What Poker Can Teach Us About Better Business and Investment Decisions with Chris Potenza (Ep. 11)

Good decisions don’t always produce immediate wins, and acting just because you’re uncomfortable can create bigger problems than waiting.

How do you know when patience gives you an edge, and when it’s finally time to act?

In this episode, Jon Meyer speaks with Chris Potenza, President of Rinkside Advertising Network and Front Burner Sports and Entertainment, about how competitive poker has shaped the way he approaches investing, business ownership, and decision-making. Chris explains why discipline, preparation, reviewing your own process, and recognizing the right moments to become aggressive often matter more than chasing constant action. They also explore risk, accountability, emotional control, and how thoughtful decision-making can help people navigate uncertainty across business, investing, and life.

Chris discusses:

• Why strong processes matter more than short-term outcomes when making difficult decisions
• How studying, reviewing mistakes, and honest self-assessment improve long-term performance
• Why patience often creates better results than forcing action out of frustration or boredom
• How changing speeds and recognizing opportunity can separate strong performers from others
• What poker teaches about business growth, calculated risk, and building lasting discipline
• And more!

 

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Watch us on YouTube at https://youtu.be/wd9env5U0RU.

 

Resources:

• Book: Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

Connect with Jon Meyer:

• BGM
• LinkedIn: Jon Meyer
• Email: jmeyer@BGM360.com
• Schedule a Call

Connect with Chris Potenza:

• LinkedIn: Chris Potenza
• Website: Rinkside Advertising Network
• Website: Front Burner Sports and Entertainment

About Our Guest:

Chris Potenza serves as the President of Rinkside Advertising Network and Front Burner Sports and Entertainment. Mr. Potenza’s vast experience in the sponsorship industry spans more than 25 years and includes time spent leading staff and selling sponsorship programs in the NFL (Minnesota Vikings), NBA (Minnesota Timberwolves), and NHL (New Jersey Devils and Tampa Bay Lightning). Aside from his experience at the major professional level, he has also served in sponsorship leadership roles for minor league teams (Cincinnati Cyclones (IHL), Atlanta Knights (IHL), Utah Grizzlies (IHL), sports leagues and governing bodies (Western Pro Hockey League and IRONMAN Triathlon), and venues (Amalie Arena).

During his time in the industry, Mr. Potenza has played a role in contracting more than $100,000,000 in sponsorship agreements. He has negotiated Naming Rights programs, Practice Facility entitlements, Event and Game Sponsorships, Vendor Programs, and Pouring Rights agreements.

A regular speaker at industry events, Mr. Potenza has been hired as a consultant on numerous projects, providing services that range from sales strategy, sponsorship sales instruction, price modeling, and sales outreach.

 

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Transcript

Chris Potenza: You can’t put together a blueprint that is gonna absolutely win you the Stanley Cup every year. All you can do is go and put in all of the preparation, do all of the things you can to put yourself as one of the top five teams in the league. And if you do that, there’s gonna be pucks that bounce certain ways, there’s injuries that are gonna happen.

Chris Potenza: You’re setting yourself up to be in that grouping of teams that has a realistic chance of, of winning.

Jon Meyer: The thing you said there I felt interesting is changing speeds. I don’t think enough people in life think about speed as an advantage, but sometimes that speed up, slow down thing is a huge advantage.

Welcome to Mastering the 360 Mindset with Jon Meyer from BGM. Join us as we explore ways to make the most out of your wealth, health, and time, unlocking opportunities for balance and lasting success. With insights from Jon’s years of experience and guest experts, you’ll gain the tools to design a life that works on your terms.

Now, onto the show

Jon Meyer: All right. Thank you everyone for joining us today. I’m excited about our extra special guest today. I’ve known Chris for a while, a long time, and I’m gonna ask him to introduce himself a little bit because he’s got quite the history in sports. I’ll explain why I wanna talk to him in a second, but Chris, why don’t you just lead off and tell us a bit about Front Burner Sports and some of the other things you’re involved in right now.

Chris Potenza: Sure. So Jon, thanks for having me on. Chris Potenza. I’m the president of Rinkside Advertising Network and Front Burner Sports and Entertainment. I like to describe myself as a long time sports sponsorship executive, I guess I would say. I spent the better part of my career, at least the first 25 years of it, working in all levels of professional sports, primarily selling sponsorships, right?

