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Carlos Welch is on the show with his most aggressive cost-cutting idea yet: living in a van! Find out how he’s managing it and how his first few weeks have been, then be sure to watch him on Twitch and read his new blog for the latest updates.
Timestamps
0:30 Hello & Welcome
38:31 Strategy
Strategy
$5/$10 NLHE, $3000 effective stacks. UTG opens to $50, Hero calls 9d 7d UTG1, SB and BB call.
Flop ($200) 6h 5s 4c. Check, check, UTG bets $100, everyone calls.
Turn ($600) 8h. Three checks, Hero bets $300, SB raises to $1000, two folds, Hero shoves, SB calls.
I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve become a Carlos groupie. I can’t get enough of his interviews or twitch stream. I’m not sure I could ever go nitcast enough to live out of a van, but watching this unfold will never get old!
Thank you so much Chris! Sounds like you’ve got a lot of reading and listening to do over at http://carloswelch.blogspot.com.
For those who haven’t read it, I especially recommend my thread in the Poker Goals & Challenges Forum over at TPE entitled “Loxxii’s First Professional Poker Year 2013” (link in the first post on my blog) I’ve re-read it like 5 times start to finish. Each time I both tear up and laugh uncontrollably. I wrote that 2 years ago and I’m somehow still here doing better than ever.
I thought sleeping in a movie theater in the afternoon was pretty clever but I suppose that strategy was short term for Vegas. Now it looks as though Carlos has a medium or long term strategy. Living for today while investing in the future doesn’t sound so crazy the way he describes it.
Thank you Mrs. B! I’d call it a long term strategy. What’s cool about it for me is that the living cheaper today part doesn’t even feel like much of a compromise. In fact, I feel like I am living better than ever.
In the fall of 2010, I was paying $1000 a month for a mortgage, teaching in a public school, and investing $100 a month for retirement.
In the fall of 2015, I will be paying $200 a month for my office, playing poker, living on beaches (including in the Dominican Republic), and investing $300 a month for retirement.
All my metrics improved once I decided to stop paying for things I neither needed nor wanted. I got over my fear of looking crazy once I realized that normal meant being broke, bored, depressed, and in debt.
I liked the analysis of Carlos as an artist. Is he creating a new paradigm or just doing his own form of life arbitrage. Of course, if everyone did what he did, our whole economy would suffer (or be radically different), but I doubt many others would want to “suffer” by living as he does.
Also found Andrew’s concern for Carlos’ love life very humurous.
Minor question – why is the hand in the notes different than what was said on the podcast? (T8 vs 97)
Dana, I agree with all of this. I dont think I am creating a new paradigm. I’m just doing what everyone knows deep down makes sense. Like we all know that we could live on much less than we do and that we could save a ton of money if we did. That’s nothing new. I’m just crazy enough to actually do it.
Yeah, it’s admirable what you are doing considering that many people say to themselves that they can’t follow their dream to do X because it doesn’t make enough money – people don’t want to sacrifice to make it possible.
I liked the bit about game theory. When people say “He bet pot so I need to call 50% to make him indifferent to bluffing or checking” I think “No, 50% is to make him indifferent to bluffing or open-mucking”
The distinction doesn’t matter with the Ace-King-Queen game – because the bluffing hand has zero showdown value, but if you sit with a piece of paper and try to solve the AKQJT98765 game (to make it easier at the start you can deal each player’s card from a separate deck, so there are no blocker issues) where the bluffing range also has some showdown value then it is different – in the version where the OOP player has to check first, if he then calls as much as 50% of his range to BTN raises then for BTN 6 is a check-behind to see if it beats a 5 – so the equilibrium is elsewhere. With the caveats that Nate mentioned (e.g. this doesn’t apply if one range just crushes the other) villain should be indifferent between bluffing and checking at the top of bluffing range, not the bottom of it, which are usually clear and profitable bluffs in GTO.
It’s getting away a bit from game theory but in my micro games these ideas are important because people don’t bluff the bottom of their ranges on the river, so the missed jack high flush draw can easily beat someone’s 9 high that they just give up with – so you have real, albeit declining, showdown value right to the bottom of your range and the bluff candidates have to be chosen carefully with that in mind. Maybe in bigger games the jack high never wins at showdown because anything it beats just bluffs it out on the river but I don’t know about that yet. 🙂
Nate…Carlos isn’t skilled at the soundbite? wtf?:) “the Henry David Thoreau of poker”, “the nit mobile is my walden”…he was spitting out gems this episode!
Thanks Mike.
That said, I do consider myself a bit like Assassinato in that you need a good bit of exposure to “get it” with guys like us. The first time I heard him I thought he was just a formerly drugged out ranter. I’m glad I stuck around long enough to learn how deep he actually is. I’m sure if a listener judged me solely by my accent in the first 5-10 minutes of a podcast or my amateurish thought process in a strategy segment, they wouldn’t stick around long enough to be surprised that I can drop a Thoreau reference. One of my favorite sayings is “I’m not slow. I just LOOK like this.”
I don’t think I said Carlos isn’t skilled at sound bites–the point (or at least my intended point) was that Carlos’s general style is more long-form. Perhaps I’ve just had the privilege of hanging out with him in person a lot (on the scale of hours instead of minutes/seconds), but I’ve generally found him to be much more concerned with getting the point right and developing it as he sees fit than with delivering the killer one-liner. I think that a format like Twitch that works at hour-scale rather than second-scale is a good fit for him.
I should probably mention one of my background motivations here, which is that I tend to really like forms of “new media” that _aren’t_ slowly evolving into television or adopting television-like structures. It’s one reason I wanted to do a long-form podcast instead of something like Radiolab or Startup, both of which can be very good but which sacrifice depth for zing. So I’m probably over-eager to think that Twitch is a good fit for people.
i knew what you were trying to say and agree with you, just felt like stirring things up here lol
Great podcast, guys. I had the same idea when I was younger of living out of a van and using a gym membership for showers and once a week laundromat visits. But instead, I just moved back home and lived with my folks for a while. I bet as time goes on, we’ll see more and more of this in order to save money.
Also, the cash game strategy was great. I had no idea that some card rooms allowed random straddles from any position. I bet this makes good aggressive players straddle every time when on the button.
Keep up the good work!