Poker

I've had trouble adjusting after returning from Alaska. The first few days back I felt directionless and seized on my bad habits as a way of retreating into a familiar routine.

One of my habits is to play online poker. It's healthy in moderation, but often I overdo it, especially when I get frustrated. I mostly play online multi-table tournaments (MTTs) from $4-$30.

They are naturally frustrating. The absolute best players make it "in the money" about 15-20% of the time, at which point about 80-90% of the other players have been eliminated. Having a major cash is even rarer, especially in the low buy-in tournaments that I play, where there are regularly 800-1,000 people playing and you need to make it to the final table (last 9 people) to earn significant money.

A smart, professional poker player once said that to become a better player it to practice Zen Buddhism, whether you realize it or not. He's right. Once you learn the technical aspects of poker, much of what separates the good players from the great ones is how they handle the mental aspects. Frustration. Focus. Staying in the present while incorporating the knowledge of the past.

My biggest challenge with poker is handling the emotional part of the game. I entered about 16 MTTs in the past few days. I played poorly in a few, well in most, and really well in a few. My results: 0 out of 16 cashes.

Intellectually, I know that's part of normal variance, but emotionally, it makes me frustrated and angry. The longer I went without a cash, the more difficulty I had focusing on making good decisions and not caring about the results, which is paramount in poker. My thoughts while playing were often angry and negative, and while they didn't hurt my play as much as usual, it made playing unpleasant. I was irritable after I was done playing too, which makes the whole experience almost ridiculous. Why am I playing a game again?

In a sick way, the emotional struggle is part of my attraction to poker. It's a constant reminder of how much work I need to do to handle my emotions in a healthy way, and an external way of getting rewarded for making these improvements.

What helps the most is having balance in my life--spreading my time out among friends, reading, writing, and hobbies like poker so I don't get too emotionally involved in one area.

All of this is a very roundabout way of saying that I hope to return to posting almost every day as part of the way to live a more balanced life. This was probably boring to read, but I have almost no real-life poker friends, and I have to vent somewhere.

Ironically fast turnaround update: I played two tournaments at midnight after writing this post. One of them was a $10 MTT with 1,485 players. I got 4th. I got really, really lucky to make it that far too--more luck than I had in at least a year--and then a tad unlucky at the end. It was like the exact opposite of the past week compressed into one game. It's a lot easier to take a break from poker after doing well.