A Crusher of Flesh and Bones: Biluzin

Pedro Assis Vasco de Toledo.

That's the name of the best online cash game player in the world. Pedro won the Coin Poker Cash Game World Championship in December 2025 by crushing a pool of nosebleed regulars at 10KNL and amassing a ridiculous $369,225.80 profit (EV-adjusted) in 37,754 hands, giving him a winrate in the sample of 9.78 bb/100. A result to be remembered.

*Graph missing a few hands

If that wasn't impressive enough, Pedro's 2025 total winnings for the year surpassed $900,000, while playing most of his volume in the rake heavy 2KNL games on GG Poker. Almost a million dollars in a single year, battling the best in the world and the highest rake in the world.

All of this sounds insane and crazy, and to be honest it is, but these figures usually come with a negative effect of transforming the people who achieve them into these untouchable entities that barely resemble an actual human. When you combine that with the usual anonymity of online high stakes players, it creates an environment where the crushers that the lowstakes players have to look up to are not really reachable. It doesn't feel possible to get where they are, because we know nothing about them, and they don't look like us.

But it's not like that at all with Pedro. He is made of flesh and bones like all of us, and his story is worth knowing.

Pedro receiving the 2025 Player of The Year Award in the Yearly Metagame Gathering

THE RISE OF A LEGEND

Pedro started playing poker like most of us: a friend introduced him to the game, and all of a sudden he got hooked. Started playing home games, some live freerolls and cash games, and eventually the micro stakes online.

In 2020, only 6 years ago, Pedro was playing NL2 online. A microstakes semi-fish with a passion for the game.

In that same year, he found a free course on the internet called 'Charada Poker', taught by my partner Max Lacerda (the first on the left in the picture above). Max was using that course as a lead magnet to open some accounts as an affiliate, and Pedro was one of those leads.

To this day, Pedro credits Max's course with helping him become a profitable player. He was actually struggling at micro stakes in the beginning, and after watching Max's course, he immediately became a winning player at the micros.

From that quickly found success, it didn't take long for him to make an obvious decision, once he was taking poker seriously: he joined Metagame in 2021.

Inside the team, Pedro had a meteoric rise: Here are his winnings year after year with us:

2021: $60,036.90
2022: $110,257.55
2023: $74,650.80
2024: $194,817.75
2025: $903,599.66

These numbers are absolutely insane for someone that was clicking buttons at 2NL in 2020. This is not normal. This is certainly not ordinary.

Looking at what Pedro was able to achieve, and at everything I taught him during the years I coached him personally (2022-2024), it's very clear to me that he has a natural talent for poker. Since the very beginning with us in the team, he crushed every single limit, from micros to high stakes. At the monthly closings, when players share their results and graphs, Pedro's was always the sickest one.

But what does 'natural talent' mean for poker? What does that look like in practice?

In Pedro's case, it means an innate capacity to be fearless. His psychology is the absolute nuts for poker: instead of feeling pressure and anxiety, he thrives in the adrenaline of the game. That's how he managed to crush the 10KNL World Championship despite never having played that limit for a substantial number of hands before that. Battling the best players in the world at high stakes wasn't something to sweat over for him, it was something to enjoy.

This doesn't get talked about enough in the environment of serious poker players. Everyone talks about the technical skills, and the ability to pull up plays that a solver would, and the capacity to exploit opponents' leaks. But very few people talk about how humans interact with the game psychologically. Being a stable owner who has staked almost 500 different people in my lifetime, I can say with confidence that a person's risk aversion profile (which has nothing to do with poker, it's a personality trait that gets expressed through poker) makes a huge difference to the player's success.

Pedro was always someone who did not fear making a mistake. He did not fear making a huge bluff and getting called. He did not fear making a big calldown and losing his entire stack. He did not fear playing in an unusual way and getting judged by his peers.

He also always dealt extremely well with downswings. Unlike the vast majority of players, he seemed absolutely unaffected by terrible short term results. As a stable owner, my business is intrinsically financial and, much like a bank, one of the most important skills in my business is knowing who to give credit to, and how much. "How much of my money can I give to this guy to play poker before I risk this money never coming back to me?" That's a primary question my partners and I have to ask ourselves when staking someone professionally. There is a limit to how much staking you can do before the make-up (the accumulated losses of a player, which he owes the stable) gets too big and unrecoverable.

This was never an issue with Pedro. We knew he was super strong technically, but most importantly mentally. Maybe strong is not even the word for it, because again it seems like he deals with the game and the monetary swings in a different way than most people. He doesn't seem to feel the money pressure like most 'normal' humans do.

I've written this a few times before, and this is a very good occasion to repeat it: you'll be a completely different player once winning or losing at the tables makes no difference to you. If you ever get there, you'll remember my words. The experience of playing poker is completely different when you're not at all attached to the monetary outcome of your actions; when all you care about is making the best play and crushing your opponents. If you get to a level where you lose a ton during your workday, and your wife/girlfriend/partner cannot tell that you lost by looking at your face, then you'll know you got there. And when you get there, you are able to unlock your full potential.

During his interview at the Mechanics of Poker podcast, Pedro credits a significant shift in his career to some advice I gave him in 2024. When asked about what his style of play was, he explains how he tried everything throughout his career: focusing on GTO, focusing on MDA, mixing both; he tried everything. But then, there was a coaching session in which I told him something that I like to say to all my naturally talented students, and that transformed his career:

"Trust your intuition."

This advice requires depth of analysis to be fully internalized.

Pedro was someone that would come to the coaching sessions with several hands to analyze; hands that he played in a certain way, from what he had learned from MDA or from a theory heuristic. But lots of those decisions were made despite his gut feeling. His gut feeling wanted to do something else, but he would override that gut feeling with some rule or heuristic he had learned in his own studies, or during coaching sessions.

