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...

Why is it so difficult for humans NOT to look at their short-term poker results. What are the benefits of getting into better results checking habits? Why the feedback of daily, weekly and monthly graphs isn't really feedback at all...and much more.

Overbets and why they're such a fundamental part of No Limit Holdem. Why pot and all multiples of pot are arbitrary. Melissa embarks on an INSANE challenge. Discussion of the Kristen Foxen bust out hand and much more.

Pete and Melissa debate the utility / futility of Range Betting and that mode of thinking before getting into a therapy session where Melissa recounts a recent incident at the poker table where she hit rock bottom in terms of her behaviour and how she's intent on changing her petulant ways.

Pete and Melissa are back with season 3 of Poker Distilled. Season 3 gets underway with a quote from a novel Melissa is reading which sparks a big discussion about how the madness of seeking a perfect theoretical strategy can absolutely ruin your poker progress and how the imperfection of humans vs human play is where the true beauty of the game resides.

Pete and Melissa are back for a one off catch up while you patiently wait for season 3 of Poker Distilled. Topics includes challenging yourself in tough games, how to build armour in poker and in life and why it's so important to have ambition as a poker player. 

It's the end of another magical season of poker distilled and what better way to start 2024 than to hear Pete and Melissa discuss why tilt and gambling issues are two points on the same spectrum and why not knowing how to fight people short-handed in wide range spots makes you a hollow shell of a poker player.

Why being a poker player is like being the CEO of a one person company; why trying to play your range at the expense of considering your hand is almost always asking for trouble; and why calling someone a 'Karen' is a reprehensible act. This episode explains it all.

Today there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that Pete's golf game is no longer as terrible as it was. The bad news is that there is a very high chance that you make poker decisions for irrational reasons. In this episode we discuss the various mental game leaks that cause unsound thought processes and how to go about fixing them. 

Your poker career can be an isolating place. You are solely responsible for your fate and no one else can truly experience your poker journey like you do. What can we do to make poker a less lonely place and what has happened to the lost arts of sweats and study groups. Are we missing out on one of the greatest aspects of learning the game by making so much of our study solitary?

Pete is looking to recruit a new online cash game student who has a bit of a following in the poker world. The new star could be a well known live player. It could be HELLMUTH? Or maybe it could be you? In this episode we also discuss Melissa's epic $5/$10  heads up battle with the cardroom manager. Our final segment is on the concept of trade offs in poker strategy and how humans are quite b...

Melissa asks Pete about a wild looking call he recently made while streaming before discussion focuses on getting inside the mind of weaker poker players. How do they think and how can we exploit them for it?

Melissa interrogates Pete about the word 'Gherkin' before an interesting discussion about how to manage your live poker career. 

After quite a few years of focussing full time on growing Carrot Corner and coaching, Pete has decided to get back in the mix and generate a big sample of hands in 2024 at the stakes he commonly coaches. Melissa interviews him about the reasons behind this decision as well as his hopes and fears as to how things will go.

Poker can leave us battered, bruised and weakened. It's not whether this happens to you in poker that is the interesting question; but how you bounce back from it. Pete plays the role of poker therapist in this episode as Melissa searches for the road to recovery from an absolutely brutal weekend of terrible variance.

If your ego is too big for your poker ability, it can lead to frustration, tilt, and delusion. Your learning might slow down or stop entirely as you become stuck in the victim mindset, expecting to win. However, deflated ego can also be a big problem leading to a lack of confidence and self-trust at the tables. How do we go about mapping our ego to our ability level and how can we tell when there...

Melissa starts the podcast with a horror story of how she lost $500 out of nowhere in a very unfortunate incident at her local cardroom. The conversation then centres around the different ways in which events can be meaningful and meaningless and where this one falls on that spectrum.

This is not the greatest episode of Poker Distilled, oh no, this is a Tribute. Couldn't remember the greatest episode of Poker Distilled, oh no, Pete's sound was muted throughout. What a boomer. This episode is about the concept of World Favourability in Poker and why having the right vantage point is mandatory for assessing it correctly.

Every poker player leans a certain way when it comes to their default game. These biases tend to come out as soon as tilt enters the fray and impartiality goes out of the window. Sure, we're supposed to mix when we have an indifferent situation and no exploitative read to guide us, but in reality we often let our default preferences decide matters. 

In 2010, Pete was part of a thriving poker community getting told off by professional poker players for his sloppy thought processes. In the modern age, good poker communities are hard to come by and lone learning has become commonplace, but how destructive is this isolation for your poker community and what can you do about it?

Melissa recounts the story of her dramatic recent encounter with an old man coffee . More serious topics this week include Pete's experiences with some rare anti-social/unpleasant poker students and some strategy talk about playing at low stack to pot ratios.