🌦️ Exited Business. Choosing Variance.

TLDR: After over 15 years in business I’ve sold my final one and launched Coffee.Poker as my new home on the internet. I’m now drinking coffee and playing poker, choosing skill inside variance. If you enjoy these letters and want to support the coffee that fuels them, I’ve set up a Buy Me a Coffee profile. No products. No launches. Just coffee.

Hey there 👋,

Yesterday I drove 1,000km, parked at a casino on Lake Constance, played poker, and slept in my Tesla.

This morning I watched the lake wake up and had my latte macchiato (coffee should always be poured after milk) before heading into Switzerland, back to where I first played poker 19 years ago, and to browse a few watch boutiques in town. I’ve fallen down the watch rabbit hole over the last year, largely thanks to Teddy Baldassarre’s YouTube channel.

Somewhere between the road, the cards, and the quiet, it became obvious that this newsletter needed to change, because my life has.

I’ve now fully exited business (as I stated at the very end of 2025) and I’m simply drinking coffee and playing poker.

I’m playing mid stakes on GG Poker, battling streamers and strong regulars.

At the end of March, I’ll be playing the World Series of Poker Europe in Prague, sharing the room with some of the biggest names in the game. Phil Hellmuth is confirmed to be attending. In 2009, I stood on the rail at the WSOPE in London watching him as a spectator. This time, I’ll be taking my own seat in the room.

Variance is weather.

In poker, everyone understands this.

Short term results lie. You can play perfectly and lose. You can play badly and win. The only thing that matters is whether your decisions are correct on average, over time.

You do not get paid for almost right.
You do not get paid for effort.
You do not get paid for being right today.

You get paid for being right over thousands of repetitions while your nervous system is under pressure.

Poker is brutally honest about this.

Business, oddly, is far less honest.

There is enormous variance in business success — timing, geography, networks, capital, narrative, sheer luck. Two people can execute almost the same plan and end up with wildly different outcomes. Yet the business world rarely talks about this openly. Success is framed as inevitability. Failure is framed as personal deficiency.

And now AI adds another layer.

What happens to business valuations when no business is safe from rapid replication? When a competitor can rebuild your product next week and run it on a Mac Mini using OpenClawd? How do you confidently project three years of profit when your entire category could shift overnight?

The stability premium is collapsing.

In business, variance is often disguised as predictability. We build spreadsheets. We model cash flows. We assume continuity.

In an exponential AI cycle, those assumptions can be wrong by an order of magnitude before the ink is dry. The ground moves faster than the forecast.

The illusion of stability is expensive.

Prediction markets make this visible in another way.

On platforms like Polymarket, probabilities are priced in real time. Every contract reflects collective conviction. Every spike reflects emotion. Panic overprices rare events. “Nothing happens” grinds quietly most of the time.

The crowd trades narrative.

A minority trades expected value, one of the last real edges:

It’s the same human psychology as poker. Different interface.

Variance does not care whether it’s cards, markets, business models, or geopolitics. It only rewards disciplined repetition and correct decision-making over time.

That’s what interests me now.

Not pretending variance doesn’t exist.
Not projecting stability where there is none.
But choosing arenas where uncertainty is visible, measurable, and honest.

That game no longer interests me.

In an age where AI breaks jobs, compresses businesses, and amplifies noise, I am choosing skill.

Something measurable. Something unforgiving. Something that cannot be faked, instantly replicated, or smoothed over by a good story.

That choice is why this newsletter is now Coffee.Poker.
I still cannot believe I hand registered that domain, it’s taken in over 450 TLDs:

I sold LetterOperators to great new owners. Customers received a full month of output with no interruption, and I stepped away cleanly.

I am not pivoting to the next thing.
I am not launching products.
I am not building funnels or communities.

I am playing poker and drinking coffee.

If you enjoy these letters and want to support the coffee that fuels them:

I get through at least three latte macchiatos a day.

Any contribution is genuinely appreciated. I’ll shout you out in future issues to 6K+ subs who like to open and click:

More soon, from the road, the tables, and wherever this leads next.

Cheers!
Richard (@richardpatey)

PS. I read this piece by Joe Thomsett, a Brit now living in Poland, and strongly agree with the sentiment. It captures something real about how much more grounded the UK felt in the 90s and asks the right questions about work, permanence, and what actually matters in an AI shaped world.