There is nothing wrong with executing heuristics at the tables. In fact, I believe that for the vast majority of players, having a super robust and extensive gameplan is the best thing you can do to ensure high quality decisions and a good winrate at the tables. But, while having a plan is awesome, as it prevents you from making a lot of mistakes and it makes achieving high quality decisions an easy process, having a robust plan also tends to kill creativity. A 'big and important plan' makes improvising and acting upon unconscious perceptions very, very difficult. "Well, I did all this plan and I studied all these rules. I'm going to get to the tables and ignore them when it's time to use them? That makes no sense" - your brain, at the tables, the moment you think about improvising.

Our brains hate being incoherent, so if you studied your gameplan in depth, and prepared off the tables for the scenarios you'd face, then convincing that same brain that you should let the plan go for something else you figured out on the fly becomes almost an impossible task.

The excessive study of theory heuristics and data exploits will imprison your execution within those boxes. Stepping outside those boxes becomes unthinkable, and that's exactly what kills creativity. If your play is not backed up by theory, or not a direct consequence of a population exploit, then it's invalid and you should drop it.

Now, how big of a problem is that? Who exactly should listen to their intuition? This is the most important question.

I gave that advice to Pedro because I knew that his intuition was extremely sharp. He understood the game from a fundamental point of view, and he intuitively understood the effectiveness of certain plays. I was able to give him that advice because I knew he was ready to step outside the box.

If your intuition is sharp enough, you'll know it. If you're an intuitive type of player, who can often times just know the correct play, you probably already make it a central part of your game. If you don't yet, maybe all you need is a little push from someone you trust. So here it is: trust your intuition.

There is no amount of theory heuristics or data-derived exploits that can get to the level of effectiveness of intuition-based play. Theory heuristics are generated from optimal play where both players are balanced, and humans obviously are not. Data-derived exploits are formed mostly through the study of the average behaviour of your opponents at the tables. It turns out that there is a lot of variance in opponent behaviour. While the average behaviour can be X, lots of your opponents might do Y at the tables. Following theory or MDA exploits would not give you the best results in those cases.

Ok, cool, so you should trust your intuition. I can hear you immediately asking next: "But what does that look like? How do I do it?"

It's important to understand that your gut feeling, whatever it may be, is the product of accumulated unconscious knowledge. These are patterns of play, patterns of reads that you have internalized, but can't yet explain or rationalize over. Yet, they are there. They represent real knowledge about the game and your opponents.

And here is where we tie it all back to Pedro's incredible performance: his sharp intuition is a direct consequence of the product: fearlessness x volume.

This is probably some of the best advice I can give you as a poker coach, so write it down: you won't be able to improve your intuition if you just play like a scared little b**ch.

The only way to improve your intuition is by acting upon it multiple times, over and over again, so that your brain can pick up on the patterns. "I felt this, played like that, and then this happened". "My opponent did this, I strongly felt that, I reacted like this, and then this happened".

If you don't act upon your intuition, there is no feedback loop for it to learn from the mistakes and improve itself. The hilarious paradox of poker is that your intuition cannot get good until you decide to trust it while it's still bad. You have to allow yourself to make mistakes to improve it. You need to listen to the intrusive thoughts.

"Shove it!! Shove it!! Shove it in his face, now! He is weak, I know it. Sure, we rep nothing here, but he won't call. Trust me on this!!" - your unconscious mind, last Friday night.

Trusting your intuition requires fearlessness. It's not comfortable to trust your intuition - precisely because you can't explain it. You can't explain why you feel like playing that certain way should be the best play. Committing to that seemingly unjustified action is something that only someone not bound by fear can do. Only someone who believes in themselves can do it.

And then comes the last part of the equation: volume.

Pedro has always been completely addicted to poker. Not even an overstatement. He lives and breathes poker every single day. He is a self-employed poker player, and yet he wakes up at 6AM to play cards on his computer. When he wants to chill, he loads up a poker video on YouTube. He plays for 8, 9 hours a day - and then wants more of it the next day.

This has made Pedro always rank up in the top positions for volume inside Metagame. He has always played a lot more hands/month than all of his peers, and this also contributed greatly to his sharp intuition. If you are fearless enough to listen to your inner voice (and all the intrusive thoughts), and you do that substantially more often than everyone else, then the consequence cannot be any other than you becoming much better than everyone else. The math is really, really simple: he has trusted himself more than everyone else, he has made more mistakes than everyone else, and he has learned from his mistakes more than everyone else - consciously and unconsciously.

If you want to get as good as Pedro, you'll probably struggle to get there, because a lot of his success can only be attributed to his own natural talent. I'd love to say that anyone can become a Pedro Toledo, because that would mean I would be able to fabricate a world champion every year, which would make me print money hard in my business. But the truth is that I can't - through 7 years of business and 500 players staked, he has been by far the most successful student, and I'd be delusional to attribute that outlier success to my own merits.

But that doesn't mean you can't imitate what makes him so good. He lives and breathes poker every day - you can do that too. He is fearless and ready to gamble on a feeling - you can do that too, with a lot of training. He plays thousands of hours of poker a year, every year - you can do that too, if you love the game.

Now, if you really want to crush and follow in Pedro's footsteps, how about learning from him directly? Since early 2026, Pedro has been an official coach for Metagame. Inside the team, he helps low and midstakes players improve their games and get closer to him at the top of the mountain. If you take poker seriously and want to be taught by one of the best players in the world, apply here. We're waiting for you.

Thank you for reading, my friend! See you next time.

Saulo