MY POKER COACHING PHILOSOPHY
MY BACKGROUND
A passion for poker, and for teaching
My poker journey began back in my homeland of the UK in 2009, when I got involved in a regular home game during the final year of my undergraduate degree in French at the University of Southampton. I fell in love with the game pretty quickly, but by the time I had decided to stay on for another year and do a Master’s degree in Transnational Studies, most of the other regulars in our home game had already graduated and moved away.
At that point, I began getting my poker fix by playing online; by the end of 2011, I was already playing low-stakes tournaments for an online backing stable, and decided to take the leap into playing professionally. After my first couple of years grinding online MTTs, I submitted an application video to become a coach for TournamentPokerEdge.com, and was accepted; my journey into the coaching world could begin.
Having previously done some teaching work outside of poker, I found my skill set was well-suited to coaching. I also wrote strategy articles for PocketFives Training between 2015 and 2017, and joined the coaching roster at Solve For Why in 2017. I also worked with the PokerDetox online stable between 2018 and 2020, and have been a coach at GTO Wizard since early 2023. Currently, my coaching time outside of one-to-one sessions is split between my work with Solve For Why and my work with GTO Wizard.
Here’s my coaching career by the numbers: More than 4,000 hours of one-to-one coaching Over 250 individual students75+ days of in-person training seminars50+ hours of online webinars500+ hours of video training contentMore than 200,000 words of training articles50+ hours of podcasts
As a player, I racked up more than $2.5million in online cashes across various sites prior to moving from the UK to Las Vegas in 2017. Since moving to the US, I’ve accumulated more than $750,000 in live cashes, plus another $500,000 in online cashes. A few career highlights include:
15x live tournament final tables4x World Series of Poker final tables (2x live, 2x online)2nd place in WSOP Event #45 in 2018 for $159,53225th place in PokerStars $25k Players Championship in 2023 for $107,5008th place in $1,100 WPT Prime in 2022 for $91,5002nd place in WSOP Online Event #29 in 2021 for $63,112
Outside of poker, I enjoy a quiet life by traditional Vegas standards, living with my wife of eight years, and our two cats. I’m a lifelong videogamer and a sports fan, while I’m also passionate about mental health advocacy, having suffered from anxiety and depression, and having been diagnosed with both Autism Spectrum Disorder and ADHD in 2023.
At that point, I began getting my poker fix by playing online; by the end of 2011, I was already playing low-stakes tournaments for an online backing stable, and decided to take the leap into playing professionally. After my first couple of years grinding online MTTs, I submitted an application video to become a coach for TournamentPokerEdge.com, and was accepted; my journey into the coaching world could begin.
Having previously done some teaching work outside of poker, I found my skill set was well-suited to coaching. I also wrote strategy articles for PocketFives Training between 2015 and 2017, and joined the coaching roster at Solve For Why in 2017. I also worked with the PokerDetox online stable between 2018 and 2020, and have been a coach at GTO Wizard since early 2023. Currently, my coaching time outside of one-to-one sessions is split between my work with Solve For Why and my work with GTO Wizard.
Here’s my coaching career by the numbers: More than 4,000 hours of one-to-one coaching Over 250 individual students75+ days of in-person training seminars50+ hours of online webinars500+ hours of video training contentMore than 200,000 words of training articles50+ hours of podcasts
As a player, I racked up more than $2.5million in online cashes across various sites prior to moving from the UK to Las Vegas in 2017. Since moving to the US, I’ve accumulated more than $750,000 in live cashes, plus another $500,000 in online cashes. A few career highlights include:
15x live tournament final tables4x World Series of Poker final tables (2x live, 2x online)2nd place in WSOP Event #45 in 2018 for $159,53225th place in PokerStars $25k Players Championship in 2023 for $107,5008th place in $1,100 WPT Prime in 2022 for $91,5002nd place in WSOP Online Event #29 in 2021 for $63,112
Outside of poker, I enjoy a quiet life by traditional Vegas standards, living with my wife of eight years, and our two cats. I’m a lifelong videogamer and a sports fan, while I’m also passionate about mental health advocacy, having suffered from anxiety and depression, and having been diagnosed with both Autism Spectrum Disorder and ADHD in 2023.
Creating a pathway to success for each individual player
MY APPROACH TO POKER
A math game with a layer of psychology
As a coach, I think it’s important that I can convey to people how I see the game of poker as a whole, after having spent so many hours of my life playing, analyzing and teaching it. It could probably best be summed up as ‘a mathematical game with a layer of psychology on top of it’. The reason I phrase it this way is because whichever way you play it, whether it be live or online, the building blocks of the game are mathematical in nature - the card values, hand rankings, chip denominations, betting structure, and virtually every other element of the game is mathematical at its core.
People run into trouble when they try to treat the game the other way around, as if it’s a psychological game with an element of math, because it’s not the psychology that dictates who wins; the math is what determines who makes money. It doesn’t matter how well you know your opponent, if they have a royal flush, you can’t win - there’s a mathematical threshold that limits your ability to leverage your superior understanding of psychology.
However, the inverse isn’t true - there’s no psychological threshold that limits your ability to leverage your superior understanding of the math. The math helps you to understand where the guardrails are, so that you can use psychology to innovate - not the other way around. Even if you start with the psychology, you end up having to use math anyway to determine whether your psychological insights are actually going to make you any money.
MY APPROACH TO COACHING
Knowledge acquisition vs building skill sets
The poker learning process features two primary aspects:
1. Transmission/absorption of knowledge (coaching)
2. Development of skill sets (training)
Many players fall down because they don’t recognize the difference between the two. When you’re watching a strategy video or railing your favorite high-roller regular at a big live-streamed final table, you’re taking in a certain amount of information, but you’re doing it passively; you’re not building a skill set. Nothing that you’re doing is going to actually help you get better at the implementation of new ideas.
Conversely, when you’re running drills on a GTO Trainer or analyzing hand histories, you’re building the skill set of executing your existing strategies or evaluating your performance of those strategies, but you’re not necessarily taking in any new information which might help you to actually build better strategies in the future.
Any coaching arrangement worth its salt should feature both these elements, but the extent to which we might prioritize one over the other, depends entirely on the student’s current level of study and implementation. Someone who is fairly new to the game and hasn’t done a lot of studying with solvers or drilling specific scenarios might need to focus more on building their knowledge base, so that they can fill in the gaps where they’re currently lacking; a more experienced player, on the other hand, might need to focus more on fleshing out a more complete skill set for adapting to their environment in certain circumstances, or executing highly-complex strategies in a more precise way in-game.
Knowing which of these things you need to focus on is the job of a coach, and any coach who’s doing their due diligence about your game should be able to identify and diagnose your needs fairly rapidly. If you work with me, you’ll be getting a coach who understands how to meet you where you’re at, rather than prescribing a set of drills or tutorials that might not actually give you what you need at the current time.
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM COACHING
A challenging but rewarding experience
Getting better at poker is hard - that's undeniable. It's a game whose nature runs contrary to most of our instincts as human beings. Any learning process with this degree of complexity is guaranteed to be difficult, but with me as your guide, you'll have more clarity in how to navigate the individual challenges as they come up.
My goal is to give you the tools you need to continue building the right skill sets for your games, long after our coaching relationship is ended. The game of poker is constantly changing and evolving, particularly as new technology emerges which allows us to explore the game in new ways, and through coaching, you can stay at the cutting edge.