Week in Review #21 August 10th- August 16th

What does "winning" money at poker really mean?

I was listening to an episode of the podcast The Gist where host Mike Pesca was interviewing Sam Parker, the author of the book Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives (link to the podcast episode here). In the interview, Parker discussed how if someone angers you at work, you would be better off using that anger as fuel to do good work yourself than angrily ranting to a co-worker for two hours. Well, now that some part of my job is getting angry and writing about it, I have decided to take Mike Goodman’s advice from when I went on the Double Pivot Podcast. If something on social media makes me angry, I will try to write about it here instead of posting about it. This week, there were at least two discussions on social media that angered me quite a bit. Next week, I’ll write about why I’m tired of seeing the poker industry clamoring for our Drive to Survive, Full Swing, or Queen’s Gambit. This week in POTD #102, I referenced the classic question, “but how much did you lose?” and today’s Week in Review I will be discussing the question du jour on social media “but, how much did you win?”

This kerfuffle all started when Jonathan Little made an engagement-bait viral thread¹ about how poker is like trading. The first sentence in that thread is “I’ve won over $10 million playing poker.” Many people, including JoeySal, Len Ashby, and Aaron Barone² took umbrage with Jonathan using the term “won” when he is referring to gross, not net cashes, and guess what, I think almost all parties involved made arguments that range from being intentionally misleading to just plain wrong.

I’ve known Jonathan for almost 20 years, and he is not stupid. He wanted engagement from a non-poker audience and knows how most people will interpret the phrase “I’ve won over $10 million playing poker.” I am not immune to this instinct myself— my “About Page” on Substack begins “Hi, my name is Sam Greenwood. I’ve played millions of hands of poker and cashed for millions of dollars in tournaments.” My name is linked to my Hendon Mob page and I’ve written that “I’ve cashed for nearly 40 million dollars” and mentioned that I am top 20³ on the all-time money list. I’ve thought about how to present this information, and while I recognize that some people might misinterpret “I’ve cashed for nearly $40 million dollars” to mean I have profited that much money, I have carefully chosen my words to try to not mislead people. Saying “I’ve won over $10 million” is misleading, which Jonathan himself admits and he calls "ethical attention stealing." Without getting too far up on my high horse, it is my belief that actively misleading your audience is ipso facto unethical and not something I will do at POTD.

Jonathan defended himself in this thread, arguing that it is industry standard to refer to gross cashes and he isn’t counting buy-ins or expenses. Mentioning expenses is a small part of his post, but it’s also willfully obtuse. Of course the only expense people care to count here is the tournament buyins. If I play a $1k and cash for $50k and celebrate by buying and drinking four bottles of Old Rip Van Winkle’s Family Selection, I did not “win” less than someone who mincashed. The thing people care about counting is buyins; they want to see if you are a net winner or loser in your overall poker play.

Which brings me to the critiques of Jon from people who wish that Hendon Mob and all other public databases tracked profits and losses. If you were to track profits and losses, the top 20 would be players who had huge scores in $1,000,000 tournaments and players who had won the WSOPME. The current top 10 can almost all be identified by just one of their names-- Bryn, Chidwick, Koon, Bonomo, Mikita, Dan Smith⁴, Negreanu, Haxton, Mateos, and Ivey. These are not the 10 of the biggest net winners in the history of tournament poker, but they’re all clearly well in the black.

This criticism is especially rich coming from people who primarily play live cash-- like Len, JoeySal and Matt Berkey-- where there is no tracking and there is zero accountability when it comes to reporting profits and losses. Live cash is also one of the more predatory forms of poker, where some pros try to bogart VIPs for their own private games and where most high stakes public games are to some degree semi-private. Tournaments have their problems, but they are open to all. Poker runs on losing players, and broadcasting exactly how much they lose is bad for business. If live cash players want to complain about threads like Jonathan’s being misleading, so be it. If their argument is that Hendon Mob should start reflecting profits and losses, why don’t they start a website that tracks the results of everyone playing $25/$50 at the Bellagio?

There might not be a lot of pros playing a $100k who have 100% of themselves, but all the money in the tournament is “real.” The VIPs have paid their whole buy-in, and action buyers and players have put up money for their own investments. In the business world, it is very common to get a loan or to sell equity when you do not have enough cash or enough liquid cash to enter a deal, so why should the gambling world be any different?

I was fortunate enough to get invited to The Triton Million GBP tournament in 2019. As part of my deal, I needed to sell a large portion of myself to the people who brokered the deal, and I also swapped with other players in the tournament. After all was said and done, I ended up profiting around £50k in the tournament. A P&L statement would say I lost £1,050,000. Should The Hendon Mob adjust my lifetime P&L to reflect how I dispersed my action? Should people who bought my action lose money on their Hendon Mob? Or should there be money in the prize pool that gets paid out to no one? If THM did track all that information, there is still so much variance in tournament poker that there will be no metric that accurately quantifies who is “the best”. It’s disingenuous to claim that The Hendon Mob results are fake, but only in one direction.

