We Asked Regs: Music, Videos, or Silence During Poker Games?

We found out who can't imagine a session without music or podcasts, and who listens exclusively to the bet sizings, boards, and ranges. We also found out which tracks are best for making money, which ones can be trusted at important final tables, and which ones will help you survive a downswing.

Oleg Wh1teBaron // t.me/C freeroll up to a Million

Music during a session is wrong, especially if it has lyrics. Someday I will become a professional and play without noise :(

In the meantime, I like to play to techno, here is a whole bunch of similar stuff:

Lucky song especially for final tables:

Playlist in case of a serious downswing:

Anton sandr1x // Sandrix's Diary: The Chronicles of Chuykorega

I play in silence, with MAXIMUM concentration. Simply because I can't afford it any other way – music starts competing with poker for mental resources, and as a result you play less and worse.

I've heard that there are people who manage to combine music and gaming normally, but their strategy is more, let's say, automated, while the regs come up with a lot on the fly, for this they need a wider bandwidth, so to speak.

I use music as therapy after playing, for example, this one.

Nikita Ebaaa11 // t.me/Ebaaa11 | KING OF LAS VEGAS 🧡 | VSMPZD

Lately I've been playing to this and similar channels:

I also always play important finals to music.

Here are the most auristic tracks for me:

This is track number one, there is no better one. I did all the biggest drifts to it.

There is also a remix of this track, I listen to it even more often.

But I have been listening to these tracks, no joke, since 2020.

At the same time, I can listen to the same track for the entire session, 8-12 hours, without any problems at all (as strange as it may sound).

Sergey Radeo_ // Poker saved my life!

I prefer to play in silence. I used to play with music, but then I realized that lyrics distracted me, even in a language I didn't know, and I switched to music without lyrics. Over time, I came to the conclusion that just Lo-Fi in the background distracts me too.

Silence is our friend in poker. At the tables, I want to listen not to music, but to the sounds of bet sizings, boards and ranges!

Sergey yx0 // t.me/BugS_Team

If I play a dense session with a large number of tables, then almost always with music. In the morning, I prefer Radio Record with their morning hosts. If I play in a different time period, then I will choose music with a predominance of guitar riffs and good vocals. Recently, I have been actively hooked on domestic punk rock, preferably from the early 2000s, something like Yorsh or Tarakany. I also discovered contemporaries – Plan Lomonosova, I would like to dwell on them in more detail.

So, Plan Lomonosova – I really like their lyrics, I feel a spiritual kinship with the author. Over the past few weeks, every time I went heads-up or at least 3-max, I turned on their top songs:

Especially the last track, "Magic Wheel", fits very well into any heads-up and literally makes you mentally outplay your opponent 😈

It is worth mentioning separately about the rink of 1-2 tables. In such cases, I love to turn on some abstruse podcast with a bunch of technical vocabulary in the background, for example, Alexey Semikhatov (physics) or Vladimir Surdin (astronomy). There is nothing better than dragging a nice tournament to the reflections of an MSU professor on space and the Universe 🙈

Andrey Zgirovsky // Optimistic Nihilism

I definitely don't play while watching YouTube or TV series, it's too distracting. Usually, there's a lot to think about during hands, and if your hand reaches out to open YouTube, it's a sign that you need to take a break or end the session. In general, when the game is intense, I prefer silence. In more relaxed times, when there are few tables, I can turn on background music, but it should be familiar, not annoying, so as not to receive too much information. Something instrumental, like Hans Zimmer's movie soundtracks or classical music – this stimulates the train of thought.

Fedya Lorem // t.me/LoremCDMX. Poker and karaoke

When I was just starting out, I played while watching TV series – and I played 20+ tables (I remember the meme from Forheili's blog, where he has 12 windows with House).

Now I play mostly to my usual Spotify playlist.

I try to choose tracks so that I want to open up a little less than usual. I'm sure that for a normal person, it's better to play in silence, but my ADHD makes my thoughts run wild non-stop, and music helps to shut them up a little.

Yura Joke703 // t.me/Joke's house

At the beginning of my poker journey, when I was beating PLO50-100-200, zoom200, and even when I started playing PLO500, I always listened to music. And I was guilty of YouTube. The stronger I became, the more factors I had to analyze, the more complex the strategy became, and the more clearly I noticed that I simply lacked concentration and time. There was too much knowledge influencing decision-making, and all of it had to be taken into account during the hand. At first, I listened to music, and when a difficult moment arose, I paused it. Then I stopped listening altogether.

Why do we want to listen to music during a session? – We get bored. And when you completely occupy your brain with a cool logic game – you don’t need music. It’s cool, fun and exciting without it.

Now I play all my sessions while streaming + many actions and analyses are done automatically, so sometimes I allow myself to listen to music. But here it’s probably more “for the stream”. And I play my work session strictly without music, Telegram, YouTube, and any other distractions.