Chris Potenza: So connecting brands to the fan bases of the teams or the properties that I worked w- for or with, and there were a lot of them. I lived in 15 cities over the course of those 25, 30 years, doing everything from the major pro sports, football, NFL, NBA, NHL, down to some interesting ones. Was even in World Championship wrestling for a while.

Chris Potenza: I was much bigger and I wore a mask. I don’t think anybody would really recognize me. Today, I own a couple of, I guess I would call them niche sports marketing companies. I walked away from the, the life of big time professional sports and decided to hang my own shingle out about 11 years ago. One side of, of the business, Front Burner Sports and Entertainment, is a very traditional sports marketing firm.

Chris Potenza: We bring sponsorship expertise to some of the second and third tier properties that are out there. Might be local marathons, art fairs, municipal buildings, all of which have a lot of the same characteristics and benefits that should bring in potential sponsors but don’t because the folks that own them maybe don’t have the time, res- sources, or the know-how to have the proper conversations.

Chris Potenza: The other side of what, what I do is Rinkside Advertising Network, and that really just came out of an opportunistic view at what the landscape was here locally in Minnesota, where you can’t throw a, a rock and not hit a local ice rink, and we felt like those rinks were underserved in terms of how much advertising they were selling, and we realized that the core problem there was that they all operated independently.

Chris Potenza: So we created a network which linked them together and offered that out as one singular opportunity to, for advertisers. We started with 10 rinks 10 years ago. We had about 30 sponsors all together, 30 advertisers. Today we’re at just over 90 rinks, and we do about 1,700 advertisers a year on that side of the house.

Jon Meyer: That’s crazy. And you and I started knowing each other with a love for the Timberwolves. I’m not gonna drag you into the Timberwolves today.

Chris Potenza: No.

Jon Meyer: Today I wanna drag you into the other part of your life, which you didn’t talk about. So let’s talk about the other part of your life where you have basically started to do more than a dabbling in the gambling world- Yeah

Jon Meyer: when it comes to the World Series of Poker and some of the fun events that go on. And the reason I wanted to have Chris on today for our listeners is because there’s a lot of, of things that happen in poker. If you ever read Annie Duke’s book, what is it called now? It’s Thinking in Bets. Thinking in Bets, that’s what it is.

Jon Meyer: Yes. There’s a lot of life and, and investing that we can equate to poker. And I thought, well, who better to have on to talk about this than a guy who really has dug in? So tell us a little more about how you got into this part of your life.

Chris Potenza: Yeah. So poker is definitely a really big part of my life, and something that I do invest a lot of time in, a lot of energy in.

Chris Potenza: It’s, it’s something that started like a lot of people who are perhaps my age or my age bracket. You know, I think the Chris Moneymaker boom 20 years ago and seeing this average Joe win the biggest event in the world got me interested. There were lots of places that I could play 20 years ago, be it online or live.

Chris Potenza: So I, I took up the game and just started playing and reading everything I could, and had a lot of success super early. Actually won an opportunity to play in the World Series of Poker 20 years ago. Played very actively for about 10 years or so. At the time I thought I was pretty good. Perhaps listeners have heard of the Black Friday date of online poker when all of a sudden it became somewhat illegal to play.

Chris Potenza: A lot of those options stopped, so my options of playing weren’t quite there, but I still tried to play a little bit. I took up the game again really seriously about three and a half years ago. Local tournament was happening. I had told my wife, “Hey, I used to be pretty good at this. I’m gonna go down, drive down the hill to the local card room.

Chris Potenza: Gonna go play in a tournament.” It must’ve been just before lunch. I said, “Look, I, in all likelihood, I won’t be around for dinner. I would expect this to take 12 to 14 hours.” Drove there, and I literally was walking back in the door 45 minutes later. I had been busted out of the tournament, left in shame, was literally ordering poker books while at a stoplight off of Amazon on the way home, realizing, “Wow, this game has changed.

Chris Potenza: I don’t know if I still know it.” And Jon, you know me personally a little bit. I tend to dive into things pretty deep, and that started really what’s become this three-year journey of, of trying to get really good by digging deeper and investing a large portion of my time in, in trying to put myself in maybe the, the top 5% of, of the folks that play.

