Should I enjoy life in my 20's or make money?

Bencb addresses his recent tweet thread about sacrifice that sparked a lot of controversy in the poker community.

This idea sparked a lot of controversy on Twitter when I posted a thread on how you should spend your time in your 20’s, so I wanted to clarify some things here.

The #1 thing that helped me become successful in Poker and building one of the most prominent poker schools in the world during my 20s...
It trumps everything else.
See below 👇👇👇

— bencb (@bencb789) November 8, 2022

It’s okay if you want to go out every weekend and have a bunch of fun while you’re young, but don’t complain when you’re in your 30’s and you haven’t made it as far as others. Many 30-40 year olds that I speak to regret that they didn’t work as hard as they could have when they were younger. Now they still live paycheck to paycheck, looking uphill at the long road to success.

Some people misinterpreted my tweet as saying that you can’t have any fun at all in your 20’s, and that everything you do should be focused on making money. This isn’t true at all. You can still go to your best friend’s wedding or have a week of fun in Las Vegas. Just realize that if your focus and day to day actions don’t reflect your long term vision, you will fall behind others in your field who are willing to sacrifice some fun.

Have fun, but remember your goals

Ideally, your 20’s should be about finding your direction in life. You should be trying different careers and businesses, developing skill sets, and meeting people in different niches doing different things. Spend your time figuring out what path is best for you. Don’t feel pressured to commit, but once you find something you want to be good at, use your 20’s to dedicate a lot of time towards getting very good at it.

For instance, if you know you want to become a professional poker player, your time and energy now should be spent getting as good as possible at playing poker. If you want to dabble in poker and keep partying every weekend that’s fine, but just know it’ll be that much longer of a road to the top later, and many players will pass you by.

It takes extreme dedication to become an elite poker player. I learned this for myself while studying and competing with players like Fedor Holz, Steffen Sontheimer and other greats of the game. They weren’t ten times smarter than everyone else, they simply had the focus and dedication to pass on other activities in the pursuit of their goal.

If you really want to succeed in life, it’ll take a lot of effort and hard work. Nothing comes easy, but if you spend your 20’s setting yourself up for the future, you’ll have plenty of years to sit back and enjoy what you’ve built later on.

Get our unbeatable Raise Your Edge discounts

Pairrd App by Raise Your Edge

While checking out the most popular courses on our dedicated Raise Your Edge page, you should also have a look at their unique interactive studying tool Pairrd that is coming with engaging video quizzes, range drilling and hand review quizzes, all based on the most up to date GTO ranges out there.

An essential part when learning poker is the ability to think in ranges and understand the why behind them. Raise Your Edge does a great job of getting that across to their students, meticulously breaking down ranges and explaining the reasoning behind them.

However, memorising ranges is quite hard, and often the only way to learn is by making enough costly mistakes to see one's errors. Thankfully, Raise Your Edge provides a powerful tool to circumvent that with Pairrd.

PokerStrategy.com editor Barry Carter has reviewed Pairrd and concluded about the merits of the innovative app:

"Pairrd is a unique interactive studying tool that provides something relatively new to the world of poker training, a way to practice spots without having to play them at the tables. It is essentially a dynamic way to make real poker decisions without risking money. Since most of us learn from experience, it's a natural way to memorise the theory from Raise Your Edge."

Exclusive 10% discount with PokerStrategy.com

You can get started with Pairrd from just $50 per month or save $100 with an annual plan for $497. What's more, if you join via PokerStrategy.com, you will get a discount of 10% when purchasing Pairrd. Just use our link below and the discount is automatically applied during checkout:

Save 10% on Pairrd with PokerStrategy.com

Key Features of Pairrd by Raise Your Edge

• Interactive Weekly Quizzes: Comprehensive library of interactive training spots covering preflop, postflop, GTO and Exploitative. Train in-game scenarios so they become second nature at the tables!
• GTO Preflop Ranges: Preflop tournament ranges included that will immediately step up your game. Accompanied with built-in practice functions, Pairrd will make you a force to be reckoned with.
• Exclusive Video Content: To ensure you fully understand the concepts being trained, quick and easy to digest video explanations are included in the interactive quizzes.
• Study With Friends: Practice and compete with your friends using Pairrd, including sharing hands, private leaderboards and a built-in chat function!

Find out more about Pairrd by Raise Your Edge