The last couple of months I've been concentrating on my bachelor thesis as I mentioned in my former blog post. Since then I've also taken a lot of exams and I'm getting closer and closer to finishing. Originally I was aiming to be finished by the end of July, but now it looks like it will have to be the end of September as I pushed an exam back to give myself some more breathing space.

It wasn't an easy decision for me to make, but I esentially removed myself from the games for some time to fully focus on my studies. I was stuck in a rut and I had to make a decision. I had to take a break from poker. It was a very liberating experience for me, because I had never really taken a prolonged break from the games since I started playing in around 2006. The feeling of allways worrying about how much it is costing me in opportunity costs to walk over to a supermarket to do some food shopping or study for some exam wasn't there anymore.
Don't take me wrong, I think as long as there is no reason to take a break, your motivated and running well you should push that as much as you can. It is a common fallacy in trading to sell winners too early and hold on to losers for two long and I think a similar concept applies to poker when it comes to managing yourself. It is however still nice to just be able to relax and be a normal university kid. It helped me put things in perspective and I feel like I've begun to develop a new joy for life and reflect on what I've been doing so far and what I want to do in the future.

This semester I took two game theory classes. One class was on decision theory with a very reputable professor named Pablo Blavatsky and the other one was a mixture of classical game theory and decision theory. What I like about decision theory is that it incorporates things like group psychology and personal preferences into it's models which leads to some interesting insights on how people tend to behave in poker aswell. I'm sure a lot of concepts will be known to poker players, but seeing them in concrete models was very interesting to me.
An example I could mention is that some players tend to become more aggressive when they are losing. This can lead to situations where people become risk seeking when they are losing as opposed to risk averse or risk neutral when they are winning. In prospect theory (a subdivision of decision theory) this is referred to as the reflection effect.

So I'm currently finishing up on my bachelor thesis in econometrics (for those who have not heard this term before, econometrics can roughly be described as a combination of statistics and mathematics applied to all sorts of data). Tomorrow I hope to get back to the books and get some work done. I'll also be getting back into some poker. I've been reading blogs again and watching some videos and I'm starting to get motivated for the game again. I probably will not be able to go on full blast for now though as I'd like to get done with my degree asap.

Finally here is a pic of (from left to right) me, my friend Alex and Steve and in the middle Sami Khedira from Real Madrid.


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I was in Madrid in April to meet up with my friends who were studying in Spain at the time and we decided to go to Mecardo de San Miguel to drink some wine and eat some of their tapas. We were standing right behind him when my friend goes hey, isn't that Sami Khedira and I was like it could be. In an instant he had asked him to take a picture with us and he was down with it so that was cool.

Daniell