Jon Meyer: So you’ve hit on at least three issues I wanna talk about, but let’s talk first about what changed so much in the time you took off from the time when you came back?

Chris Potenza: Yeah. You know, I think that the first go-around, certainly there weren’t the same number of technical tools involved to be able to study.

Chris Potenza: Today, there are things called solvers, and basically what they do is they have two super computers go and play against each other and model out what the perfect play would be in every situation. And while there’s no way that any human could go and memorize the outputs to that and the various charts that come out of it, what we can do is start to learn heuristics, and I think we’ve just learned more about what the proper long-term EV play is, or positive EV play would be.

Chris Potenza: There was a time 20 years ago when everybody was just starting this poker boom that I think aggression trumped everything. And while aggression is still very, very important, I think it’s about picking your spots, being educated, and knowing when to turn it on and when to turn it off.

Jon Meyer: All right. So now you’re really pushing my buttons.

Jon Meyer: So I have a, a bunch of questions. One is, when you came back, you really had to put in more hours, and this is similar to investing, in anything we do in life. In fact, I would argue this is similar to retirement. Now, people don’t think about it as, “I gotta put time into this,” but you put a lot of time into learning again.

Jon Meyer: How much time did you put in to that alone? ‘Cause this fascinates me.

Chris Potenza:So for a lot of players, I think that, you know, they might consider playing being the same as studying. And undoubtedly, you gain experience from playing. So there’s opportunities. You could find some places to play online. You could certainly go to your local card room.

Chris Potenza: And I think when I first got back into it, I did a lot of that, and probably didn’t go as well as I liked, and I realized that there was a whole other side of, of getting better that I need to invest in. And that really took me down a rabbit hole of what was first, you know, perhaps reading printed material and, you know, weaving in various tools that I could study, and then getting to a place that I really need to weave in extra help.

Chris Potenza: So, you know, there’s a number of different poker training sites with canned videos or classes that you could take, and I took that as far as I could go. And honestly, I, I eventually got to a place that I ended up hiring a poker coach that would … We would s- do one or two one-hour sessions a week where we were talking about different parts of the game or analyzing perhaps some of those sessions that I had before to, to really understand both holistically what a session might have looked like for me, and then even individual spots.

Chris Potenza: And, and really it was … It, it almost became a, a 60/40 split. I still play a lot, but I probably for every hour that I play, I probably study for two at the end of the day. And, and I think that that’s really separated me from the pack and has, has allowed me to become one of the better players.

Jon Meyer: So that’s my thought when I hear you is This is similar to investing.

Jon Meyer: It’s all about your process. If your process is solid, you’re probably gonna have decent outcomes. And I think what’s interesting to me, ’cause I think I’ve heard you say this in the past, don’t confuse luck with your process.

Chris Potenza: 100%.

Jon Meyer: That’s kind of what you’re saying, right?

Chris Potenza: No doubt. And, and I think it’s … I, I think you draw really smart comparisons with investing, but speaking specifically about poker, like you can’t take bad luck out of the game, and you also have to be realistic about good luck, right?

Chris Potenza: There is positive and negative variance to everything. But I think poker’s a math game, and it’s about putting yourself in the best possible position that you can and putting your opponents in the best possible position that you could put them in, the worst for them, that it’s really difficult decisions that they have to make.

Chris Potenza: Now, you know, you can’t take all of the probabilities out of something, right? So is somebody gonna hit a one-outer and you’re gonna lose? Sure. It happened to me last night, right? Are you gonna hit that one-outer once in a while and, and feel like you’re the greatest poker player in the world? Sure. But it’s about stepping back and realizing that there is that variance either way and just making sure that your process is sound.

Chris Potenza: You know, I, I played a lot of poker tournaments at the World Series this year, and I think that the one that I- Absolutely felt like I played the best in was not the one that I made the most money in, but the one that I thought I made the most really sound, great decisions in. And, you know, I think it’s just about preparedness and keeping educated.

Chris Potenza: A- and, you know, not to get off the poker track or investing track, but at one point in my life when I was working for pro sports teams, I, I worked directly for a guy named Lou Lamoriello, who’s probably considered to be one of the best general managers ever. He ran the, the New Jersey Devils at their most successful time.

Chris Potenza: And I remember having a conversation with Lou where he said, “Hey, look, you can’t, you, you can’t put together a blueprint that is gonna absolutely win you the Stanley Cup every year. All you can do is go and put in all of the preparation and do all of the things you can to put yourself as one of the top five teams in the league.

