High end advice articulated crisply
Poker’s newest content creator is none other than Canadian high stakes beast Sam Greenwood, who just launched his new series of Substack articles entitled “Punt of the Day.” Five times per week, he will revisit the blunders that he has made on his way to winning $40m on the live felt. He will try to explain his mindset and thought process in key moments when he failed to execute to the best of his abilities.
Having been given a sneak peek of what is to come, the striking thing is how approachable Greenwood’s thought process is. He is a natural communicator, dropping pearls of wisdom that apply to everyone’s game. There can be no doubt that it is high-end advice for high-level thinkers, but it is also articulated so crisply that I suspect that it will find a wider audience.
The beauty of this series is going to be how it will show the difference between having knowledge in a vacuum and being able to deliver on that knowledge under pressure. VSO News sat down with Greenwood to talk about his new venture.
Q&A with Sam Greenwood
VSO News: Do you think there is a perception that the top players don’t make mistakes and is part of what you’re doing here an attempt to show how that isn’t true?
Sam Greenwood: I do think that there is a perception that the top players are so well-studied that they never make mistakes. I’m definitely trying to show that isn’t true.
In my time in poker, I’ve seen two types of errors from casual players. One is they see a top pro (everyone always picks Chidwick here, pick someone else 😂) make a play and say: “I know everyone says he’s the best, but I don’t believe it.” But there’s a slightly more enlightened level of incuriosity that is: “That play doesn’t make any sense to me, but X did it so it must be right,” without even considering the chance he might have made an error. That sort of incuriosity bugs me.
the insights that I have, shortcuts that I take, and the blind spots that I have”
The beauty of poker is that, in any given hand, one player can outplay anyone, so of course it’s possible that top pros have a bad read or misapply a theoretical concept. It happens constantly. My hope with the blog is that over the long run readers will not just learn poker fundamentals, but also get a window into how I think, which includes the insights that I have, shortcuts that I take, and the blind spots that I have.
VSO: What would make this a success for you as a project? Is it about gathering a large following/subscriber list to your substack, or is it more about satisfying a personal objective to do some writing?
SG: I like writing and always have. I love making videos for RunItOnce, but when I speak I can be digressive so I like the discipline of writing something short and focused every day. However, if this were just about personal growth, I would be doing it in private. I absolutely want to gain subscribers and build a community.
VSO: Define “punt” for me as distinct from “blunder.”
SG: Once a mistake is made in poker, it cannot be undone and, for me, the word “punt” is so evocative. You can spend days making careful, precise decisions and then one decision blows it all up. I played rugby in high school and writing about “punts,” I’m just picturing a ball flying high into the air floating off into the distance, never to be recovered. Now some decisions covered in the blog will be blunders and slip-ups and not, strictly speaking, “punts,” but I liked using punt in the title.
O’Dwyer and O’Kearney weigh in
Fellow high-stakes circuit regular Steve O’Dwyer thinks that Greenwood’s articles are going to hit a sweet spot. Speaking to VSO News, he said:
“I think Sam’s new Substack blog is an innovative idea in the realm of educational poker content. Sam is the first person I seek out on tournament breaks when I want feedback on a hand that I’ve played. He’s got an incredible mind for poker and always does a great job explaining his thoughts in a way that a dumb guy like myself can understand.”
Another of poker’s great strategic minds, Dara O’Kearney, applauded the structure of Greenwood’s breakdowns and said how he particularly liked the “what I got wrong section”. Speaking to VSO News, O’Kearney also commented on the integration of the background sims used:
“I think that the short explanations of why the solver advocates certain things are very valuable. It’s so important to relay the reasons behind what the solver does.”
Different subscriber tiers
Poker players at all levels today run sims or at least grapple with solver output. Greenwood’s breakdowns are going to be a daily treat for those players. His first entry is a hand he played versus the talented young Bulgarian Boris Angelov at the Triton Jeju $20,000 buy-in a few weeks ago. At the end, he grades his line as a D+, believing that he botched two of his four decisions.
so that we never bungle, blunder, botch, slip-up, fail, err, mess up, or punt ever again”
In the introduction to this series of articles, Greenwood lays out his tongue-in-cheek mission statement: “My hope is that you’ll gain some insights from my mistakes and we can all learn something together so that we never bungle, blunder, botch, slip-up, fail, err, mess up, or punt ever again.”
Punts may be inevitable, even from the best, but as Greenwood confesses more and more of his poker sins, his subscribers will be the beneficiaries, learning from one of the game’s great strategic minds.
As a cheeky tempter, unpaid subscribers will get access to one free post per week, whereas monthly plan subscribers will receive every post, plus the ability to comment on the Substack. Premium subscribers will get access to every post and access to the “Punt of the Day” Discord server, where they can see the original sims that Greenwood ran and delve into some additional analysis.