I completely agree with the sentiment, and as someone who’s mostly focused on a startup for pro poker players to study game theory more effectively (https://www.livepokertheory.com) , I find countless parallels between poker and entrepreneurship.
Also, people don’t realize that startups aren’t one single event. There’s a million events and each one has its own luck. For example, you make a piece of content marketing there’s luck in whether it performs well, but that luck can be managed and the risk spread across many events by doing lots of small pieces of content marketing.
I also wrote a blog post about how a popular psychology book oriented towards poker pros (The Mental Game of Poker) can be easily reframed for entrepreneurs:
With all that said, it’s highly ironic you picked Moneymaker as your example poker pro, since he’s famous in the poker world for being a very bad amateur player who got extremely lucky at the perfect time . It’s a bit like talking about the importance of hard work and deep technology skills for founders, and using Adam Neumann and WeWork as your example of that.
> it’s highly ironic you picked Moneymaker as your example poker pro, since he’s famous in the poker world for being a very bad amateur player who got extremely lucky at the perfect time
You may be overly generous in your estimation of MY poker skills! However bad Chris is, I am sure I am not anywhere close.
The problem with this advice is that solvers are one of the best ways to understand how to "exploit the shit out of your opponents".
Piosolver has several features that lets you emulate how your opponent plays, such as "node locking", that "lock" the game tree node to the strategy you suspect your opponent plays, and shows you how to maximally exploit it.
Otherwise, what is your exploitation based on? Certainly some people have great instincts for the game, but it's just untrue that solvers can't help you exploit weaker players. For example, if you're on a given board and a given river and an opponent makes a big bet, if your opponent bluffs too much you should call, if they don't bluff enough you should fold. But the solver teaches you how often they should be bluffing and thus what "too much" or "not enough" even means.
This is why I prefer the term "theory-based" to GTO, since the point of studying GTO is not to play GTO but to develop a better understanding of the underlying mechanics of the game.
Before solvers people still implemented strategies, so I'm not sure what you mean when you ask what my exploitation is based on.
I think GTO is a great way to think about the game. I don't think studying solvers is important to understand the game well, or GTO. When solvers provide an insight, it generally trickles out to the poker community and we all hear about it. It's much easier to digest traditional educational content than to futz around with a solver, and a much better use of time for a new player.
There’s not much else to say other than you’re wrong. People tried their best before solvers, then solvers came along and people who didn’t keep up with them lost to people who did. I think it’s possible for people to win without studying them because of a combination of soft games and natural instincts, but the vast majority of good players these days do solver work. If your brand new, having an experienced player distill some of those concepts is helpful, but if you want to be good you might as well start doing the things good players do sooner rather than later.
Game selection is the most important way to make money in poker, but the stronger a player you are, the more games you can select from. Isaac Haxton is a top pro player who only plays only tournaments that cost $10k+ to buyin to, and recently discussed how this works on a recent episode of the Thinking Poker podcast by Andrew Brokos. He actually recommends against tournaments for less experienced players aiming to make money since smaller buyin tournaments have large fields and thus large variance, but the "high roller" tournaments have smaller fields which make variance more reasonable.
The bigger point is that while playing against worse players is an important skill if you want to make money, poker is still a very complex game with a high skill ceiling similar to a game like chess. If you're good enough, even pro players are "worse players" and you can "select" those games. Though admittedly even the high roller tournaments require some "recreational" businessman players for enough pros to be willing to play it for it to run.
Solver study has become essential for the vast majority of top pros, which Haxton also discusses in the podcast, and I mentioned my project in the space in my other comment.
For people actually trying to make a living playing poker, it isn’t enough just to find a game you can win; the game also has to return enough per hour to make it worth your while. Even if you can reliably win, but only $5 an hour, it isn’t worth your time. There is an opportunity cost to consider.