Chris Potenza: And if you do that, there’s gonna be pucks that bounce certain ways. There’s injuries that are gonna happen.” You’re, you’re setting yourself up to be in that s- that grouping of p- of teams that has a realistic chance of, of winning. And I think probably the same holds true for poker, right? And when I started my journey with my coach and he asked me what my goal was, I said, “Look, I, you know, I, I can’t study with the intent of being the best player.”

Chris Potenza: You know? I, I don’t think that happens. I think that all you can do is construct a process that puts you into a subset of people that have a realistic chance of winning every time they step in a room. And, and, and that was my goal when I started.

Jon Meyer: So what you’re kinda saying too is a losing decision can be a good decision.

Chris Potenza: I think a losing, a losing outcome is not always due to a bad decision.

Jon Meyer: Okay.

Chris Potenza: Does that make sense?

Jon Meyer: So talk me through a hand, ’cause it’s kinda like life.

Chris Potenza: Yeah.

Jon Meyer: I think so many people in life Probably operate from a position of I started with a premise and I just have to see it through. But what I hear you saying too sometimes is there’s incomplete information, and as I get new information, I have to pivot.

Chris Potenza: Sure. And I think that you could take the same starting hand, for example, and there are right ways to play it and wrong ways to play it depending on the situation in a tournament, for example. So if I, let’s say, have ace king and I am Early in a tournament, we’re just starting, we all have our starting stacks, and somebody goes and decides to raise all in against me very first hand of a tournament, boy, from a, i- it’s

Chris Potenza: It may not … That might not be the best time to call that off.

Jon Meyer: That feels like it would freak me out at that point.

Chris Potenza: And it’s happened to me, right? I mean, I, I had a tournament at the World Series two years ago where it was I looked down at kings the very first hand, and somebody went all in before me, which is almost unheard of when you, when you’re that deep, and I had to make a decision of if that was the right play.

Chris Potenza: And, you know, that particular time I had kings, so my … I knew I was gonna be a favorite against everything but one hand. It made sense. But if I had ace-king, gosh, it’s, it, it’s probably the … You can make a case that it’s a, it’s the second-best starting hand in poker, maybe the third, but it’s just not worth going and drawing out at that point.

Chris Potenza: There could be a better spot. You know, there’s still another time in a tournament where maybe you are, you know, say that there’s 100 people that are gonna make the money, and you are 100 people away from that spot, so you’re still not terribly close, but you’ve got a, an opportunity to put yourself in a really, really strong position to not just make the money, but really go for it in the end.

Chris Potenza: And that same situation, you know, depending on my read on a player and where they’re positioned at the table, I may very well make the decision that, no, I’m gonna run with this even though, you know, I, I could be a, you know … A- and by the way, a- ace-king versus any random two, a, a pair of cards outside of aces or kings is about a, a, a 55/45 dog, right?

Chris Potenza: So you’re not far off. You know, maybe 60/40, 55/45. Either way, it’s really close. So you got a pretty darn good chance of squeaking this out. And in that situation, depending on where I am in the tournament, what my edge is against the rest of the field, I may very well decide, you know what? This is the moment that I need to go and put myself over the top and put myself in a position to potentially punish other guys down the stretch.

Chris Potenza: And yeah, so I, I, I might very well decide to go and call that all-in bet. There’s still another time when it returns to when perhaps I’m, a time when I’m one off the money, and there’s a case where, you know, th- there’s a whole series of studies that- You know, if, if the other guy has more chips than you and you’re one off the money, and they go all in and you look down at aces, it’s a very, very, very real thing to fold the aces there, even though there’s a pretty good chance that you’re an 82% favorite.

Chris Potenza: But depending on what the money jumps look like, there’s a moment to go in and be ultra-conservative. And, you know, so it’s three spots in a tournament, perhaps with even the same hand, ’cause you could say with ace-king as easily as aces, where you’re making a different decision based off of situationally where you are in the moment and what it means for you later.

Jon Meyer: So are you saying that gut trumps math part of the time?

Chris Potenza: I would always use math as my baseline, always. So I would never make a decision based off of a favorite hand or I feel like a card is coming. But I think that there are … In, in poker, there’s a concept called risk premium, where even there is a, you need additional, additional equity beyond the math to make a decision worth going in a certain direction, if that makes sense.

