Year end 2016

$1/hand is impressive! I haven't posted in ages as I don't really play much these days. I am getting close to broke though so need to play a lot more or get a job real soon. I have been saying this for 2 years though, just don't know what I'd do next @ 32 years old, no job experience and mediocre qualifications :/

Yea solid winrate.

I played a bit over 100k hands of 1/2 plo zoom with 1.82 evbb/100 pre-rb winrate. Its 5 times less hands than the previous year and probably like 8-10 times less than what I used to play pre black friday, but I am happy with it. Its difficult to find the time between school, work, futsal (5v5 soccer) and random other stuff, 20 hours per month or so max. When I do play though, I actually enjoy it quite a bit, way more than I used to in the previous couple years. And winrate, while fairly low, is actually above average among plo 200z regs afaik, so not unhappy about that either. Ok year overall.

Now I can't play since PS now needs to get a licence to offer real money poker in Czech Republic. But its just as well for me I guess, with exams coming up this month. And hopefully they will get the licence in a month or two.


@ToT)Midian( Yea I know that feeling, was in a similar spot a few years back. Then I got really interested in Machine Learning, big data and mostly AI, started reading and learning about it and even went back to university to study it, at the age of almost 30 while most of my classmates are some 10 years younger, lol. Not complaining about it at all though, esp. with all the young girls around, haha.
Anyway, oportunities are huge in this field, with the IoT era coming up, there is tons of data everywhere, so one can get to interesting projects in just about any area (security, medicine, advertising, searching, text processing, physics, ...). I am really fairly enthusiastic about what all may be achieved with ML and AI in the next decades. So yea, I would recommend this field to a smart poker player who is looking for something interesting to do next.

Well, then there is also the ever enticing option of getting back to Starcraft:Broodwar :-)

On January 05 2017 23:00 Joe wrote: Yea solid winrate. I played a bit over 100k hands of 1/2 plo zoom with 1.82 evbb/100 pre-rb winrate. Its 5 times less hands than the previous year and probably like 8-10 times less than what I used to play pre black friday, but I am happy with it. Its difficult to find the time between school, work, futsal (5v5 soccer) and random other stuff, 20 hours per month or so max. When I do play though, I actually enjoy it quite a bit, way more than I used to in the previous couple years. And winrate, while fairly low, is actually above average among plo 200z regs afaik, so not unhappy about that either. Ok year overall. Now I can't play since PS now needs to get a licence to offer real money poker in Czech Republic. But its just as well for me I guess, with exams coming up this month. And hopefully they will get the licence in a month or two. @ToT)Midian( Yea I know that feeling, was in a similar spot a few years back. Then I got really interested in Machine Learning, big data and mostly AI, started reading and learning about it and even went back to university to study it, at the age of almost 30 while most of my classmates are some 10 years younger, lol. Not complaining about it at all though, esp. with all the young girls around, haha. Anyway, oportunities are huge in this field, with the IoT era coming up, there is tons of data everywhere, so one can get to interesting projects in just about any area (security, medicine, advertising, searching, text processing, physics, ...). I am really fairly enthusiastic about what all may be achieved with ML and AI in the next decades. So yea, I would recommend this field to a smart poker player who is looking for something interesting to do next. Well, then there is also the ever enticing option of getting back to Starcraft:Broodwar :-)

Did you have any prior programming experience before your interest in machine learning? What would you tell past you to learn sequentially to speed up the learning curve?

@Daut

Yes I did. I started programming quite early (14 years old or so). Later I did some web development, but just smaller projects or my own things. Then I started IT uni, but quit because of poker after a while. Then I did none or very little programming for about 6-7 years while being a poker player, so of course I had to start learning it again afterwards, especially given how fast the IT world evolves.

What would I tell my past self to learn more/better? Hm...
1. Start using Linux / MacOS and learn it properly. Its just such a efficiency difference compared to being a standard Windows user.
2. Learn Python well. And get very familiar with Pandas and Numpy libraries. And matplotlib and/or some other graphing library.
3. Math. I would tell myself to really try to get deeper understanding about a lot of stuff. Like for example Calculus, its one thing to be able to simply calculate integrals or derivatives and quite another to be able to really understand and visualize it in your mind to know what is in fact happening.

Also, I think as far as speeding up your learning, its by far best to just start solving problems. I for example learned quite a bit trying to solve some Kaggle competitions or reading other people solutions. I also regularly try to come up with ideas for small things that I could program to both solve a small thing I want solved and learn / practice something while doing it. For example recently I wanted to try how scraping works, so I decided to write a scraper for a local real estates server, because I am also currently looking to buy a small apartment as an investment and having all the data in a Postgre database is much more convenient.

That's very cool to hear Joe, I'm trying something similar (though still playing decent bit of poker).

Started with MIT's 6.001x last august, just finished 6.002, did a few weeks of Andrew Ng's Machine Learning on coursera but dropped it in favour of shoring up some math leaks first (could get through the content but like you put it, I want to really understand what's happening).

There's an insane amount of free education material available out there... EDX, coursera, Udacity, khanacademy (for math). It's really amazing.

Couple of cool resources I happened across:
https://github.com/open-source-society/computer-science
https://github.com/open-source-society/data-science
http://datasciencemasters.org/
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/if-yo...mming-classes-fb694ffe780c#.p3lwfixnw

Had 0 programming experience but python is so natural to get into, already been able to use it to write some simple stuff to help me study poker stuff. Actually had waaaaaaay better 2016 than 2015 pokerwise but programming and machine learning is just so god damn fun/interesting. Wish I had started on it years ago but happy to have started at all.

