Of Life And Poker

I tried playing poker with a temperature of 101 degrees. Dumb.

In making my grand decision to become a full time online poker player, I failed to take into consideration a number of potential scenarios.  I’ve been playing poker long enough to be aware that poker is a game of swings and there would be sessions, days and weeks even, where nothing would go right.  I was prepared for that - well, as prepared as I could be.  I was equally aware of tilting over bad beats and money management issues and a score of other dangers which are all part of the game of poker.

What I did not mentally prepare myself for were the two issues which I was currently confronting.  Physical illness and emotional instability.

I woke up two days ago in a cold sweat and soon discovered I had contracted a severe chest cold.  My first inclination was to remain in bed (which in hindsight, I should have done) but instead headed downstairs to the kitchen.  My thought was to make myself a coffee, pop a few pills and start my poker day in spite of the coughing, sneezing and fever burning through me.  I had already missed one day of poker this week and was unwilling to miss a second.

I logged on to PartyPoker and opened up three tables of $1/$2 NL Hold’em.  After about a half hour’s play and a loss of about $250, it was obvious that I was in no condition to multi-table.  Focusing was a problem and a single table would be the smarter way to go.  After another half hour’s play and a further loss of $140, panic set in.  I felt I had to play poker on this day but understood that I was in no condition to do so.  To further complicate the issue was the fact that I was already down almost $400 and my instinct was to play to recover my losses.  As any intelligent poker player will tell you, chasing one’s money is not conducive to playing smart poker.

Stubborn as i am, I gave it another go.  Lost another $70 in the next five minutes and finally gave it up.  Poker would have to wait for another day.

Aside from the cold I was suffering from, my head was an emotional mess.  For about eight seconds that day, I hated Lizzie.  I hated her for picking this time in my life to walk away ( see On Love and Poker).  I hated her for forcing me to play every lousy poker hand with thoughts of her racing through my head and  I hated her for breaking my heart and making it so difficult for me to concentrate on my game as I so desperately needed to do.

I hated her for that whole eight seconds and then it stopped.  My love for her is too encompassing and my understanding of her reasons for leaving are too real to allow myself the pretence of hating her.  I just don’t want her to go.

Lizzie, if you’re reading this…please don’t go.

___

Bankroll:  $5049
Day’s Profits:  -$456
Total Profit to Date: $2049

Have  I mentioned how much I love poker?

I had one of my strangest poker days.  What began as a disastrous session turned out to be my single most profitable day of poker ever.  There’s nothing like making four day’s pay by noon on a Thursday.  After a mere 3 hours of poker I walked away with more than $1100 profit.  Except for the fifth hand I played, it was one of those days where I could do no wrong.  If every poker session could be like this one, poker would be sooooo easy.  I was hitting flops and catching river cards hand after hand.  I was literally on fire.

Poker is like that.  There are days when you can’t win a hand no matter what you’re dealt and others where you could play the game blindfolded and still win big.  But I need to describe that fifth hand.  It’s going in the books as my worst bad beat ever.  I guess if you play this game long enough, you’re going to see it all.

Playing $1/$2 Pot Limit Omaha, the flop came down 789, all diamonds.  I was holding the 56 diamonds - a straight flush - and I was praying that someone had the Ace high flush.   I checked and smooth called a pot bet.  Turn showed a 2 of clubs.  I checked again and once more simply called a pot bet.  The river showed a 10 of diamonds.  It wasn’t the best of cards but I wasn’t concerned.  The only hand that could beat me was a JQ of diamonds.  I bet pot and was all-in when my opponent re-raised my bet.

Naturally, he was holding the JQ of diamonds and had magically hit his one outer on the river.  I lost a $380 pot while holding a straight flush.  Lovely.