Jon Meyer: So now you’re touching on something I wanted to bring up, ’cause now you’re getting into risk. I love risk.

Chris Potenza: As do I.

Jon Meyer: Yeah. I think everything in life is about risk in some ways. We don’t always assess it that way. But what percent of the time … Let’s put it differently. How much information do you need, 50%, 60%, 70%, for you to say it’s worth taking that risk?

Chris Potenza: Boy, there’s so many different variables, right? And again, you’re always thinking in the back of your head what the math looks like. So, so th- that’s my baseline, and if I don’t have any other information as far as a table read or anything else as far as, you know, what the overall temperament of a table might be or what my own image might look like, I’m always gonna go to the math.

Chris Potenza: Or perhaps I’ve seen how other players have played and the cards that they’ve laid down, and I’ve been able to label them certain ways. So I always use that to start with, right? What, what would be the perfect play here, and how close to that can I get? And then I’m looking at adjustments based off of certain players, certain, you know, what time in a tournament I’m at, I’m at.

Chris Potenza: So for example, if I knew that you were sitting to my left, and you tended to call too many hands. So I … There’s a certain grouping of hands that you should open a hand w- uh, open play with from different positions. So let’s say that I’m in a position where 24% of the starting hands are ones that I should consider opening the bet with.

Chris Potenza: If I realize that you play too wide, then I might extend that to 30 or 40%, knowing that that 30 or 40% probably trumps Most of what you’re, what you’re gonna start with, and I’m always putting myself in a good position.

Jon Meyer: Interesting. So you, you talked about reading the table. Just to go into that a little bit more because in life we have to read other people, we have to read situations, we have to read the table.

Jon Meyer: So explain that a little bit more, what you’re looking for.

Chris Potenza: 100%. It’s always the first question people ask me when I play poker, right? “Are you good at reading people? Are you good at reading tells?” And I think that comes from, you know, most media. You watch a poker movie or you watch Rounders and you’re, you know, you’re watching the, the Oreo cookie thing.

Chris Potenza: Or, you know, you hear some bead of sweat coming down or they’ve got a strange pulse. And the reality is that almost none of that happens at a real poker table. At the end of the day, there are a couple of things that you might be able to pick up, live tells, but most of the reads come from paying attention and seeing what people…

Chris Potenza: Once a hand ends, if it ends with people showing their cards, if you paid attention and can kinda mentally backtrack through the hands, then you have an idea of historically what they do with certain hands, so to speak. If I open from first position and somebody– Th- there is a series of hands that somebody should think about calling with, somebody should think about raising with, and somebody should think about folding based on each position that they are to act after me.

Chris Potenza: If I raise a hand, they call, we get to showdown, and they perhaps Played a hand that they should have folded or raised a hand that they should have called or something that was outside the norm, that’s a mental note that I’m taking that I’m gonna kinda put into my file bank for later as how I use against them.

Chris Potenza: I’m also looking at, okay, this person might raise this percentage of the pot when they’re on a draw. This person is always checking when they have second pair. Those, so player tendencies tend to be more accurate than physical, live tells, and you spend a lot of time when you’re at the table, if you’re smart and you’re not spending the whole time scrolling on your phone, there’s a lot to be had by just paying attention.

Jon Meyer: So reverse that. When has someone read you? When has someone, like … And, and I’d even throw out there, when did emotion take you to the wrong spot and someone beat you?

Chris Potenza: Yeah. Look, I think everybody’s human, right? So I think that I’m certainly not immune to tilting, as they say it, right? I mean, every poker player has had pu- had pocket aces and had a giant pot that they were an 82% favorite, and that miracle card comes out on the river for somebody else, and, you know, it kinda throws you in a tailspin.

Chris Potenza: And any player who tells you that they don’t, that they haven’t been affected by that is lying. And I think that there’s moments, gosh, I think at every tournament, you’re gonna tilt i- in every single tournament you play, in all likelihood. There will be a gut-check moment, and it’s because you can’t win or lose a tournament without giving or taking a few bad beats.

Chris Potenza: And part of the game is how well you’re able to kinda steady the ship and not panic, and how quickly you could return to your baseline, ’cause there’s gonna be a couple hands where, you know, gosh, I just had my aces cracked and my next cards are, wow, it’s, you know, king of spades, seven of diamonds, and I’m the first to act.

