Those selected are worthy candidates who serve the needs of the poker industry. Yet one of the few podcasts of any real lasting worth, Sessions, isn’t likely to ever make it out of the first round, never mind win the award itself. Jason and I talk lightly about this problem for a bit.

After seven seasons of diary-meets-storytelling, Billy is still in a tough spot, but he continues to stretch out a grand story arc. His is not really a podcast in the sense GPI voters mean, but a kind of oral history, one which represents an entire vein of the culture. It’s hard to compare Sessions to a half-hour interviewing the latest tournament donkstar, in other words.

Jason and I also go over the recent Faraz Jaka queen-nine of diamonds hand, tournaments in general, and a few other fun things as well.

Jason has made several appearances on the Zoo, here’s another one to check out.

He also has a series of amusing trip reports documenting his days in Las Vegas, check them out through searching my website. Here’s one.

Hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.

Thanks,

Chris

The post PZ99: Jambasket FAQs, GPIs, MTTs, & LOLs appeared first on Out of Position.