In February of this year, heads-up PLO regular TiltMeNot began tweeting. From old forum posts, many players claim that his real name is Bengt Sonnert, a Swedish player with $1.1 million in live earnings. From what we can see, this hasn't been confirmed.
After 15 years of playing at the highest stakes, TiltMeNot retired from poker in 2021. He now focuses on business, investments, and cryptocurrency.
Lately, he's taken to sharing openly on Twitter about all three of those passions.
The most profitable decision I ever made wasn’t a trade. It was quitting poker.
5 years ago, I was paying my poker mind coach, Elliot Roe, 4 figures an hour. he works with the best players in the world.
I hired him to sharpen my game. I was losing my edge at the highest stakes, and it was bleeding into everything.
Around session 5, he said something I wasn’t ready to hear:
You built your career on table selection. Maybe it’s time to select a new table.
That wasn’t what I paid him for.
That one sentence probably saved me years.
I would’ve dragged it out. kept battling. convinced myself i still had it. while it slowly ate my edge and my head.
Instead, I walked away.
Best decision I ever made.
Built businesses, got better at allocating capital. met my wife. rebuilt everything.
Never thanked him.
Probably because I didn’t like what it meant at the time.
Thanks, Elliot.
– What do you think lead him to say that? Your mindset or your actual play?
Both. The play was slipping, but it was my head that wouldn't let me quit. At that point, I was breakeven at best for at least a year against the top guys heads up and telling myself that was still good enough. Elliott just named what I already knew but didn't want to hear.
– What business did you start?
Two fitness studios in LA and started allocating capital more seriously.
Now, in addition to business, TiltMeNot is involved in crypto and business. He often connects these worlds to his poker history:
Played high-stakes heads-up poker for 15 years. me vs one person. Six-figure sessions. thousands of hours reading people and situations for a living.
What it actually taught me: every good decision I've ever made came from a plan I built before the pressure showed up. Every bad one came from abandoning that plan because I felt something.
That's how I see markets now. That's how I read the news. That's how I run two businesses and manage an 8-figure portfolio. I don't react to what's happening. I already decided what I'd do before it happened.
When I override that process, I lose. Every single time. No exceptions.
TiltMeNot started its business during the pandemic:
Retired from poker in 2021. 42, set for life, done. played 1 on 1 for 15 years. Two people trying to outthink each other for hours. I loved every second of it.
Traded crypto during COVID. Made real money. Felt like I still had it.
Then I needed something tangible. I bought two stretch studios in LA. went from $50K sessions to $80 memberships. from managing nobody to managing everyone. Turns out I can't stand people. not in a bad way. I just spent 15 years alone in a room, never explaining myself to anyone.
The business makes money. But nobody tells you what retirement actually costs. It's not financial. It's the silence where the fight used to be.
I check BTC 10 times a day, not because I need the money. I need the action. crypto grew to almost half my liquid portfolio, so now I trim $70K a month to bring the concentration down. on a calendar, no discretion. Because if I don't have rules, my brain turns every price move into a reason to do something.
Four years out, and nothing has matched the intensity of sitting across from one person with real money on the line. not crypto, not business, not anything.
Replacing that feeling is the hardest allocation problem I have.
TiltMeNot invested most of his capital in real estate:
My liquid portfolio right now:
~$505K t-bills
~$292K index funds
~$250K AI / semis / tech
~15 BTC, 40ETH (trimming monthly)
~$55K individual namesThat’s about 22% of my net worth.
Real estate is over 65%.
That’s not a plan. That’s what happens when you buy property and don’t rebalance for years.
The goal now is to flip that.
sell real estate and raise liquid assets to ~40%.
But selling a house isn’t like trimming crypto on a Tuesday.
47. No advisor.
Every decision is mine, and every mistake is too.
TiltMeNot recalls his poker adventures with particular pleasure:
This used to be a normal workday for me.
Heads up vs isildur1.
$150K on the table.If you don’t know Isildur1, every poker pro alive has a story about that guy.
He ended up winning around $50K from me in this session.
I did this every day for about 15 years.
You can watch the entire session on YouTube.
Of course, not every story has a happy ending.
I was 25. Built a $1M bankroll playing online poker during the boom. Felt invincible.
So I sat down heads up against Erik Sagstrom (aka TheSalmon), one of the best players on earth at the time, at $100/$200 no limit.
48 hours later, the million was gone. All of it.
I ignored the one rule that had built the bankroll in the first place. Table selection. I had no edge against him. I knew it. I sat anyway because the action felt like where I was supposed to be.
That loss taught me something I now apply to every dollar I allocate:
The fastest way to lose everything is to confuse confidence with edge. Feeling ready and being ready are not the same thing.I rebuilt. It took years. And now every investment decision I make starts with the same question I should have asked that night:
Do I actually have an edge here? Or do I just want to be at this table?
In fact, TiltMeNot probably shares more about downfalls in poker than upswings.
In poker, I was a heads-up specialist. My entire edge came from opponent selection- only sitting with players I had an advantage against.
The poker world called it "bum hunting." It wasn't glamorous. But it was the single highest-ROI decision I made every day. Not the hands I played. Who I chose to play against.
Forgot all of it when I bought Zcash at $360.
No thesis. No edge. Just hype and a chart moving up. That's the equivalent of sitting down heads-up against the best player in the room because the stakes looked exciting.
Sold at $280.
Every asset is a table. The question isn't "is this going up?" It's "Do I have an edge here that the person on the other side doesn't?"
If you can't answer that, you're the fish.
And as we've heard from other players, becoming a parent definitely affects TiltMeNot's game.
By 2020, I was a ghost of the player I'd been in 2018 and earlier.
The timing wasn't random. A couple of years of fatherhood will do that.
Turns out being a fully present parent, not just physically but mentally, and being a cold-blooded heads-up killer don't mix well.