—

The Mortician

In the early afternoon, Lizzie reminded me that the moving company rep was coming in to give her an estimate for packing and storing her belongings (see Poker Sites and Moving Trucks).  I had promised her that I’d leave the house for a few hours and I was fully intent on doing so.  I just wasn’t yet ready to go.  For some sick unknown reason, I wanted to see the face of the guy who would be helping my baby leave me.  Thirty minutes later, the doorbell rang and Lizzie threw me a worried glance.  She answered the door and a tall, thin middle aged man walked in.  As I watched him remove his black overcoat, a thought flashed before me that this guy was the equivalent of a mortician who comes by to measure the body for the casket.

I should of just left and not said a word but I couldn’t.  A surge of anger filled me as I watched this bastard holding a clipboard and pen begin to walk up the stairs to my bedroom.  I turned, grabbed my laptop and walked toward the door.  As I passed the stairs, I stopped, looked up and shouted…”Hey buddy, I’m five foot ten so a six foot coffin would be perfect!”

Lizzie who was half way up the stairs stared back at me, embarrassed and motioned for me to shut up.  I proceeded to the door making sure to slam it as hard as I could as I left.  It was not my finest hour.

As I write these words, I realize that the irrational me hates the mortician.  Not surprising.  What is though, is that the rational me hates him too.  I think I need to hate somebody right now and I could never hate Lizzie and I don’t think I’m ready to hate me.  Not yet, anyway.

Sorry mortician guy.  For the time being, it’s got to be you.

___

Bankroll:  $5505
Day’s Profits:  $1128
Total Profit to Date: $2505

Poker professional Barry Greenstein once remarked that one of the keys to winning poker is to play against players who are not as good as you.   Makes perfect sense to me.

I’ve come to understand that I’m not interested in becoming the best poker player ever.  What’s important as far as I’m concerned is making money at this game.  That said, I’m fulling intending on improving my game in any way I can and will continue reading and studying.  But I have no desire to play Johnny Chan and bluff him out of a big pot.  If anything, I’ll do my best to avoid the Johnny Chans of this world.  I’m not looking for glory or bragging rights.  It’s the bottom line on my monthly earning statement that gets me excited.

I mention all this only to explain why I play most of my online poker at PartyPoker and PokerStars.  Both of these sites have a good turnover of beginner players who are just dying to give their money away.  The downside of PartyPoker is that they still don’t accept US players.  In addition, if Omaha Hi-Lo is your game, PartyPoker has a limited number of games available.  PokerStars has neither of those problems.  Hold-Em and Omaha games at all stake levels are always available.  Also this site has some of the largest tournaments you could find online.

I’ve also played at FullTilt and Ultimate Bet and have found the competition to be a little tougher.  I’ll do a full comparison of various online poker sites in an upcoming post.

.

Lizzie

As long as Lizzie is around, I’m hopeful she’ll come to her senses and not leave.  I’m still having a problem fully understanding how a woman who tells me she loves me as she does, can still make the decision to leave.  And yesterday, my hope sank a notch.

Lizzie asked me if I could leave the house for a few hours the following day.  She had set up an appointment with a moving and storage company to make an appraisal on packing and storing her belongings.  My initial reaction was to show defiance and say “no” - to tell her that I wasn’t going any place and I’d stick around whether she liked it or not.  But I didn’t say any of that.  It did not take long for me to understand that Lizzie was thinking of me and wanted to spare me the pain of having to watch some stranger prepare for her departure.

I held her hands in mine and just stared at her and didn’t say a word for a minute or two.  And as her eyes teared, I pulled her close to me and just said, “sure, baby“.

___

Bankroll:  $4377
Day’s Profits:  $211
Total Profit to Date: $1377

My decision to spend a day away from poker was a good one.  Playing online poker for 8 to 10 hours a day, 7 days a week might not have been a good plan - especially in my emotional state.

I played two $1/$2 tables of Omaha in three separate 2 hour sessions with great success.  My plan is to now play a maximum of two hours in any single session.    As well, I’ve decided to not multi-table more than 2 tables for the next while.  I’ve found that playing more than two hours at one time gets me to the point where I begin to lose focus. My big losses and bone-headed plays have usually come in the third hour of continual play.

So by breaking up my online poker time into three separate  two hour sessions with an hour break in between affords me the time to not only get other matters attended to (this blog for example) but to also regroup and start the next session refreshed and ready to go.

