Back in 2016, an enterprising young man named Tadas Peckaitis reached out to me to ask for some advice about the poker industry. That initial email turned into a business relationship and eventually into a lovely friendship. As a former professional poker player, Tadas originally envisioned his site, MyPokerCoaching.com, as a portal to get students to sign up for various courses that he had put together. As the years progressed, however, the site’s focus pivoted towards offering free poker training material.
Over the last decade, I’ve watched with pride as Tadas has worked hard to transition from being a poker coach to establishing himself on the media side of the poker industry. While we’re frequently in touch, I thought it would be fun to “check in” with him, almost 10 years after he launched his site, to get his reflections on the site’s evolution.
When you first decided to launch the site, what specific goals did you have?
After playing poker professionally for a couple of years, in 2015 I started coaching on the side. While all of this started with just giving some advice to my friends and helping them out, it soon evolved into a part-time gig where I taught players from the 2+2 forum and launched mypokercoaching as a simple website to provide my poker coaching services.
I never planned this to evolve into anything other than a platform to share my thoughts and a few occasional articles, but I am really glad it did.
What was it that initially made you want to stop playing online poker professionally and pivot towards poker coaching and then poker media?
This was really an organic transition. My biggest concern with poker was that it wasn’t really scalable, and I always wanted to do something that would move me from exchanging my time for money. This is probably the reason I was always involved in some other business endeavours aside of playing. At some point, I decided to try to combine both of these into one. This is how I started recording video courses.
I figured that if I were discussing the same 10 concepts repeatedly with my students, I would rather record some videos and then sell them at a much lower price to a wider audience, but it didn’t pan out that way. I spent a considerable amount of time creating these courses back in the day, when solvers weren’t readily available, and I thought I had developed extremely high-quality content.
That said, many well-known players were launching their own training sites, and I decided to create a platform where I could review their offers, rather than directly competing with their courses. Step-by-step, this became a full-time endeavor over the years, so I started to scale back on playing poker and traveling to concentrate on building the website to give it a real shot.
At what point did you decide to redirect the site’s focus towards offering free poker training material, and why?
It all started with me writing occasional articles. However, as soon as I began promoting other training sites, such as Upswing and Pokercoaching, I realized the gap between paid and free content. I then hired additional writers to help me build a useful strategy library that would be accessible to everyone, and we dove into it.
While the vision of how this should look changed multiple times over the years, I believe we are nearing the final iteration with structured content that helps everyone easily master the basics.
What’s your “60-second elevator pitch” for why someone should visit your site? Who would you say is the site’s primary target audience these days?
If you want to learn poker basics for free and in a structured way, mypokercoaching.com is the only site you need to visit. While I understand the appeal of consuming endless YouTube content and reading random articles, this is actually more a form of entertainment, since it is extremely hard to transition it into actionable knowledge.
You need a structured, step-by-step approach to learn core concepts. Otherwise, you will waste a lot of time. This is exactly what we offer to our audience in the form of a learning path, where you can just select which section you want to improve, and we will help you with that.
What have been some of the highlights of your time running the site?
Without a doubt, that would be the ability to meet new people. This helped me build many new friendships and have very impactful conversations, both within and outside of poker, which I am truly grateful for.
You’ve published a TON of free poker training content over the years. Between that and the type and amount of content offered to people who pay for premium poker training content, how do you decide what specific types of training content to continue publishing on your site, and how do you plan for the future in that regard when the game seems to constantly be evolving?
That is a great question. I always think from the perspective of the player, and what would be the most beneficial and efficient way to learn in today’s environment.
I started publishing general strategy concepts, covering basic tips and how to play specific hand groups, which evolved into more specific range breakdowns detailing exactly how to play in various situations.
Of course, we also write some random, fun articles to make the entire process more enjoyable and not just “hard” work. We also need to create supporting content around core topics to break them down better and have pages that structurally make sense for Google algorithms, as well. However, I always try to think about what kind of content I would prefer to consume when learning, and we strive to go in that direction.
A decade ago, did you think you’d be where you are on your poker journey? How do you see MyPokerCoaching continuing to evolve over the next few years?
By no stretch of imagination would I have guessed that I would be able to enjoy the game that I love from a different angle than just playing. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to meet a multitude of wonderful people, build something in a niche I love, and have thoroughly enjoyed this process.
As for the future, it is challenging to predict what new AI opportunities will bring to the learning space, but I remain optimistic that we will find a way to adapt and offer additional value to our players. Poker is not going anywhere.
