Interview with majcy (Part 2)

Charles Hawk: Tell me about your daily schedule, do you have any grinding routine?

majcy: Through recent years most of the time I had quite regimented routine trying to treat poker as a full time job and to put close to 8 hours during peak time, which in Bali often means that you need to wake up middle of the night or stay up whole night. Sometimes when situation requires I would just stop grinding and try to put equal hours studying.

Charles Hawk: What are the main advantages living in a grind-house with poker-friends?

majcy: I certainly wasn't that serious of a grinder when living on my own so that's one of the biggest advantages of living with dedicated players. It's almost like you feel ashamed by not putting in hours when you see everyone works so hard. And everyone always motivates each other to progress further. People I live with are both hard working and ambitious and when you live in that environment you realize there's no magic to it, you need to sit down on your ass and study, and grind those hours. And then you realize you can do it too, it's mostly a matter of being willing to put the effort.

majcy: Another big advantage of living with other pros is to see the true scope of variance on a bigger scale. I can't picture how people that are on their own stay sane. swings in hypers can be really confusing when it comes to reg wars. When you have someone to tell you - that's fine, that's not the end of the world, review, come back next day - it's easier to take shots and move up in stakes.

majcy: And of course brainstorming poker ideas with friends is always great.

Charles Hawk: Do you have your own grinding space? How often do you grind together with others?

majcy: We have dedicated office room where we grind. It's massive step up from grinding in my bedroom in shared flat in Poland. It gives you different space where you work and different space where you can clear your head and leave your job behind. I had no idea how much it improves your life when you have it separated like that. and yeah, we grind together in pretty serious atmosphere, so it's a lot like a true office job.

Charles Hawk: You surprised me when in Part 1 formulated a thought telling that you are living the dream-life. It seemed to me that a human nature is always seek for more, always have to be unsatisfied („is“ in comparison with „could be“) because of possible better future. So how you would motivate our community - especially mid and high stakes pros - to be fully satisfied with their lifes? Or maybe it's a bad approach to have, because with full satisfaction comes laziness or lack-of-seeking-for-more?

majcy: That's a very good question. To be honest in recent years I've been finding myself guilty of having issues with being happy with my life. I had the rep of most unhappy person in Bali and it gave raise to so many jokes, Alan even wrote a song about how tough my life is (CLICK HERE) it's really easy to forget about the bigger picture and make your everyday life a struggle because of some small events that don't go your way. It's something I'm working on recently hence the comment I made, that I live the dream life. And I do, when I take the step back and look at my life it's just insane how lucky I am. And that's maybe some kind of advice to people - don't forget to take a moment to realize how many little or big good things you already have in your life. It's so easy to take good stuff for granted and then focus on failures and non-ideal aspects of our life.

majcy: And like you pointed out - it seems like the human nature is to be unsatisfied and always seek for something else. And that can get a bit bizarre when you are living on the tropical island, in a beautiful house, you surf everyday, dine in great restaurants etc. but surprisingly things like that can become just a background too and you want something different. I remember thinking - wait, I have the money, I have all that shit that all my friends with 8-to-5 jobs aim at and I wan't something else? It felt for a moment like life doesn't have much sense, what are we actually chasing. I still have some issues with that aspect of it all and can't say anything revealing other than typical clichés that some people love to post on Facebook all the time :) Enjoy the small things, work on your friendships, work on stuff that make you happy, find some small or big hobbies, get better at stuff you enjoy. These are things of more substance than what money can buy you. I'd say in general shift focus away from money goals, that's just wrong way to approach life. And explore the world a little bit, it will never stop to surprise and amaze you.

majcy: I don't think you are running a risk of getting lazy when you are satisfied with your life. If anything you are probably more productive when you feel better in general, and you focus on right things, so it's definitely something to work on.

Charles Hawk: Could you expand more on the brainstorming ideas with others? How you are doing that?

majcy: It's probably the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about living with other poker players who you respect, that you share and often fight for your ideas. Actually it's best when you get in heated arguments over why your strat is better than other person's idea, you learn the most when someone tries their hardest to put your idea to the test.