T.S. Eliot

While my problems with Lizzie have not improved (Double Tilt), I do feel better today.  I had a wonderful talk with my old friend Jeannie.  Lizzie and I met Jeannie and her husband Brian through my sister Dee.  One would be hard pressed to find two people more honest and down to earth than Jeannie and Brian.  They’re the type of people whom you meet once and instantly bond with.  Love ‘em both.

Jeannie quoted me a line from American born poet T.S. Eliot which instantly hit home.

“Experience is not what happens to you… it is what you do with what happens to you.”

How perfectly true I instantly thought and how easily one can apply its simple logic to both poker and life.  Experience in poker is not measured by the number of times one is dealt a pair of aces or suited connectors.  Our experience is derived only by the manner in which we choose to play the cards we are dealt.

Similarly, when we speak of having gained experience in life, it has little to do with the events which mark our lives.  Stuff happens to everyone.  Instead our experience, our very lives, are defined only by the manner in which we deal with these events.  I like that.

I’ll have to remember this as I work on my relationship with Lizzie.  She’s still intent on leaving and for the time being, I’m at a loss as to how to prevent her from doing so.

___

Bankroll:  $4166
Day’s Profits:  $314
Total Profit to Date: $1160

It is clearly one thing to understand what the best course of action is in any given situation and quite another to actually follow that best course.  Nothing expresses this snippet of human behaviour better than finding oneself on the verge of tilting, be it in poker or life.

I took a day away from the poker tables which allowed me some time to reflect on my disastrous performance I wrote of in my last post - Double Tilt.   I mentally replayed my actions of that day and was not surprised to discover that I was completely aware of exactly how I should of handled the situation.  Again, knowing and doing is not always an easy match.

Poker Tilt

All poker players have been there.  We lose a hand we thought we should of won or fold to a huge bet and then are shown a bluff and suddenly we start playing in a maniacal fashion. Everything we have learnt on playing smart, winning poker is temporarily abandoned as we proceed to make a bad situation worse.

The essence of tilting is our wish to force a victory.  Our momentarily deranged state of mind has us believing that we can win the next hand through sheer willpower - that we can somehow convince the gods of poker to grant us a victory because we are owed.  The truth is that the gods seldom listen to angry words with the result being a further depletion of our bankroll.

Life Tilt

Anger is ugly and nothing works against us more than a display of rage.  It worsens a bad situation and shuts down all channels of communication.  As justified as we might feel about displaying anger, the result is the exact opposite of what we hoped for.  We want the person we’re directing our anger at to listen and understand how wrong they were.  We want them to acknowledge their faulty behaviour and have them say, “Sorry.  You are right and I was wrong.”  Instead we reinforce their conviction as they become unable to hear our words and when a person stops listening, we’ve lost the battle.

So what is the best immediate action when we find ourselves on the verge of tilting?  Well, we all know the answer to that question…walk away.   Leave the table or leave the room and don’t return until we feel we are once again in control of our emotions.  This of course is easier said than done but that should not prevent us from understanding this simple logic and making it our goal.

I’ll explore the tilting phenomenon in further depth in a future post and write of how some of the top players handle their bouts of tilt.  For now, I’ve got to run down to the hardware store and get me some plaster to repair the lovely hole where water glass met wall.

___

Bankroll:  $3852
Day’s Profits:  $0
Total Profit to Date: $852

“In the poker game of life, women are the rake man.

They are the fuckin’ rake.”

(Ed Norton from “Rounders”)

I’m not exactly sure what that line means, but it sounds right.  As I wrote in a previous post, I have no right playing poker in my current state of mind (see On Love and Poker).  The dilemma I’m faced with is that I can’t take a week or month off.  Poker is how I’m planning on supporting myself and I simply don’t have the luxury of taking a number of days off to deal with a life crisis.  The challenge for anyone who has decided to take this game seriously is developing the ability to push aside whatever personal problems troubling them and play poker in a consistent manner.  This is obviously not an easy task but it is vital if they plan on being successful.

