How To Make 2024 Your Best Poker Year

Hello! Happy new year! 2024 is up already, and I’m here to wish you lots of success in all your endeavours for 2024 – health goals, relationships, and of course, poker. 

But more than that, I want you to count on me with helping you make this year the best year of your poker career.

I don’t know how 2023 went for you. Perhaps it was a good year, perhaps it was a mediocre year; and perhaps it was plain bad.

But how do we actually know whether it was good or not? How do we judge what happened throughout the last 12 months and then assign a unique label of “good” or “bad”?

Well, typically in poker, we measure how good a year was based simply on the accumulated winnings. If you made substantially more money than the year before, then it’s a great year. If you made close to the same amount, it’s an okay year. Then if you made less, it’s not even just bad – it kinda feels like you’ve lost somehow. 

The winnings measure is certainly important. After all, most people decide to pursue poker as a profession, at least partially, due to it’s attractive monetary figures. I remember when I was in college in 2015, studying computer engineering at the most prestigious university in my country, when I found out that a recently graduated engineer in my field could expect to make around $18k/year as a software developer in Brazil. 

I was like “lol that’s bullshit”. I was a 10nl regfish playing 20% VPIP at that time, but I absolutely knew I could make much more, much faster, with poker. So I quit university on November of that year, and started 2016, which would be my last year in Uni, playing 10nl for a living. Fast forward 2 years later, in 2018, which would’ve been my second year as a graduated engineer – I made around $70k as a full time poker player and coach. Not bad. The next year, 2019, I made over $120k.

Wanna know which was my best year in Poker, ever? I can tell you. 

It wasn’t 2023. It also wasn’t 2022. 2020 and 2021 were amazing for me financially, but those also weren’t my best years in poker. 

My best year in poker was 2017. Here is my graph for that year:

A solid $7628.57 year in winnings. $635.71 per month. $4.62 per hour. Very ironically, in my second year as a full time poker player, I made more than 2 times less money than I would have made had I decided to graduate from University.

The reason why this was my best year in poker has nothing to do with how much money I made in that 12 month interval. It has to do with something much more important than money – in fact, what I acquired the most in that year is exactly what allowed me to make several hundred thousand dollars in the following years as poker player, and over 7 figures as a poker entrepreneur and content creator.

Knowledge.

It was the knowledge I accumulated that year, through hundreds of studying hours and hundreds of dollars spent in research, that I was able to build and achieve everything else in my career. It was in the 400k hands breakeven stretch you can see in the graph above, from 600k to 1M hands, that I developed the strategy framework which allowed me to move up in stakes super fast from that point forward, and it’s what allowed me to build a staking business that profited millions of dollars in the last few years. I learned so much so quickly, that I was able to almost 10x my income from 2017 to 2018. 

Knowledge.

I thank my father for teaching me the importance of studying and the beauty of knowledge. I carry with me a phrase he told me probably several hundred times throughout my childhood, and it’s something I will absolutely teach my (as of now :D) 3 children:

If you truly want to make 2024 the best year of your poker career, then you only need one goal: to end the year with much more knowledge than you started. 

For some reason that I particularly don’t understand, most poker players actually don’t prioritize the acquisition of knowledge in their careers.

Maybe people view poker as an easy activity that doesn’t require that much effort to find success. Maybe people perceive simply grinding a lot as an effective means of progressing and developing their poker skills (it isn’t). Maybe they struggle with studying and as soon as it gets hard, they quit.

I don’t know whether you fall in any of the scenarios above, but my advice to you in this first post of 2024 is: don’t make those mistakes. Invest in the one thing that will bring you fruits literally for the rest of your life. No one can ever take it away from you. And it will make you more money than doing anything else. 

Next time you have a coaching session with your coach, don’t just wait for him to give you answers. Bring him doubts about something you’ve been working on. Next time you buy a poker course, don’t just watch the videos passively as if you were watching a movie on Netflix. Do some work on the topic of the video before watching it, and contrast what you came up with with what’s been given to you. Next time you review a poker hand, don’t just go straight to the solver solution. Think through the ranges yourself and come up with a solid strategy – and only then check it against the simulation.

Prioritize your studies. Study for 2 hours a day, every single working day, without failure. Ask yourself the reasons for everything. Make your own hypothesis about the why’s for those things. Then test them. At the tables, trust your intuition; but then off the tables contrast your intuition with reality. Search, research and study the facts, don’t just take the word and the qualitative conjectures of someone else as truths just because they make more money than you. Question everything. Then employ energy, time and money in the quest for the answers. 

That’s how you get good at poker. And after you get good, money is just a natural consequence. 

My wish for 2024 is that you can end the year as a much better poker player than you started. I’ll do my best to help you with that goal.

I In the theme of making 2024 your best poker year, I separated this video from my channel that I think can really help in that regard. Take a look:

Move Up In Stakes FASTER Using These 3 Tips

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See you next week. Until then – keep it simple.

Saulo