Charles Hawk: Tell me what are the most valuable lessons you have learned about poker not from theory but from practice?

majcy: I think in general most of your skills develop through both theory and practice so it's hard to say what exactly came from just practice other than sort of obvious things like multitabling, stamina, and better understanding of population tendencies. And they are all equally important if you aim high, being a good multitabler that doesn't loose focus for hours makes a difference between successful or unsuccessful shot.

Charles Hawk: Do you get bored when grinding? Do you have any advice on how to keep focused when playing bad players?

majcy: I do, of course. Like I mentioned earlier I believe that mental game is something that you work on your whole career and that's part of it. It's easy to not give a shit about your lowest buy-in that just poped up when u are chatting with a friend on Facebook :) I think the recipe to stay focused is to be competitive with your friends. We always have a thing going about who can crush the fish harder. And if I'm not giving my 100% I get quickly motivated by stretch of bad results or even single bad move I made. I kinda do reversed bad-reg-mentality and attribute any bad results to my poor performance instead of variance and try to focus best I can.

Charles Hawk: I asked that 1rake1 and want to ask you: Tell me how you are able to keep up the constant passion for the game and avoid burnouts?

majcy: It's probably thanks to life balance. He probably said the same thing. We take good care of ourselves, putting health really high on priority list. Good working environment, spot on diet, gym or sports, having some small jobs being done for you by a maid - all helps you divide your time between putting 110% into work and than relax and come back fresh next day no matter how rough it was. I believe you also need to have natural love for the game and be a competitive person. Another thing would be to take holidays when you really need them, don't smash it too hard and then crush and burn.

Charles Hawk: Please write an update about attacking cartel as a team. Are you still doing that/aiming to become 500-1ks regs?

majcy: I almost don't want to touch that subject, but maybe some people out there should hear my 2 cents on that. The whole idea is long gone, me and Alan are in 500s now, twins and adam are in 1s, and it happened 'the normal way', if not with extra stubbornness towards twins and ads. I know that what we perceived as just a business move got received as crossing some lines, and maybe it was, I don't really want to start a discussion over this. For me at the time it was all happening too fast, a 100s reg that just got accepted to 300s playing 500s and later 1s? I was really excited about the idea of facing people that were my heroes when I discovered hypers and wasn't thinking much about the whole political correctness of what we were doing. To get the downswing of a lifetime and ''biggest scumbag of the community'' badge out of it seems more than fair punishment so I hope people don't hold grudge up to this day. Reflecting back on it I wish that stuff on our end would have been done at least with more, idk, class.

Charles Hawk: Tell me about the biggest downswings and most critical moments in your HUSNG career. Did you ever have serious doubts in yourself?

majcy: Biggest downswing would be April last year after being pretty unsuccessful at 1ks. It was a lot of money for me but I think at no point it seemed as most significant factor. I knew I don't need to change my lifestyle, I knew I can still make money playing poker. But I took it very personal, I always expect a lot from myself and don't cope that well with failures. Then on top of that I had issues with the fact that I can't be part of the team anymore, no point to be involved in daily chat, I felt pretty insignificant and it took me a lot of time to shake it off and come back to playing. so yeah for a moment I had doubts if I want to play poker again but the guys came up with awesome ideas to keep me in the loop. I was doing a lot of theory work for them at the time so that really helped me to see that they still have trust in my poker mind and that I'm worth something. And that's probably really important to not give up in moments like that, after all I still managed to find motivation to fight for 500s and get SNE that year despite taking pretty much 2 months off.

Charles Hawk: What do you think about online poker’s future? And about HUSNG hypers future? Do you think husng hypers could ever dry out because of Spin and Go‘s?

majcy: I like to think that future is exciting. It's funny that public discussion always looks like - OMG its bad and it's gonna get worse! But somehow good regs find a way to make money and I believe it will stay that way for quite some time. It's really hard to make some precise predictions but i'd be surprised to see hypers drying up much further than what spins already did to them unless the whole poker economy will be taking a hit.