If Hendon Mob tracked P&L’s, the most successful high-roller poker player of all time is likely Antonio Esfandiari. After Antonio won One Drop, he was interviewed on Howard Stern and Howard tried his best to get Antonio to answer the question “But how much did you win?” and Antonio evaded Howard’s badgering, replying “it’s personal.” Which is his right; disclosing your finances should not be a prerequisite for playing a poker tournament. All-time money lists, like POY awards, reward high volume players who also put up lots of results; this has been the case for decades, and proudly declaring that these lists have biases in 2025 is not an “emperor has no clothes” moment.

There is a small, but clear, semantic difference between saying “I have won $x” and “My winnings are $x” and “I have cashed for $x,” and Jonathan Little’s critics were right to note that. I think every other suggestion they had to fix this problem is unnecessary and certainly not something they would like in their own games. When people like Len write things like “And if you accounted for what percentage they play on after being staked and their makeup it would blow peoples minds I think,” when he himself knows nothing about the finances of people playing tournament poker or the action-selling markets, they should mind their own business.

Housekeeping

Do you like my writing about poker, my HH analysis and would like to read more of it? If so please consider becoming a paid or unpaid subscriber to POTD. I currently have ~230 paying subscribers and ~1400 unpaid subscribers, but a normal post of mine is viewed over 1000 times and my email open rate is pretty consistently in the mid to low 40% range. If you are one of the 400-500 people who read POTD almost everyday, but are not a paid subscriber I am intersted in hearing from you. Comments on this post will be available to the public and my DMs are open on Substack, Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky. Let me know what’s stopping you from taking the leap of paying for a subscription. I will select a few people who reached out to me and upgrade them to paid for free.

Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers

Premium subscribers get the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries, videos of me walking through the sims, and a text summary of how I ran the sims. This week I uploaded:

• PIO ICM sims of my hand vs Vladimir Korzinin from POTD #101

• PIO sims of my hand vs Limitless in POTD #102

• Two Rocket Solver sims covering the three way pot I wrote about in POTD #103

• Two strategy locked PIO sims I ran for POTD #104

• Three HRC sim and one PIO ICM sim covering all the odds and ends in POTD #105

Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers

Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today I’ll share #onemorething for POTD #102 where I write about why I don’t think straddles are a good way to increase action,

POTD #102 #⁠onemorething

This hand did not have that many moving parts to it, so I will use the #⁠onemorething to talk about something alluded to in the introduction: Why straddles are stupid. The idea of a straddle is they will generate loose action and allow more people to see flops because there is more dead money in the pot. There are a couple problems with this, one there is not that much extra money in the pot. Let’s say you’re playing (500/1k/2k) with a 2k ante. Compared to (1k/2k/2k) there is an additional $500 dollars in the pot. Compared to (500/1k/1k) there is a lot more money in the pot, but then you should just play (1k/2k/2k).

Compared to (1k/2k/2k) you have increased the pot size by 10% and in the process created a position, the SB who is OOP vs two players and must play tight and aggressively, which means one player has to play fewer hands, while the rest of the table plays around the same number of hands. Since the SB also plays more aggressively that means more three betting, which hurts the goal of letting more people see flops. Finally, and this is more exploitative, people in straddle games tend to open to a larger preflop size for whatever reason, giving everyone worse pot odds and in theory making less people see the flop. Straddles are a good way to trick VIPs into thinking they should be playing looser when they shouldn’t be, but beyond that it’s not a good mechanism to encourage loose play or to have lots of people see flops. If you want to encourage looser preflop play it’s simple, you just increase the size of the ante. Then you will actually start seeing stuff like open limping and VPIPing 50% of hands won’t be so costly.

Media

No media appearances this week, but I will recommend two Toronto-centric things I consumed this week. Burdock Brewery’s Hard Pickle Seltzer and the hand made perciatelli (aka bucatini) from Famiglia Baldassarre. Have a good weekend and as always I can be reached on

Substack
Instagram
Twitter
Bluesky

1. To his credit, it worked. Jonathan is very good at social media and branding, and this thread has 200 RTs and 1.6k likes, which are numbers that I don’t come close to approaching when I post my version of engagement bait (calling Phil Hellmuth a clow

2. Kudos to Aaron for being so forthright in his posting

3. But no longer am

4. Sorry Dan, your name is too plain for you to be identified by just one name.