Interview with Sentin

Sentin's 7 Day Mindful Based Stress Reduction Series

Charles Hawk: Tell me a bit about yourself and how yout get into poker and coaching.

Sentin: Well I just turned 33 this past week and I think my first online game was somewhere around the age of 20, so it's been quite a journey. I had pretty much never played a hand of poker before jumping into online. I just saw Rounders one day while in University and thought to myself 'Hey, I think I can do that in my pyjamas' and off I went. Not the best mindset going into a new profession, but fortunately it worked out in the end.

At the time I was working on a Bachelor of Education degree with plans to become an elementary school teacher, but after I completed the degree I decided to stick with poker for a while and eventually realized I was more interested in helping people 1-on-1 so I went back to school and completed my counseling diploma, which is what I do professionally now. And I think poker coaching was just a natural progression of that teaching background.

Charles Hawk: What is your ratio between playing husngs and coaching these days? Which stakes are you coaching?

Sentin: Well this year has actually been pretty insane for me between having a new baby who sleeps maybe 5 hours/day if we're lucky, getting my counselling practice underway, launching my new website and also unexpectedly losing my best friend since I was 10 years old, which was probably the hardest thing I've ever gone through. So my poker focus has been almost exclusively on coaching lately. I've been coaching primarily the $7-$30 limits but also worked with a couple of $1 players too, which I was surprised to be approached by, but also really happy to see this type of dedication from players at such an early stage of their careers.

Charles Hawk: Tell me about your video pack Crushing Fish Like A Boss.

Sentin: Well the idea itself took me forever to put together because I kept starting working on one idea and then a few weeks later would realize I was essentially just recreating Chadder's pack, which is something that I obviously didn't want to do since he did such a great job with it himself. So after a bunch of frustrating trial and errors, I spent some time talking to my students and asked them what they liked about my free videos while also paying close attention to issues that kept coming up over and over in my sessions with all of them. Once I did this, I quickly realized that the key for me was going to be to simplify things as much as possible while focusing the pack on 2 key areas that most of the guys I worked with seemed to be severly lacking in: aggression and hand-ranging. I also really wanted to focus on making the pack not only informative and educational but also engaging and enjoyable, which are things I personally felt were missing from a lot of the material in the poker training world. I think having spent 5 years of my life writting lesson plans for young students really helped me learn how to take semi-complicated topics and boil them down to their core components in a way that would keep even the most distracted students focused. From there it was just about asking myself what kind of material I would have been excited to see when I was starting out, which eventually led me to the format I ended up with of short classroom-style lessons, reviews of my own original grinds at each limit showing what my own journey was like, and the 'extreme grind' format that I thought would add some excitement to the pack in a unique and intersting way.

Charles Hawk: Tell me please about your new pack. What we can expect from it?

Sentin: Well, I think the thing that surprised me most about the HU videopack was the great response I received for the free mindfulness video that I released along with it. I really wasn't sure how the poker community would react to a mindfulness-based approach to tilt managment, but I knew just how insanely helpful it had been to me personally so I decided to put it out there and let people decide for themselves. And once I did, the response I received was so overwhelmingly positive that I was honestly shocked by it. However, as good as the response was, I still kept hearing the same two concerns come up over and over again. The first was that meditation was 'too hard' or that people felt that they just couldn't 'do it right' and the second that the 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction program I reccomended was too overwhelming of a commitment to make for people who were new to the material. And to be honest, I completely understood both these concerns because I too remember having the exact same ones when I was starting out with mindfulnesss (it took me three tries to make it through the 8-week program initially). So after coming up against this problem one too many times, both with poker players and with people in my counselling practice, I decided to take matters into my own hands and do for mindfulness what I tried to do for husngs, which as i said earlier, was to take a complex topic and make it as intersting, painless and easily-digestible as possible so that people could get a taste of what mindfulness was without needing to commit 2 full months to deciding whether it was right for them.

So after a couple more months of trial and error, I was able to create the 7 Day Mindfulness Intensive, which I truly believe is one of the best introductions to mindfulness that I've personally ever come across. The program includes 8 guided meditations as well as an E-book manual covering various aspects of mindfulness, both from the official MBSR program as well as from my own experiences with mindfulness and mindful mediation.