It’s true that playing against bad players will increase your win rate but it’s also true that if you study and improve you will also improve your win rate. It’s not true that there’s no point in studying since you should only play against bad players, because “bad player” is relative to your skill.
The podcast episode I recommended is a long time pro player interviewing another long time pro player, whose widely regarded as one of the best players ever, so I think these people know better than the HN comment section of “well 20 years ago I read one sklansky book and a year ago I played a 2/5 game and didn’t win much so poker is pointless unless you play idiots”
> The bigger point is that while playing against worse players is an important skill if you want to make money, poker is still a very complex game with a high skill ceiling similar to a game like chess.
I used to strongly agree with this (skill ceiling is so high that large edges can be found if good enough) but no longer believe this is the case - I think the edges are much narrower now in the top levels of the pro scene, much of which I'm sure is due to the rise of solvers and the game being closer to "solved" now than it was even 5 years ago.
There's a lot of complex evidence for this, but without going into too much, the degree of scumbaggery in pro scenes going on is usually a strong indicator. When edges get small, pros tend to get a little scummier to get ahead.
I'm currently full-time on a project dedicated to helping people understand how to apply solver strategy to win at live games. I generally avoid the term GTO in favor of "theory-based" since GTO usually refers to equilibrium strategy, and generally you want to study equilibrium but diverge to exploit your opponents.
You can check out my project which includes a preflop trainer at:
I also have a lot of strategy articles that explore how to use solvers to understand live cash games, and I also just started posting Youtube videos that do solver walkthroughs of high-stakes LA cash games.
I'm also doing some unique things like spaced-repetition which none of my competitors do, unfortunately very few pro poker players have heard the term so it's not a selling point to them but HN crowd tends to have heard of it.
In terms of where to start, I'd recommend where the game starts, which is preflop, and incidentally where my product starts, which is a preflop trainer that helps you study equilbrium-based preflop charts using spaced-repetition. It's currently about 90% free with only one set of charts paywalled (BB defend).
I'm actively developing both postflop content and a native mobile app, though the current app is a responsive web app that should work well on your phone.
I also have a Discord with a lot of professional live players that I've attracted via my content marketing and I'm happy to answer followup strategy questions there.
Some good books I'd recommend that are more modern:
Modern Poker Theory by Michael Acevedo
Play Optimal Poker by Andrew Brokos
Grinder's Manual by Peter Clarke (pre-solver but basically the most exhaustive guide to every concept pre-solver)
I have a similar blog / newsletter on trying to bootstrap a software business called “Road to 10k MRR” :
writing.billprin.com
I’m definitely a huge fan of mtlynch and was very inspired by his transparency especially around year 2 when he was pretty far in without much working.
I’d also recommend Jon Yongfook who bootstrapped an image generation api for social media marketing to 50k as well. Tony Dinh is also a must read. I actually have a notion database with a bunch of other bootstrapped bloggers but on the go at the moment.
For communities, Indie Hackers is the best known one, though there’s many others, Microconf, smallbets , etc
My biggest piece of advice is work backwards from where you plan to share it. If you want people to care about what you make, it needs to be built for a certain type of person, and you need a way to reach that type of person. Ideally you can repeatedly reach that audience.
Otherwise, you're going to do all this work, and then you're going to think of where to share it, and at that point you'll probably wish you had thought of this key step in advance.
Stuff built for "everyone" will rarely work because "everyone" is too broad an audience and too hard to reach.
Similarly, while Hacker News is a good place to post a project, it's very easy to get lost in the sea of /new and get zero attention, which could set yourself up for disappointment if that's your only distribution channel. It's better to have a smaller channel you have a higher probabilty of reaching -> think a small Discord, a small subreddit that's easy to get on the front page of, a small Facebook group, a small old-school forum. If you're part of any community on X/Mastodon that can work but I wouldn't stress about it if you're not, as there's many alternatives.
Hopefully, these are all communities that you want to be a part of and are active in. A lot of self-promotion can be forgiven in communities if you're otherwise an active member who contributes in many non-promotional ways.
