The Secret of Jungleman: Change Your Approach to Make More Money in Poker

The Golden Rule: Chase Opportunities, Not Competition

For Jungleman, the core element of becoming successful in poker wasn’t luck, grind or exhausting study but openness to different possibilities:

“I opened as many doors as possible, so I could pick and choose the spots that I could participate in. This is the dimension I want you guys to look at is all different doors of possibilities versus “oh, I need to get really good so I can beat everyone” — because we’re just diminishing returns to that dynamic and that’s not going to ultimately, unless you’re the actual absolute best, which is rare, win you all the money.”

The difference between chasing competition more than opportunities is well described in a non-poker book “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel that Dan recommends reading (or listening) to to better understand the value of changing you focus and approach:

“It’s a little bit misleading to look at the giant market and say “oh there’s loads of value there” because the problem is that people look at how much opportunity there is but they don’t look at what the competition looks like.”

If we apply this to poker on a higher level you always have stronger competition that requires more improvements and investments to succeed. So, the wise choice there is to just pick your niche and focus on beating its field and maximizing personal value:

“Focusing your attention on the right areas is as important if not more important than the substance of how good you are and what you bring to the actual table.” 

Bonus Advice: Be Picky Towards Poker Content

For the first quarter of the 21st century, poker showed stable dynamics of becoming more and more difficult to compete with development of GTO and solvers, but also the increasing availability of free educational content. But if the first two factors were more significant for high stakes, the last one was and still is more influential for a wide area of stakes from micro to mid.

However, according to Jungleman, this content is not all helpful but a big chunk of it is just not worthy of any poker players’ time:

“There’s loads of content currently on the Internet about how to get better at poker, how to play GTO, how to play this spot — and a lot of that unfortunately is bull***. Or rather it’s not worth exactly all the effort that a lot of you guys are necessarily putting into it when it comes to actually getting better.

You’re not going to get a whole lot better at all by watching High Stakes Poker. It’ll be fun to watch, unless you really think deeply about the plays. Most of them are for entertainment not for strategic analysis, a lot of the ways of which it’s being focused on getting better and better is really actually going to be a big diminishing return for a lot of you unless you change your approaches.

Not everyone gets to be the very best at everything. It’s impossible because then there would be no “very best” or rather the ceiling would just keep rising.”

All of this doesn’t mean you need to stop watching, reading or listening to free poker stuff to grow as a player. It only means that you should re-evaluate your system of choosing content and shift towards the most informative, insightful and accurate bits of information instead of consuming anything and everything. It is not the amount of digested information that makes people better but its quality and relevance.

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