I think this 7-Day timeline is a much more reasonable way to try out this process while not getting overwhelmed by the commitment that the full mbsr program requires; so if people enjoyed what I did in my hu pack and the free mental-game video, I think they will be very happy with this new program as well.

And if people want to learn more about mindfulness before starting the program, my website www.organicmentalhealth.com has some cool features including blog posts about my own experiences with the mindful lifestyle and free ebook called The 7-Step Guide To Becoming A Mindfulness Ninja which takes a bit of a lighter, more entertaining approach to the whole process.

Charles Hawk: Isaac Haxton does meditation on regular basis. I interviewed him about few weeks ago. :)

Sentin: Ya I actually just read that earlier today and was really happy to see it. It really seems meditation is becoming much more popular with poker players these days. In fact, I'm heading down to the WSOP this week and already have plans to get a meditation group together with a bunch of other players, so maybe we can convince Ike to join us for a session or two. And I don't know if Olivier Busquet is planning on being there too but he had a very nice response to my mindfulness video and is a personal poker hero of mine, so if he happens to read this interview one day, I would be thrilled to have him join us as well.

Charles Hawk: Have you already rented a place for those meditation groups or something? How much it will cost? How long will the sessions be?

Sentin: I'm actually still working on the details and wanna wait till I'm in Vegas to check out a few things before I finalize everything, but I will without a doubt have some free sessions for people to come experience mindful meditation first hand. I've started an email list for the group so anyone who is interested in receiving updates can just message me on twitter (@sentin9) with their email address and I will mail the details once they're sorted.

Charles Hawk: How many times per week would you recommend to meditate?

Sentin: Every day! I mean, you might not be able to commit an hour or two every single day, but everyone can find a spare 5 minutes to do a quick meditation and ground themselves back to the present moment. You'd be shocked how much of an impact even just a few minutes a day will make on your life.

Charles Hawk: Is it somehow related with religion or beliefs? Did you get any concerns about that?

Sentin: It has absolutely no religious affiliation whatsoever and can be practiced by anyone and everyone regardless of background or religious belief. And in fact most religious people who practice find that it brings them much closer to the source of their belief. And although some of the concepts of MBSR have their roots in Buddhism, when Jon Kabat Zinn created the program at the UMass Medical Center he explicitly did so from a completely secular and scientifically-based perspective so that people could practice it without any concern for anything other than leading a happier and more fulfilling life.

Charles Hawk: Tell me about your future plans.

Sentin: Well, as I said I'm heading to the WSOP this week and plan on being there for the entire series. I also will be continuing with my counselling work of course and plan to expand my site in the near future to include resources on yoga, nutrition and other areas of self-improvement that have made such a positive impact on my own life over the past few years. Add that to being a full time stay-at-home dad to my 10 month old son when I get back from Vegas and squeezing in some grinding and coaching whenever I get the chance, and I think that will leave me with about 12 minutes of sleep/day for the next couple of years. :)

Charles Hawk: Do you have any daily routine?

Sentin: Not really, right now my wife and I are at the complete mercy of my son since he's not very fond of sleeping, so I just have a list of things I need to do and try to cross off as many as I can every day. It's definitely tough way to live sometimes, but I try to see it as a great opportunity to work on the non-striving mindset that mindfulness advocates.

Charles Hawk: How has playing poker succesfully in multiple game formats helped you understand poker players' mental issues?

Sentin: Well, although the are some differences of course, I think the various forms of tilt are pretty similar across the board, especially when it relates to mindfulness. So in my opinion the key is to figure out the most +EV way to relate to your thoughts and emotions and then it won't matter what game you play...or what limits you play...or who tilts you...or how big your bankroll is, etc. Because at the end of the day, it's all essentially the same issue when you boil it down to its most fundamental level.

Charles Hawk: Any last words for our readers?

Sentin: Well I just want to wish them all the best of luck on their own journey and, if I could, I'd like to share with them the mindfulness quote I have posted on my monitor that has really helped me through some tough times recently, perhaps it can do the same for some of them.