The repeatability is important because that lets you iterate. Even if you front-page Hacker News, that's great, but you'll get a ton of traffic for a few hours but then you go an improve things and want another pass of attention, you can't really front-page again soon.
Of course, the most important thing is to stay motivated and keep pushing. I personally get motivated by other people caring about my project, paying for my project, etc and you sound similar based on your question, so that's why I'm giving you tips on accomplishing that. But many other people get motivated just because it's a really interesting challenge or it solves a huge problem in their life. Know thyself and what motivates you and pick a project you won't quit.
I will also note that you seem to want two contradicting things. You want to improve your Rust and you want to make money. For a given project, I'd focus on one goal or the other. And if you want to make money, frontend development is often important, HN condescending attitudes towards frontend notwithstanding. However, if your goal is just beer money just a popular repo might get that with Github sponsors.
Finally, you said you discard ideas because they're too simple. That is the most backwards logic you stated. You should be discarding ideas that are too complicated. Simple is great. Simple is the dream. Simple is unfortunately almost never easy. But one illuminating exercise is go back to popular Github repos and go to their very first commit and you'll see very often they started absurdly simple. As an example, DHH wrote the Rails frameworks in a couple weeks and a thousand lines of code and that became the dominant web framework for a decade. If your project gets popular , the complexity will inevitably arrive, there's no need to start looking for it from the start.
It’s good to be aware of survivor bias but the discussion around it has been overdone and leads to pointless defeatism.
The airplane example is the canonical example but also ironic because it’s an example where there was a ton to learn from survivors. Their first takeaway was logically inconsistent but eventually they realized that places without bullet holes were the most important to armor. Because planes shot in other places survived. If no planes survived they’d learn nothing but instead they learned something useful from the survivors.
It doesn’t change that a WW2 fighter pilot would need some luck to survive but if he took the right lessons from survivors and armored his plane in the correct places he’d improve his probability of surviving.
One of my favorite pieces of business advice is since 90% of businesses fail, start 10 businesses and you’ll probably succeed. Of course that oversimplifies things but so does the original statistic . It’s also useful advice that helps you re-frame “luck” as stochastic risk that you can manage. And learning ways to lower probability of failure is a great way to manage risk even if there’s always some element of randomness at play.
This is assuming uncorrelated results too. As you observe more and more of your businesses failing, you would want to update your estimate of your own rate of failure. Each new failure in a string of only failures is slight evidence that your own rate of failure may be >90%, even if it's 90% on average for everyone.
You can have nine businesses all fail for separate reasons. Learn all you want from each failure but the next business might fail in new and creative ways no matter what lessons you apply from previous failures. The 10% chance to succeed is a combination of lots of factors, many of which are completely out of your control.
I also wonder how many of the failed business in the stats already are an entrepreneurs third or fourth attempt. Some repeated attempts may already be factored into the failure rate!
I had a conversation on an airplane with a lady that read scripts for a movie studio. I learned three things. You submit a script they'll read it for purely liability reasons. Most scripts are garbage. But of the ones that aren't about 10% get bought. So if you're good you can make a living script writing.
Some other bit about being a movie producer. Guy said people ask how you can become a producer. He said it's impossible. No one will let you produce a movie unless you've done one before. But if you have even if it is terrible and flops, you're a producer and can get work.
Combine those two. If you have the want, low grade cunning, and persistence you can totally make a living starting businesses after your first disaster.
Yes I understand basic math but I would implore you to improve your reading comprehension as I used the word “probably “ (which 65% qualified as) and emphasized we can’t eliminate luck but can influence it.
Sir, this is Hacker News. Replying with snarky arithmetic is pretty much the what passes for a bon mot around here. If you don't enjoy that, you will probably (>65% chance) find HN a stressful forum.