Chris Potenza: I really shouldn’t play this, but God, that guy beat me with a crap hand. Why can’t I go and lay that on the next guy? And you allow yourself to get caught up in it, right? Poker’s a game of patience. It’s a game of discipline. It- but it’s also a game of emotion, right? And there’s times that you’re trying to find that person who’s tilting and making, and putting them in even worse decisions later

Jon Meyer: So let me ask this.

Jon Meyer: Do you tilt when you’re bored?

Chris Potenza: I, I can, yeah. I think that that’s one of the things that I continually work on, right? Because poker tournaments are really long. You followed along when I was at the World Series, and my days would-

Jon Meyer: Oh, yeah. I loved it.

Chris Potenza: Yeah, look, you know, the days there start, you’re at a table typically, you know, sometime between 10:00 AM and 11:00 AM in the morning.

Chris Potenza: You are playing, in most of those tournaments, you’re, you’re perhaps playing 11 one-hour levels, and there are some breaks in there and a dinner break. So you’re typically not done till 1:00 AM in the morning. That’s a really long stretch. And, you know, in poker, you know, I think on average, you’re supposed to play somewhere between…

Chris Potenza: If you average out from all positions and the starting hands, you’re probably only playing somewhere between 16 and 28% of the cards that you’re dealt, but there’s no guarantee. You know, the, it, that’s an average, right? So it’s not rare that you might go 45 minutes and never get a hand that is one that you should open and, or maybe you do finally get something and open that is kind of at the bottom of a range, and there’s a bet behind you and a, and a four bet after that, and now you’ve gotta fold down that one hand that you’re gonna play.

Chris Potenza: So it is a mental exercise in patience and discipline, for sure. And I think that’s something that every poker player has to fight against because look, you, you go to the casino, you wanna go play cards. You don’t wanna sit around. So over time you start to understand and embrace the discipline. And, and look, the reality is that, that the good players are able to be super disciplined but also Know when the time is to kind of unleash the beast, so to speak, and turn on the aggression.

Chris Potenza: And, a- and they can do that and not get bored.

Jon Meyer: Well, when I think of what you’re just saying, it’s no different than investing. When people get bored or when people think you should be taking action, they make mistakes.

Chris Potenza: Mm-hmm.

Jon Meyer: I would say to your point, 75% plus of the time, the right decision is no action.

Chris Potenza: Undoubtedly.

Jon Meyer: And, and that’s why I, I’m kind of curious about this. It just feels like that’s the bigger part of life sometimes.

Chris Potenza: Yeah. It’s, it’s funny because it’s a pretty common story among poker players where you’ll hear somebody tell us- tell their story of a tournament, and it’ll be, “Gosh, I was card dead for what felt like hours, and I watched my, my, my chips dwindle down, and then I…

Chris Potenza: Well, gosh, I played this terrible hand ’cause I had to make something happen.” And, you know, my immediate response is, “Well, yeah, you’re right. You made something happen. You’re out of the tournament,” you know? Yeah, if you’re not careful, that’s exactly what’s gonna happen, right? So look, it’s hard not to be bored.

Chris Potenza: It’s hard to pick your spots. But y- I, I think finding those key and critical spots is I would imagine what makes the, the, the real difference in investing as well, right?

Jon Meyer: Totally. So you kind of touched on this already, but what does your post-game review process look like?

Chris Potenza: So, um A tournament’s really taxing, right?

Chris Potenza: So you, you do try to decompress a little bit, but I think anybody who plays and plays at a high level is gonna remember hands. There are times at the table I try to stay off my phone. You can be on the phone when you’re not in play. At the end of a big hand or one that I thought was memorable or one that perhaps I had a question about my own actions and was it right, I will

Chris Potenza: I’ve kinda developed my own shorthand to kinda write down exactly what the action was in a particular hand. And over the course of a session, I will probably try to write down somewhere between 10 and 20 different hands. And after a session or a, a day of a poker tournament, I’m probably taking an hour after the event, after I’ve had, had a chance to cool down, and I do subscribe to a couple of tools that tap into the power of a solver, and I will do my best to recreate the hand and look what the perfect positive EV play was according to the computer and try to understand not only what the play was, but why the play was right, and try to draw a comparison so I can work that into my game.

