Hey there 👋,
I left the UK.
Sold my last online business.
Went all in on poker — properly, not as a hobby. Serious study, thousands of online hands a day, the World Series of Poker Europe in Prague.
Now I’ve folded on that too.
Here's what nobody tells you about poker.
The environment is draining. The people, mostly. The energy, almost always.
Live tournaments are just boring. Play two hours, fifteen minute break, sprint back, rush down, seconds to spare. Repeat for three days.
The poker influencers and content creators are also fake. They look miserable. Then the camera turns on and suddenly everything is amazing for YouTube.
And so many of them are promoting CoinPoker for the affiliate commission. You deposit in crypto, it gets held in USDT — but your table funds sit in their own shitcoin. Sub $10M market cap. No longer tracked on CoinMarketCap. At any point, what you bring to the table can theoretically go to zero. I've seen how that ends.
And the site I’ve been playing on GG Poker has insanely brutal rake — over 6 big blinds per 100 hands (I’ve been tracking). To beat it you grind leaderboards, chasing volume that keeps going up every day. You're not playing poker anymore. You're playing for rakeback.
The sites only squeeze harder over time.
I ran 20 buy-ins under EV over my last 20,000 hands.
That's not a complaint. That's data.
But once you truly understand variance, you understand this:
There is nothing stopping that from continuing.
So I folded.
The experiment just gave me its answer.
Online poker is no longer a game I want to win.
And whatever edge you currently have, AI is coming for it…
AI is coming for everything.
Not eventually. Now.
In Prague, I tested the three main agentic tools, only Claude Cowork actually completed the task. I watched a message sent from my phone trigger a computer to attempt work without a human in the loop.
The accuracy will improve. The infrastructure is already here.
And nothing is stopping a tool like Cowork from eventually taking over a MacBook and playing perfect poker against everyone:
It can't do it yet. But it will. And when it does, the human edge online disappears.
AI is eating every industry it touches. Someone has to help local businesses navigate that before they get eaten. In Central Europe, almost nobody is doing it yet.
That's the gap.
Real businesses. Real owners. Real payroll that can be replaced with AI systems — not eventually, right now, using tools that exist today.
That's what I’ll be doing here in Slovakia.
And I’ll be writing about it as it happens.
No more Coffee Poker. The chapter's done. This newsletter is back at RichardPatey.com — home of Folded.
More soon.
Cheers, Richard (@richardpatey)