OTOH, if you assume we're not on average dumb or trying to get a rise out of you, you'll have a good time.
If I wanted to be really snarky, I would point out that words like "probably" actually have agreed upon numerical values (give or take), and 65% would often be described as "about as likely as not". [^1] Although it's close to the "likely" range, I will grant you. :P
Your account is from 2021 so spare me the lecture on the rules of Hacker News. If you don’t want me to assume you have poor reading comprehension skills, don’t leave comments indicating that.
The risk compounds. It's like playing Russian roulette more than once. The risk for each trigger pull is the same. Yet taking that risk repeatedly means your odds of ending up dead are worse the more times you have to play.
The point of my remark is for B-17 crews, each pull is less risky, because they learned how to avoid getting shot down. For example, at the end of each mission, the crews were required to clean the guns. Some crews on the way back over the channel, would take their guns apart and clean them to save time.
One day, my dad said a Junkers was lurking near the airfield, and got behind the crews lined up for landing. Brrp! Brrp! Brrp! and down they went, without firing a shot in return. He said he never dismantled his gun before they were safely on the ground.
Crews who successfully survived 30+ missions were often rotated back to the states to train the next crews in how to survive.
I think if we were to see an X killer I’d much sooner predict Substack does it. I was sleeping on Substack a bit but it has many of the positive qualities of Twitter with many of the downsides removed:
* Notes are a short form platform but Substack itself is more long form centric. A huge problem of Twitter was excessive short form creates emphasis on snappy talking points over substance, but Substack more naturally lets you make your talking point but expound on it long form
* More creator-friendly letting you export your email list and leave the platform
* But has many the social media network strengths such as likes, retweets, recommends, etc
* Focused on strong writers as early users which lends itself more naturally to short form writing than the pictures of Instagram
* Doesn’t have the Facebook stigma that Threads has
Substack just feels like it has so many of the advantages of what Twitter offers while also being a new , unique thing. Threads feels more like Twitter, but by Zuckerberg, and the IG crowd seem less like natural writers than the journalists on Substack
I initially rolled my eyes at Substack being this big YC company around email lists, but I did admire some of their writers and since I’ve checked out their platform I’ve been extremely impressed.
It of course doesn’t have the same cultural cachet as Twitter but it also has none of the Taylor Swift deepfakes or bot armies. So a lot of headwinds. If I could bet on Threads, X, or Substack I’d wager on the Stack.
Substack has loads of real businesses 100% dependent on the platform, which is an incredible asset for the network as a whole. These are run by people that are going to fight hard to make Substack a valuable service.
This is something that Twitter never quite figured out, though Facebook has to a certain extent with Pages.
It is akin to saying doubling down on 2-hour in-depth content will help YouTube beat TikTok. The clientele isn't looking for long form articles and deeply researched nuanced content, they want a quick dopamine feed and want to move on next.
Not really, it's akin to saying Youtube Shorts will help Youtube beat TikTok, as both Youtube Shorts and Substack Notes are the short-form version of their product.
Substack has plenty of stigma [1], esp. among the type of people who left Twitter because they don't appreciate Elon's right wing extremism, including endorsement of actual Nazis [2]
“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”
― Pablo Picasso
Also, people don’t realize that startups aren’t one single event. There’s a million events and each one has its own luck. For example, you make a piece of content marketing there’s luck in whether it performs well, but that luck can be managed and the risk spread across many events by doing lots of small pieces of content marketing.
I also wrote a blog post about how a popular psychology book oriented towards poker pros (The Mental Game of Poker) can be easily reframed for entrepreneurs:
https://writing.billprin.com/p/the-mental-game-of-entreprene...
With all that said, it’s highly ironic you picked Moneymaker as your example poker pro, since he’s famous in the poker world for being a very bad amateur player who got extremely lucky at the perfect time . It’s a bit like talking about the importance of hard work and deep technology skills for founders, and using Adam Neumann and WeWork as your example of that.