I had the pleasure of playing a Sunday session with Mickey “mement_mori” Petersen and a few others today and I chatted to him about staking. Among other things it got me thinking a lot about some of the pieces I’ve bought in the past and how while staking is very rarely a game of asymmetric information perhaps I’ve been too liberal in my lack of due diligence. In fact when reflecting upon it, there is nothing really that I’ve sort of just picked up and had a natural inclination. I fell down all the straightforward and obvious poker pitfalls when I was starting out but it still took me 3 or 4 years to overcome most of them – for example being terrible at poker and bankroll management and having a vice or two on the side.

When I was at school I’d often moan to my mum about how history/geography/English were useless to me and how I would never use them and how boring they were. She would always patiently explain to me that it isn’t necessarily what I learn that matters so much as the learning process. It wasn’t advice I clicked onto until maybe a year or so after I’d left university where having successfully coasted my way through 16 years of education I was left with a $2k roll trying to make a living at NL50. While I appear quite lazy to many it’s more that a lot of things just don’t hold my interest and so I stubbornly don’t want to put the effort into it. A year and a half on from playing full time I was only up to NL200 – it would have been shrewd to have taken my mums advice of sticking at school just to get that learning process down. Fortunately for me poker is something I absolutely love so I am quite happy to commit a lot of time to getting better at it which is probably half the process itself.

Currently I’m investigating a couple of property options, nothing overly exciting just something to squirrel away some money into in case everything goes tits up. It’s a somewhat daunting prospect dropping a lump on something especially as I’m unlikely to go down the traditional route of residential housing. Hopefully I won’t make too many mistakes and clock onto things earlier rather than later but thankfully I have a fairly laissez faire attitude anyway (probably something to do with those slacking school days) so if it all goes wrong I guess I’ll just live and learn.