Listening to music, chatting with friends, and watching YouTube during a session is strictly minus EV. This minus can be calculated. I think it will be about minus 2-3bb/100 to the win rate, if we are talking about a normally plus reg with a good select.

The main question here is: "Are you ready to sacrifice 1-2-3 thousand dollars to enjoy music?" My personal answer is no, but everyone will have their own.

Now on the stream, I listen to either my playlist or modern classical music, which has been really cool lately – you don’t get distracted by the lyrics, just beautiful music playing in the background.

But in any case, for a professional poker player, this is a minus :D

Dmitry timenow // Maza: Offliner without playing for 15bb winrate

I tried playing to music and TV series. I gave it all up when I heard that it makes you lose concentration, and you don't even notice how it drops. Then I tried playing to classical music, even though it's not my type of music. In the end, I came to the conclusion that for me personally, any music is -EV and I gave it up.

Catch27 // Catch the Luck

Silence during the game is simply unacceptable for me. More precisely, when I first started playing, I worked in silence, because each situation was unique. I had to check the charts, and remember the combinations.

Later, when the actions became more routine and mechanical, I started to connect music. By the way, it does not distract me at all, it only charges me. But sometimes it gets boring, and when there is moving after moving, it can even start to irritate.

I also spent quite a long time playing to streams. I really liked Lebronka's and Fenomenico's streams, and sometimes I played to Semin and Filatov. But streams have one significant drawback – they are interactive. I always wanted to write something in the chat, and when you play 12-15 MTT tables, then each remark is a guaranteed 2-3 sitouts at the tables. And when you play spins/twisters, then writing in the chat is completely unrealistic, so I subsequently gave up streaming.

I played and still play to sports. Now it's mostly hockey. In the old days, when I still followed football, I played to the Champions League and always to the World and European Championships, but after Euro 2021 I completely lost interest in it. I played to Formula 1 – the American stages coincided with the playing time, but for the last two years I have hardly watched the broadcasts.

I started trying to play while watching TV series at the end of 2017. I wrote about it in more detail on my blog .

I also wrote about the difference between playing with TV series and with music . In short, if I need to play intensively for several hours (to get a bonus, to take a higher place in the race) – I turn on the music and play more tables. If I just need to work, then I prefer a more moderate mode – I turn on a TV series and play fewer tables, but for a longer time.

I have already explained my rating system more than once:

I also decided to change the rating system a little. More precisely, to divide it. Now there will be not one rating for films, but three. The first is the actual rating of the film. The second is the convenience of playing to the film, I used to often lower the ratings a little, because it was difficult to play to the film, mainly because of its excessive dynamism. Although balance is important here. If the film is boring, I start paying more attention to the tables, noticing the moves, getting mad about them. If it is dynamic, and I can’t be distracted from the screen, I still get distracted, and then rewind back, in short, it’s still crap. The third rating is how lucky I was to see this film (well, how can a poker player not rate his luck? 🤣).

I posted the criteria for the first rating earlier – a ten-point scale, in which the worst rating of 5 is a three on a five-point scale, everything below is crap and garbage that I won't even watch, and 8 is a five. 9 is a masterpiece from my humble point of view, and 10... I already wrote about them in the post about my top 10 😉

The second assessment is on a five-point scale, that’s all it takes.

The third is a pure ten-point scale, where 1 is a terrible downswing, 10 is an upswing with a steep win (jackpot, big win in MTT, etc.).

You can throw together a list of lucky movies) But it's unlikely to be universal. After all, one may be lucky to this movie, and another not. I remember how I used to make a music playlist for myself – I marked the songs that worked for me, and threw out the ones that made me run away. As a result, I collected 30-40 songs that "bring luck" and sat down to play an MTT. I spent a lot of money that night 🤣🤣🤣

It would be more useful to make a list of comfortable films and series to watch while playing. But I, again, have written about them more than once in the blog and even on the Main Page.

The most comfortable for me are Friends, Gilmore Girls, Teenagers and Korean dramas.

By the way, despite the fact that I always point out “Gilmore Girls” as the perfect series for me to binge, one of the most terrible downstreaks happened during the period of its viewing, when in a month and a half I was short 1,000 buy-ins in “unbreakable” twisters. But it is quite possible that because of this series I did not go crazy during that difficult time, it greatly helped to smooth out negative emotions. Therefore, I always remember it with warmth in my soul.

I also remember the TV series “How I Met Your Mother” .

I also can’t help but mention the film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” .

One of the latest finds is the Korean series “Weak Hero” .

Sasha AlexZA3 // t.me/AlexZA3 poker road to $5,000,000 🚀

For the last year and a half I've been playing without music, it worked out well. In August I decided to play with music and it worked out even better))

Usually, I just turn on my wave on Yandex Music and that's it. True, I played this finale without music, and I listened to my inner melody.