Am signed up for Linear Algebra Foundations to Frontiers when it starts this month, and also @ a MIT Probability course (I've heard this one is quite hard tho, so I kind of expect to not be ready for it math wise).

Super excited about it in case you couldn't tell!

1. Start using Linux / MacOS and learn it properly. Its just such a efficiency difference compared to being a standard Windows user.

Haven't looked into this at all yet, but keep hearing it, what would you recommend as a good entry-point Linux distribution? Thinking of building a new computer anyway...

Best decision I made was continuing with my degree while I played poker.

I was super close on just quitting university in my first year to pursue poker full time, luckily I didn't.
The only downside to this when I completed my degree is I lost the drive to really achieve anything in poker, compared to when I started, I was always in tournaments around here and in home games and casinos.

I do enjoy playing poker more now I would say, I still beat live cash games $200nl at the casino and I'm a consistent winner online up $25nl. But I don't feel any motivation at all, like I want to prove something to people. I lost ego in poker. I don't know if this is a good thing or bad, but I could not care less.

I'm also enjoying MMA betting and discussions here on LP, thanks to the MMA regs, (PR, soberstone, whamm, spitfiree, Baal and couple of others).

had a good year, just too old to brag now I guess

also had a lot of health issues past 2 yrs and a half and made me realize that money is overrated, way overrated

On January 06 2017 14:47 TianYuan wrote: Show nested quote + 1. Start using Linux / MacOS and learn it properly. Its just such a efficiency difference compared to being a standard Windows user. Haven't looked into this at all yet, but keep hearing it, what would you recommend as a good entry-point Linux distribution? Thinking of building a new computer anyway...

Probably MacOS :-) It is the most user-friendly OS with a unix/linux kernel. If you want Linux, then probably Ubuntu or Debian (they are almost the same afaik, but I am no expert). Learning to use the terminal commands and utilities will speed up your overall computer efficiency quite a bit. And it is almost a must if you become a developer

A couple recommended commands/utilities/apps to check out:

Alfred (MacOS) - a quick launcher, searcher, ... Basically you just press alt+space for almost anything you want to do: start a program, search the web, calculate something, open up a text file or a picture, check emails, ... Its way quicker than any other way except maybe when you are super good with the command line (terminal).

Wox - almost the same as Alred, but for Windows

Git - probably no need to introduce it, but this is really important to get familiar with, once you get into any development team. Also git diff is a nice utility to check differences between files.

ag (the silver searcher) - a utility to search inside text files and among all files in a given directory. Again, almost a must for a developer.

Some useful standard linux commands to check out:
cat - prints out a text file to the terminal
vim/nano - terminal text editors
curl - get stuff from the internet in the terminal
locate - quickly search for files, very powerfull especially when combined with grep. (Before running for the first time, updatedb has to be run)

Thx I'll probably go with Ubuntu just because I have some stupid built in dislike for apple.....

On January 05 2017 19:44 ToT)MidiaN( wrote: $1/hand is impressive! I haven't posted in ages as I don't really play much these days. I am getting close to broke though so need to play a lot more or get a job real soon. I have been saying this for 2 years though, just don't know what I'd do next @ 32 years old, no job experience and mediocre qualifications :/

Move to Denmark imo 20$ per hour minimum wage and 32 hour work week

On January 07 2017 13:48 VanDerMeyde wrote: Show nested quote + On January 05 2017 19:44 ToT)MidiaN( wrote: $1/hand is impressive! I haven't posted in ages as I don't really play much these days. I am getting close to broke though so need to play a lot more or get a job real soon. I have been saying this for 2 years though, just don't know what I'd do next @ 32 years old, no job experience and mediocre qualifications :/ Move to Denmark imo 20$ per hour minimum wage and 32 hour work week

Yeah but no doubt doing something I wouldn't enjoy, far from home and with no friends there. My issue with moving on from poker and the reason I've put it off the last 2-3 years is largely because there's nothing I "want" to do, it's not all down to money. I am a mortgage free home owner with a decent enough car from poker and I could live the life I want to live making average wage from here on out, it's just finding a job that I'll enjoy that I can get at 32/no job experience/mediocre qualifications. I wouldn't sacrifice location too much anyway as I'm going through a bit of a depressing point in life and being away from friends/family at this juncture wouldn't be good for me at all

how hard is it to get a work visa for a US citizen who would want to move to Denmark? Forgive my ignorance, but what would language barrier be like? I have visited the Netherlands and heard the locals speaking English as often as I heard British tourists and some Germans (was only in Amsterdam a day, though).

I could see relocating to Europe.

On January 08 2017 01:59 chris wrote: how hard is it to get a work visa for a US citizen who would want to move to Denmark? Forgive my ignorance, but what would language barrier be like? I have visited the Netherlands and heard the locals speaking English as often as I heard British tourists and some Germans (was only in Amsterdam a day, though). I could see relocating to Europe.

there wouldnt be a language barrier, 99% of danish ppl are fluent in english

On January 08 2017 01:59 chris wrote: how hard is it to get a work visa for a US citizen who would want to move to Denmark? Forgive my ignorance, but what would language barrier be like? I have visited the Netherlands and heard the locals speaking English as often as I heard British tourists and some Germans (was only in Amsterdam a day, though). I could see relocating to Europe.

Probably easier than vice versa. English is 100% fine.