Chris Potenza: And then I will also … You know, I, I keep just a simple note tab on my phone with different parts of my game that I feel like I’ve gotta work on. And what was really interesting at the World Series, when you play every day, ’cause I, I did play 23 straight days of poker, and I worked as well. I got up in the morning and worked, but it was, you know, it was a good solid 10 to 11 hours.

Chris Potenza: And when you’re, you’re playing that much, you start to recognize spots like, oh gosh, you know, I am the out of position caller and it’s a low flop, and this guy just led into me with, uh, an over bet I’m uncomfortable, and I was in a similar spot yesterday. I was just as uncomfortable. I think this is an area that I need to study about what the best way is to do that, i- to, to handle these situations.

Chris Potenza: So, you know, I, I, I use the immediate time after a tournament to recap those specific hands so I, I can understand what I did right and wrong. And then I try to look over several sessions at some common threads so I have some real themes that … And I can be honest with myself, and really self-aware, “Hey, where are my leaks?

Chris Potenza: Where can I go and improve and tighten up my own game so I can compete at a higher level?”

Jon Meyer: That’s, that’s the one thing I’ve appreciated about talking to people that gamble, because sometimes the … You know this. The joke is, “Oh, it- the stock market’s just a bunch of gamblers.”

Chris Potenza: Sure.

Jon Meyer: I think the stock market’s less gamblers

Jon Meyer: Or I’m sorry. It’s less gamblers just because there’s no … So many people don’t have a process, and so many people don’t have what I would call the humility to acknowledge their weaknesses the way I’ve seen most professional gamblers do it. So it’s just interesting to listen to that. Let’s step out of that for a second and, and look at the bigger life.

Jon Meyer: What’s poker taught you about life or about how you’re running your business? You know, ’cause you’re a very disciplined person in poker, so.

Chris Potenza: Yeah. E- well, I’m, I’m disciplined, but I try to be aggressive at certain spots, and I think … You know, we’ve talked so much about discipline, but it’s also about being able to change speeds, right?

Chris Potenza: And to recognize that this is my moment to go for it, and this is where I could separate myself from the pack, so to speak. And I think that, you know, running my own business, I’ve learned that there’s a benefit to some consistency and discipline a- along the way, but also not being afraid when you recognize that there is a, you know, a plus EV, positive expected value, decision or opportunity out there, that it’s time to go for it.

Chris Potenza: And, you know, I’m, I’m just by nature somebody who embraces risk. But it’s not … I, I, I don’t embrace risk just for the thrill of it. I don’t, I don’t play poker just for the thrill of it. There’s a … Like, I wanna win. I wanna make money. I see this … That’s how I measure myself in poker. It’s not just, “Hey, I had a good time.”

Chris Potenza: That tends to come with winning. And I think the same holds true f- from a business perspective. You know, I do try to keep myself educated, keep myself in, in positions where I have an edge, and look for areas that are … that there is, you know, an advantage that I could take advan- th- that, that I could capitalize on, and not being afraid to take that

Jon Meyer: Right.

Jon Meyer: The thing you said there I felt interesting is changing speeds. I don’t think enough people in life think about speed as an advantage, but sometimes that speed up, slow down thing is a huge advantage. I’ve seen it in the markets, I’ve seen it… I’ve even seen it in tax planning sometimes, so.

Chris Potenza: Yeah. I mean, I, I think that that’s the key, right?

Chris Potenza: I, I, I run a business that we’re, we’re purposely small so we can be nimble. It doesn’t take a lot to turn the ship here, so to speak, so we are able to go and capitalize on things. And look, there’s certain times during the year, you know, right outside my office I’ve got six people here working for the summer because I identified a gap in the market and one that I felt like I needed to take advantage of these particular six months.

Chris Potenza: So look, we, you know, after years of being a one-man show, I decided to… I, I looked at the numbers, I did some study. I, I, I did my best to really extrapolate out where the edges were for me, and then, you know, when I understood that I had an edge and it was a, it was a, a, a plus EV decision for me, I went all in, right?

