hey, welcome to my website. you probably found this from my instagram or youtube so i wanted to introduce you to what this website is and who i am.

my name is dennis. i currently live in a city called toronto in the cold land of canada and have a burning passion for the game of poker. i call myself an aspiring pro poker player because that’s what i’m striving to be – a professional poker player.

many people have different definitions of a “professional” poker player, with the most common one being making a full time living from it.

for me, i define it differently. to consider myself a professional, i have set a few arbitrary goals for myself:

1. ability to synthesize and create my own exploitative strategies, and interpret my own and other’s results independently
2. understand the complete ins and out of the mechanisms of the game – including the “boring” stuff like math
3. have a positive expected value over a statistically significant sample size of hands played (this is realistically not verifiable until i get to at least 1 million hands)

before this pursuit, i went to college for health sciences, worked at morgan stanley sales and trading, and graduated from mcgill as the valedictorian (also involved in a few startup stuff):

yep.. that’s me back in 2019/2020. oh how things have changed…

anyways, back to what this website is about and why i’m so obsessed with poker.

basically, before i became the valedictorian, i used to be a failing student. and no…i don’t mean like getting a “B-” and calling it a fail. i literally mean a 0 credit received fail:

this is when i decided to “gameify” my life. i never played poker back then (maybe casually), but i became intrigued with this idea of leveling up certain aspects of my life like a computer game. simply put, i started to view certain aspects of my life like a decision tree:

with one action resulting in changes downstream.

this had pretty profound consequences for my own life because instead of blaming myself in random ways such as “i was too lazy” for the consequences of my failing grade, i could clearly see that it was a result of action “A” that lead to result “B”. and once i started to identify these cause and effect patterns, by organizing my thoughts in a very stepwise way, i drastically improved myself and my life to ultimately graduating as the valedictorian.

now you might start to see why i fell in love with the game of poker because it’s essentially the same thing.

people who aren’t familiar with poker might see it as a gambling game you play at the casino on a friday night drunk with your friends, but in reality, it’s a fierce competitive zero sum game where the edge is calculated between the players, and not the house, with a clear winner and loser that results from a sum of positive expected value decisions.

fast forward to now, as i continue to pursue this painful path of professional poker, i decided to start an instagram/youtube documenting and sharing what i learned from this game.

my big “‘blow up” video was one on situationships and relationships i posted on instagram where i related poker concepts to human relationships.

to be honest, i have mixed feelings about that video. on the surface, it was a fun video i made on a whim because i could see clear parallels between love and poker, but at the same time, human relationships are not supposed to be calculative. it’s supposed to be an emotional experience of bonding, love and trust.

i came very close to deleting those videos, but i decided to leave it up because many people have told me it helped cope with their painful relationship experiences.

and i got many… many.. and many more messages from fans talking about how my videos have helped, so despite some personal lashback, i decided to continue… and ultimately develop this website.

this website is designed to be a completely free resource where people who want to use game theory and poker concepts to optimize their life can come to read and learn. i am by no means an expert or a PhD in game theory or human behavior, and am currently a student in the subject myself learning as i go.

i am not selling anything.

i am not offering any paid courses.

this website is designed to be completely free where i just spill my thoughts and perspective on life, poker and game theory.

and it’s also a place where we can connect – i too am an imperfect human being trying to navigate this chaotic life a little bit better.

thanks for reading so far, and i want to leave you with this favorite graph of mine and the logo for the website:

it’s a graph showing a polarized range (all credits go to GTOWizard).

if there’s any philosophy i live by is that in life, don’t be a bluff catcher – be polarized.