Eric Crain

Full-time professional poker player.
Full-time family man. Part-time golfer. Part-time insane person.

[Matt Glantz @MattGlantz]

From the heart, guys. I got lucky with poker & it had nothing to do with cards. I'd already started a family & put in years on the trading floor. I was fortunate to find poker at 27 & not 18. If I found poker as a teen, I don't know where I'd be. Same brain, same competitiveness, no anchor.

I've watched it happen too many times. A kid finds the game early, he's good at it, or even great at it, but it takes everything out of him & more often than not takes everything away from him. His twenties & thirties just get lost in time.

Those are the years you're supposed to be meeting someone & building a life outside the room. The game doesn't tell you it's doing that. It just does. Every year feels like one more year. Then you look up & you're 35 or 45 with a hotel key card & nothing else. The opportunity to build a family continues to slip away.

Not a lecture. The game has given me plenty. But it takes a lot from people who never had anything else to hold onto. It's dark, but we need to talk about it.

[Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant]

The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline is that every year does.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“One of the most underrated skills you can learn is the ability to ignore your mood and stick with the plan.”

[L E S E D I @_Hybreed_]

“Discipline is boring until you calculate what the lack of it has cost you.”

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Brazilians have reportedly been spending 6.5% more on staple foods since sports betting was banned in the country.

A month ago, Lula signed an order banning fixed-odds sports betting, a move he said was designed to tackle the problem of families falling into debt.

Now the President of the Brazilian Supermarket Association says that since the ban, sales of essential foods such as rice, oil, coffee, and noodles have grown by 6.5%.

[Eric Crain @EricCrain]

@THefferman @Junemom47 🔥🔥🔥

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Doing chores as a kid predicts how your life turns out better than your IQ does.

Harvard followed 456 boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods from age 14 all the way to 47. The ones who worked hard as kids, chores, odd jobs, whatever, grew up mentally healthier and had better relationships. That mattered more than how smart they were or how much money their family had.

Kentrell kind of explained why without meaning to. Coolest man on earth, but hella structure.

A Berkeley psychologist named Diana Baumrind spent the '60s studying exactly that combo. Parents who were warm and strict at the same time raised the most capable, independent kids. Strict with no warmth did worse. So did fun with no rules.

Look at his dad's list. Out the door by 6:50am. Homework gets checked, no excuses. No dishes left in the sink. In bed by 10. Plus a four-week deep cleaning rotation that ends with him hosing down the outside of the house.

Then look at what he gets back. Friday after 6 is his once chores are done. Saturday he can be out on the block till 10 and home by 11. And the Sunday laundry line says Dad will help if he's not working.

Pretty much every rule on there earns him something. An 8-year-old can understand that deal.

When you start matters too. Marty Rossmann at the University of Minnesota went back through 84 kids from Baumrind's research. The ones doing chores at 3 or 4 were doing the best in their mid-20s, and it predicted that better than IQ did. Kids who didn't get chores till 15 or 16 mostly resented them, and it backfired.

Most of us grew up with this. In a 2014 survey of 1,001 American adults, 82% said they had regular chores as kids. Only 28% make their own kids do them.

A kid who was 10 when that survey ran is 22 now. Some of the people in these replies are about that age, saving a stranger's dad's chore list so they can run it on themselves.

[Principal⭐️ @OkadikeOnyeisi]

There is an unwritten rule to life that most people never get told. After every long stretch of hardship and uncertainty, a period comes where you make quantum leaps across multiple areas of your life at once. It happens all at once, and it happens because of everything you survived before it. The only requirement on your end is simple. Do not give up on yourself before that period arrives.

[Ashely Siwila @Ashelysiwila]

Restart again. Find your spark again. Set goals again. Forgive yourself again. Be a kid again. Trust your guts again. Show up again. Step by step.

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Underrated life advice: Be careful what you normalize around your kids. How you speak to your spouse. How you treat your body. How often you complain. How you talk about others. What feels ordinary in your house becomes how they'll act as adults outside of it.

[EQ Poker @eqpoker]

If you're a cash pro who wants to make the most of poker without wasting their life you're chasing roughly 0.5 to 1 Buy-ins EV for your daily grind.

IMO if you aren't reaching these or can't access games where this is possible do not try and get into poker as a way to make money.

ONLINE BENCHMARK:
5-10bb/100
250 hands/hr
𝟏𝟐.𝟓-𝟐𝟓𝐛𝐛/𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫
20 hours of volume (weekly) = 2.5 to 5BI
Monthly EV = 10-20BI

You can either play a ton of tables at 100-200nl or play 500nl+ and make $100k+ EV annually with a 20-30 hour work week and some months offs.

LIVE BENCHMARK:
15-50bb/100
25 hands/hr
𝟑.𝟕𝟓-𝟏𝟐.𝟓𝐛𝐛/𝐡𝐫
20 hours of volume (weekly) = 0.75 to 2.5 BI

You need to be playing at least 5/10, texas deepstack 5/5, ideally 10/20 so you don't have to be glued to the table.

THE GRINDER TRAP:
<5bb/100. You play more hands, but mostly on autopilot (a functional necessity of the high volume approach).

Since you need 2-5k hands a day and are playing 6+ tables, you are training skills that will not serve you well above 200nl online where there are less games running.

Live players fall into this the most because they can always find a profitable game but may have no time or energy left to really work on their game > and the live environment does nothing to offer feedback/learning opportunities.

Solution for both is carve out and commit to your learning away from the table. Record hands and questions that arise. Seriously work to answer them. Get serious about ranging people and challenging your assumptions on review.

Making it a non-negotiable, and actually enjoying the deeper work of analyzing the game and how you + others perceive it.

Easier when you have a group of peers/mentors you can trust so you can get an outside perspective. Can be hard to know what assumptions are true (this guy always has it here) vs something we're projecting (this guy always has it here) otherwise.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

James Clear on thinking like a scientist:

[Carl Jung Archive @QuoteJung]

A friendly reminder that Carl Jung believed life doesn’t truly begin until your 40s. Everything before that is just research and development.

[Haralabos Voulgaris @haralabob]

ESPN turning sports betting into a colorful, cartoon-style tutorial is an utter disgrace.

https://t.co/L9DOjgc6ls

[The 48 Laws of Power @48LawsofPowerr]

when Napoleon said:

[Patrick Leonard 🫡 @padspoker]

This guy is sharp guy. He says it’s not 724 bots but in fact 12,000.

Interesting.

[On3 @On3]

NEW: UCLA head coach Bob Chesney on his goals for the 2026 season and whether they've changed:

"Goals are for people that want to win once. Process and standards are for people that want to win longterm."

(via @3xOptionShow)

https://t.co/PdhJozfOaN