Week In Review #59 May 17th-23rd 2026
I talk about private coaching
I regularly mention on POTD that I do private coaching, and whenever I receive an inquiry regarding private coaching, I usually write up some version of the same message. So because I am efficient and smart, it has taken me more than one year to realize I should write a long post about my private coaching, what it entails, and why I feel like I’d be a good coach for any reader of this blog, so that I have something to link to when I receive coaching inquiries in the future.
Let’s start with the price. I charge $600 an hour or sell 5 hour blocks for $2500. If you are interested, I’m happy to arrange an introductory phone call with any prospective student. Every private coaching student also gets a free Lifetime Premium Subscription to POTD, where they get access to Premium Posts that have additional written analysis, and a daily 5-10 minute video of me going through sims I ran for the hands. They also get access to the raw files of the sims that I’ve run.
If you’d like to see a sample of some premium posts, you can look at the reruns I ran over the holidays last year. #56, #70, #103, #105, #149, #158, #184.
I think my coaching is very good value; I am priced cheaper than many of my SHR peers, and I put in a lot of extra work that is unpaid. I am a capable and qualified coach for players of all skill levels; however, if someone is a total beginner, there are probably better value coaches for them. Poker is about making money, and if you’re a novice poker player, you’d get more bang for your buck buying cheaper resources and coming back to me when you are more experienced. If you are not budget-conscious and just want the best coach available, I still think I am your man.
I always like to begin coaching new students by reviewing their play, ideally by looking at recorded online sessions or hand histories. The reason for this is before I set out on determining the best way to coach a student, I need to get a sense of who they are as a poker player. Every poker player’s play style, even studied solver “robots,” has its own unique qualities, and I need to get a sense of someone’s play style before figuring out the best way to coach them. I’ve written before about the idea of “poker gravity,” the idea that there are some players who naturally gravitate towards a certain style of play no matter the game they’re playing. If Michael Addamo played with Doyle Brunson in the 50s, he’d be bluffing a lot; if Allen Kessler did, he would be folding a lot. I am not looking to change my student’s inherent poker instincts, but I am looking to lessen the gravitational pull and force them to add plays that might be unnatural to them but will make their game more well-rounded.
When I coach I like to focus on increasing my student’s technical poker knowledge base. “You should rarely c-bet on this board.” “You don’t play flat calls here preflop.” “Your min value bet here is a set.” Information that will improve their game. However, I also think it’s important to marry those concepts with what I know about their play style and personality. If someone keeps flatting three-bets with potential four-bet bluff candidates, we can dive into why they’re not four-bet bluffing enough. If some takes every check-raise spot, we can figure out if it’s their natural poker gravity, a conscious exploit, or if they had an extra cup of coffee that morning. During our coaching sessions, I want to impart as much knowledge about the game of poker as possible, but I also want you to learn about yourself and how you’re playing so we can set you up to execute in an actual game.
I also believe coaching is a long term project and do not subscribe to a “billable hours” model of coaching. If a session goes 10 minutes long, I am not charging you an extra $50; if you have any questions you want to ask me after a session, I am not timing how long it takes me to craft a response. If you are not actively a student of mine, I hope you will be one in the future and still want to do what I can do to help you improve. I mean this as no disrespect to Kevin Rabichow, who I like and respect a lot, and I am sure his coaching is good value, but when he advertised his WSOP Mentorship Package, he promoted that people can send him hand histories on Discord throughout the WSOP and he will respond in 24 hours. That is something I do for free for all my students, even if they are not actively paying for coaching. I tell every student the same thing: “No one has ever sent me so many hands that I’ve felt the need to tell them to stop. Asking me poker questions does not bother me. I’m happy to answer them.” Commenters on POTD and members of the POTD Discord know this to be true of me.
Selling myself does not come naturally, and when I look around the poker coaching and content spaces, I see a lot of oversimplifications, false promises and strawmen. There is no easy solution to getting good at poker; it requires playing a lot and working a lot. I see a lot of poker content from people who have a mediocre understanding of solver poker explaining why the solver is wrong and their exploitative style is the best. No one is arguing that you play perfect solver poker vs. the whale in your local $2/$5 game, but people sure love to contradict a hypothetical person who might say that. Most of the exploitative lessons trickling through the poker world right now could apply to the games I started playing in in 2006. Players are too tight, so you should bet a lot and over-fold when they play back at you. I cannot promise that a student of mine will make millions, but I can promise to give answers that are more complex than “c-bet a lot” or “when a fish bets big he has a good hand.” I don’t like selling myself, especially in the annoying grindset aesthetic that gets algorithmic attention online, but I think I am as qualified as anyone to make you as good a poker player as you can possibly be. If you are interested, please contact me on Substack, Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky, or if you’d prefer e-mail, Discord, or WhatsApp, just DM me and we can arrange another way to communicate. If you are a subscriber and would like to take the next step, please contact me. If you aren’t a subscriber and found this post, please subscribe by clicking the button below.
Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium Subscribers are given access to a Google Drive folder where they will also be able to download 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. This week I uploaded
Four PIO sims for the very deep stacked hand covered in POTD #282
A PIO sim forcing one flop size from the c-bettor in POTD #283
A PIO sim forcing a two size flop strategy from the c-bettor for POTD #284
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included in the main post. Today, I’ll share #onemorething from POTD #282, where I wrote about playing a big check-raise size when deep stacked.
POTD #282 onemorething
I wrote that “My hand is basically a pure flop check-raise. I am not sure if I picked the right size; running 200bb deep sims with multiple flop check-raise sizes is pretty onerous.”
But not for Premium Subscribers. I ran a sim that had r70, r120 and r170. R170 is never used, but r120 is used quite a bit, it’s about a 50/50 split and the composition of the r70 and r120 range aren’t all that different. So maybe an r95 size where I raise to ~16k would be ideal. When I use r120 it’s enough to get top pair to start folding right away, especially top pair without backdoor flush or straight draws. KQo mixes, but even Ks7s with no backdoor flush draw pure calls. Facing a larger checkraise the IP player get’s rid of all the A high backdoor floats, but still floats a little bit of QJ,QT,JT with backdoors. As for pocket pairs, the shape is pretty similar to the other classes of hands we’ve discussed. 99-77 can turn straight straight draws so they pure call, but QQ-TT mix folds. Practically I like busting out the bigger checkraise size here, it’s a good way to get money in the pot with great hands and your opponents will likely respond too linearly, they won’t call pocket pairs enough and call too much top pair, which will make them easier to play against later in the hand.
Media
I was on the Thinking Poker podcast with Andrew Brokos and Carlos Welch; you can listen to the episode here.
As always, I can be reached on