EDIT: December 2, 2024 – So a lot of things have happened. I used to be at ~30 Instagram followers when I wrote this and now I’m at 28k+. I’ve changed my name from “dparkpoker” to “dennisparkpoker” and I’ve also switched a lot of my content from pure poker to poker applicability to irl. It’s insane how far I’ve come but also there’s so much more I want to do. I want to keep growing the content side and keep becoming better at poker. Despite not really posting much about poker, I’ve been working steadily with Jonathan Little and Brian Kim, along with 2 other people in really improving my basics. I’ve been grinding on microstakes zoom games for getting my reps in while using live to improve my bankroll. This has been a crazy journey so far and I thank everyone for following along. This is just the beginning and I’m excited to see where this will take me…
If you’ve been wondering what this page is or who this is, this post will answer all your questions.
My name is Dennis, an average Korean guy living in Canada (for now). Ever since early 2022, I’ve been perplexed by this question – how can I beat the game of poker?
To give you some context, I’ve been obsessed my entire life with trying to “beat the odds”. Why? Idk. I never found it particularly exciting to take the safe route in life. Here are a few examples of me attempting to beat the odds in life.
My first “beating the odds” experiment was graduating as the Valedictorian of McGill University despite my first year grades looking like this:
The second time I “beat the odds” was when I got into Morgan Stanley Instituitonal Equities Sales and Trading despite no formal finance background or connections (more on this later).
The third time I “beat the odds” was with the equities market, which led me to this tax statement and the skills that indirectly landed me a job at MS.
These are some examples, but you get the point – I like to take maxims and put it to the test.
Ultimately, poker came into my life by chance and for some reason it was the one game I couldn’t seem to beat.
The game seemed infinitely more simple than trading and there were many parallels – you are trying to gain an edge against other participants and push your edge while managing risk.
But for some reason, I could not seem to break past a certain 5 figure barrier. I would start with a few hundred dollars and accumulate my bankroll before dropping down again. And rinse and repeat. There would be no consistency and huge amounts of variance.
It didn’t make sense. Take trading for example – the market has millions of participants at a time while poker has a few handful at most. Traders are using sophisticated tools and quantitative weapons to gain an edge against other participants. Traders in the market are close to optimization while poker players aren’t (not because of the players per say, just due to the nature of the game). And if the goal of poker is to “exploit” the opponents with your “edge”, shouldn’t this be much simpler than a market with millions of participants at one time? Well that’s what I thought… until I realized that it wasn’t.
So given this perplexing question I decided to embark on a journey – see if I can “beat the odds” in poker in the next 5 years. Same way I did for trading and becoming the Valedictorian.
I will be sharing everything. My ups and downs. And in the end, maybe it turns out that I can’t beat the odds. Well that’s fine. The point is to go on this journey of self growth.
Thanks for reading up to this point, and if you have any questions or you want to connect, let’s do so through my Instagram (where I’ll be updating a lot of my journey) which is “dparkpoker”.