Based on today’s performance, I’m a long way from that stage of my poker playing development.

Playing two tables of $1/$2 Hold’em, I was ahead by about $70 after an hour’s play.  Lizzie who was at work called in the early afternoon to say hi.  Somewhere in the conversation she let me know that she had given her notice at work. My heart sank to a new low.  i wasn’t yet ready to accept her decision to leave and somewhere in the back of my mind, I had convinced myself that it wasn’t real.

Today it got real.  Too real.

I slammed down the phone, picked up a glass from the table and flung it across the room.  It hit a wall and shattered.  I didn’t care.  The smart thing would of been to shutdown the computer and take a walk or go out for a coffee or paint the entire house or reshingle the damn roof or maybe build an ark…anything but play poker.  I, of course, chose to continue playing.  And I wasn’t about to play any kind of poker.  As I quickly discovered, this was going to be angry poker.

In the next 15 minutes I lost my entire stack of $270.  Was I ready to walk away?  Nah.  I reloaded for another $200 and lost that in the next four hands.  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.  I was on double tilt, both the poker and life variety.  If I’m going to make it in this game, I’ve got to smarten up and take control of my emotions.

I’ve made the decision to take the weekend off and not play.  I really need some time to think about what it is I’m doing and besides, I want to spend every available second I have with Lizzie.  The only positive thing right now is that I’m writing this blog which is giving me an emotional outlet.

OK.  Deep breath.  Tomorrow is a brand new day.

What was that line again about women and the poker game of life…?

___

Bankroll:  $3852
Day’s Profits:  -$470
Total Profit to Date: $852

This whole Lizzie thing and how it’s turned my life upside down has got me thinking as to the direction I want this blog to take.  I’ve decided that it will be truer to it’s title, Of Life And Poker, than I had initially imagined.

I’m less interested in writing about how I lost a big hand while holding Aces or as to how I took down a major pot when my one outer hit on the river as I am about writing about the psychological side of poker and the parallels we find in the non-poker part of our lives.  If I’ve learnt anything from playing poker for the last thirty years, it’s that this wonderful game is truly a microcosm of life itself.  It really is.  I can’t begin to tell you of the number of times I’ve used a poker analogy to clearly explain an entirely non-poker related idea.  I can’t imagine any real life scenario that cannot find a related parallel somewhere in the psychological game of poker.

What makes poker and life so inter-related can be found in a single word: attitude.  Any true poker player will tell you that what counts in a poker hand is less the actual cards one is holding as much as how they play them.  Ace/Ace is not always a winner and Three/Nine does not always have to be a loser.

And anyone who has lived long enough and has developed an acute awareness of self, understands that what shapes our lives is less the particular circumstances of that life as much as the attitude we adopt in addressing those circumstances.   A job promotion does not guarantee happiness and success.  And a job loss does not necessarily have to be a bad thing.   The promotion, for example, might lead to more work hours and increased stress which might negatively impact our personal relationships and our lives in general.  At the same time, a job loss might turn out to be the very opportunity we needed to leave a boring and unsatisfying job.  It might be the shot of adrenalin we desperately needed to now pursue what it is we always dreamt of doing but were afraid.

Afraid to leave the comfort of a paycheck, afraid of failure, afraid of what others might think, afraid that we might not be up to the task, afraid that our fragile egos might crumble in the face of challenge…afraid of life itself.

So yes, I’ll be writing about poker but it won’t be about the best way to play a pair of Aces.  This blog  will focus on the thought processes and the mind games we adopt when we’re dealt Aces or rags, be it at a poker table or in our personal lives.   And I don’t pretend to know all the answers nor the best and smartest way to approach all which comes our way.  You only need ask Lizzie if you doubt me.  But I’m learning.

So as I wrote in my first post, I’ll write of my poker and life experiences with the hope that I can develop a greater awareness of the person I am.  And if along the way you come to learn something about the person you are, great.

—

I’m on a roll!  Up another $334 today.

___

Bankroll:  $4322
Day’s Profits:  $334
Total Profit to Date: $1322