Chris Potenza: And whereas I could have hired one or two people, instead I hired six because I felt like it was that much of an opportunity. So we’re not about portion control. When there is a, a positive opportunity, I want it all, which is no different than when I’ve got a great hand, Jon, and I know that I got you. If you’re my opponent, what’s- what I’m thinking of when I’m deciding what my next move is, it’s, it’s not how I’m gonna win this particular street or this particular hand from Jon.

Chris Potenza: It’s How am I gonna get every single one of his chips, right? And I think from a business perspective, that same thing holds true, right? Where there are gaps and there are places where I think that there’s a real advantage for my companies, I, I wanna take everything. And I, I don’t know if that’s greedy or gluttonous, but I think that that’s just, you know, part of what I’ve been taught in my, in my, my night job of playing poker, that there’s no benefit to, to, to not doing that.

Jon Meyer: Yeah. You’ve also just taught me to never play you.

Jon Meyer: So we can meet at the bar, but I’m not playing.

Chris Potenza: All right, fair enough.

Jon Meyer: So as we close this up, I, I kinda wanna ask, like, what have I missed, if, if anything? I don’t know. What have I missed?

Chris Potenza: I mean, look, I don’t, I don’t think you missed a lot, right? I mean, it was… You know, you had the opportunity to follow me at, at the World Series of Poker.

Chris Potenza: The one thing that I tend to do, and I, I don’t know if it’s relevant for your crowd, but I, I tend to do big things. You probably also followed me when I did an Ironman triathlon. One of my signature moves is to… You know, I tend to be very public with what I’m doing. I don’t do anything in the shadows. I feel like I tend to tell people what I’m doing.

Chris Potenza: I tend to make it pretty public. And yeah, I may be an attention hog, and part of it is that, but I think, you know, a lot of it is I look for ways that I could keep myself accountable, that, you know, I am pushing myself to succeed, but I’m not doing it where nobody sees me, right? Like i- if I’m gonna fail, it’s gonna be really publicly, so that puts a level of pressure on myself to just make sure that I’m prepared enough and I’m making good decisions that aren’t rash or emotional, because I have done this so publicly that I’m gonna have to explain myself later.

Chris Potenza: And I don’t know that that is particularly pertinent to… I guess it might take some work to figure out how we compare that to the investment world, but if there was anything that’s worth touching on specific to my journey, it’s probably that.

Jon Meyer: Yeah, I, actually I could equate it to the journey that I, I deal with a lot with clients.

Jon Meyer: Because to your point, when you make it public it, and, and make it accountable, you probably are gonna win.

Chris Potenza: Mm-hmm.

Jon Meyer: And where I see it the most show up is when people say, “Well, I wanna do this,” but they don’t make it public. Like, “I wanna retire when I’m 57,” but they don’t tell anybody.

Chris Potenza: Right.

Jon Meyer: Right? Like, it’s not gonna happen.

Chris Potenza: 100%. If, if you don’t hang yourself out there, then those are… That’s just a wish list at the end of the day, right? When you, when you make it public and you post it, you know, a- and you’re communicating it, you’re a little on the hook, right? So you gotta by hook or by crook find a way to get it done, and that’s always pushed me for success.

Chris Potenza: Now, look, I, I don’t want anybody to think that I don’t still work for a living. I, I do well playing poker. I’m not a professional poker player, but I have had a level of success, and I think that that is directly attributable put, to the work that I put in both on and off the felt, and my willingness to be super accountable and find ways to keep myself accountable.

Jon Meyer: Mm-hmm. Yeah, with that, now that we know it’s kinda skill, but it’s a lot of process. I like it.

Chris Potenza: A lot of process.

Jon Meyer: Let’s, let’s wrap it up. I wanna thank you for coming on, Chris, and if anyone is interested in what you’re doing at Front Burner or anywhere else, how can they get ahold of you?

Chris Potenza: Yeah, so both of our websites have ways to contact us.

Chris Potenza: That’s probably the best spot, right? So rinkadnetwork.com or FrontBurnersports.com. Both of them describe what we do, how we do it, the places we, we, we actually play in, and ways to contact us. And we’d love to hear from folks.

Jon Meyer: That’s great. And the next time you’re on, we will talk about the Timberwolves.

Chris Potenza: Fair enough.

Jon Meyer: Thanks for coming on today, Chris, and if you’d like to hear any more from my podcast or anything about BGM, please visit us at bgm360.com. Everyone have a great day.

Chris Potenza: Thanks, Jon.

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