It's debilitating and demoralizing in many ways, because you're always confronted with your failure pretty directly. Money is either won, or it's lost and it's all directly equated to what happened that session. You get paid for your performance (and sometimes not for your performance), but the end result is always seen in money in your pocket or not.

If you suffer from emotional downswings already, this could be quite painful. If you're an innate gambler, you'll probably inevitably get over it, but the lure of the gamble will always bring you back. Me? I'm sorta in between. I don't like to gamble, but I do enjoy the excitement, the thrill of the confrontation, the challenge of outwitting your opponent and making some crafty play that people will talk about for years afterward. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in it for the fame. If I were to live my whole life playing poker without being in the limelight in any way, that would be fine by me. In fact, it's my goal. Writing this blog seems antithetical to that premise, but I think that you have to give in some things. I was told that I should write, when I was in school, because I did tend to be supremely honest, yet introspective about life in general and had the ability to put in down on paper. I did have a thirst for writing at some point in my life and I do still to some extent, which is why I write this blog. But for the most part, if it's just entertaining or slightly insightful, I think that I have achieved something and if I happen to make a buck from this somehow, someway, don't condemn me for it. I would relish it for just allowing me to play more poker.

I always struggled with the nature of self-expression ever since I went to art school. With your thoughts and ideas out in the public, open to criticism and shame, you often put yourself in a tenuous and emotional position.

I can't say I regret it though. Even though it has burdened me with debt I'll carry probably a good portion of my life, I'll never regret it as it was worth more than the money, though I do wish there was some other way to get the experience with that price.

Finshed Gus's book Every Hand Revealed and it was highly entertaining and enjoyable reading. Although you might not get a lot of super-secret methods that Gus uses to make decisions, it does reveal a lot of mathematical decisions that he makes, which puts his method of playing in a different, or even better light. Some people may not understand him making a call against a player holding 62o, but understanding the math and decision behind the call opens up a new kind of thinking and adds ideas to my way of playing hands. Unfortunately, it affected me in a bad way shortly after reading the book, since I tended to raise more often with garbage hands and changed my image from a Tight Aggressive player (TAG) to a Loose Aggressive player (LAG) and subsequently opened myself to more 3-betting and overt aggressiveness from other more experienced players. Normally, the more experienced players left me alone and tried to steal pots here and there, but not on the level where I was feeling I was getting re-raised almost every hand.

I had to stop that crap and go back to my image as a TAG, so that I could pick my spots and steal spots when I felt it was available. Everyone needs to steal spots, I think, in order to stay ahead comfortably and you can't do that in the same way as a TAG and as LAG. LAG's optimize their situation by maximizing money off their good hands since they're usually call-folding most of the other times. TAG's don't usually make big money off their good hands as anyone who knows what they're doing normally won't get that much into the pot unless they have the second best hand. So the TAG normally has to grind it out, making as little mistakes as possible and maximizing all the small edges. LAG's are more volatile and experience larger swings during each session, so you have to be able to maintain getting bad beats as well as giving them. My fellow poker aficionado likes the LAG style to the maximum. Most TAG's think he's a donkey, but he maximizes his swings by putting people on tilt and getting them to commit large sums of money that would not ordinarily get into the pot. Every time he tells me a story about he got some TAG to shove all in drawing dead, I just shake my head and tell him, "I don't know how you do it". He does this all, because he has a excellent reading ability, coupled with his knowledge of your stack and what you're emotionally capable of doing. I don't like to put people on tilt intentionally, preferring to get my money in on the small edges and letting others make their own mistakes, but that's just me. I've always been that naive when it comes to money.

The Way

The Samurai used the code of Bushido to describe the way of the warrior. I often refer to this philosophy as a way of reminding myself that the means is the ends, that, in the end, the end result was always the path that you took and not the money you made or the fame that you won.

Feeling that I am a bit out of control in terms of my mindset, tends to make me focus on the fact that poker can be an analogy of life, just like the code of Bushido. It's not really what you do in the end, it's what you take from it. Any profession can really provide you with life lessons, so poker is no different. If you look at the lessons learned on the table and off, you can see where this can apply. Personally, I see the struggle for bankroll management to be symbolic of my struggle in life with money. I tend to see money as something that you can't take with you in the afterlife, so it's best to spend it while you can. Enjoy life to the fullest, have no regrets. That is why I don't have much of it and why I struggle with a bankroll. But I have set out to change that. I have done well, despite my setbacks.

I was just thinking about Bushido again and I had just recently watched a show on the Travel channel showing Kendo and the apprentices studying to be master swordsmen. Though not as relevant as a few hundred years ago. The practice of Kendo called to mind the pursuit of perfection and way of the Samurai. To completely calm the mind and absorb oneself in only making a true hit, essentially cutting another man down with one strike of the blade, was what it was all about.

If you've watched the Kurasawa movie "The Seven Samurai" there is one scene where one of the samurai was having a mock fight with another, who challenged him in a duel and they both had wooden swords. They locked horns and they came just short of blows, but they held back in what looked like a tie. The samurai just looked at the challenger and nonchalantly told the challenger he lost and walked away. The challenger could not accept that and repeatedly told him that it was not true. However, the samurai tried to ignore him and just walked away, until the challenger pulled out his real sword. It wasn't too long before the samurai cut him down reluctantly and walked away.

The samurai knew that he had struck the crucial blow in the mock fight and it was not necessary in his mind to prove otherwise, knowing that if the challenger was a true samurai, he would have realized that as well.

When I was playing at the tables today, I thought about that and I realized the same was true when making the right decision in playing a hand. The outcome may not be what you expected, but if you made the right decision and you get in with the best hand, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose the hand, because over the long period, you will always be ahead.

I didn't get ahead today, even though I only made one crucial mistake and didn't rely on my read, but I'm still okay with what happened. I had one other questionable hand that I could have played differently, but other than that, I had played better than I thought I would.