Thursday, February 04, 2010

And Now For Something Totally Different

I asked the wife if she though Nick was a scumbag and would cheat on her. I will talk about that more later. See the teaser to get you to keep reading. Alright I know I do not need a teaser. Train wreck syndrome is hard to stop watching.

I was thinking today about poker. Is it all about attitude and not skill. I am not picking on anyone here buttttt like LJ or IAK. We all read their blogs. Superstar cashes and massively bad plays like A-rag is the nuts. Except they won. Big things. Went so deep so often. Seemed like awesome players for a decent amount of time. Later on we heard a few grumblings about bad luck and hands not holding. Less reading about big scores. Did they just get less interested in making money? Did it take a while for their losing A-Rag bag style to catch up to them? Were they just bad players that got lucky?

I am not sure I think that is the case. Is it attitude? Did they see good hands get crushed and stop expecting to win. Instead of knowing that the hands they play were going to hit for sure did they feel the doom hammer coming? How much does that positive attitude that you ARE going to win come into play. Is it mysticism? Karma? Your expectations manifesting as reality? Do you just play different when you expect to lose? Did the game just get a lot tougher? Lot of good questions to think about.

I remember my attitude when I first started. I did not believe I could lose. If I chose the optimal hands to start with there was no way I could not win. I firmly believed that. I won. I kept winning. Straight up the ranks from .10cent LHE to 5/10 LHE. For a straight year I did nothing but win. Bloggers were jealous. Old school guys were like "WTF?". Of course the meteoric rise came with a equally fast crash and burn. After that. Once I knew I could lose. That I would lose. I never won again.

Probably all in all there are many factors that lead to going from winning all the time to losing. Attitude has to be one of them though.

4 Comments:

Blogger Mike Heffner said...

1) I'm sure that "scumbag" doesn't even enter into her equation - it's like an extra variable that no one knows what to do with it.

2) It's all a cosmic butterfly effect.

When I think positive billions of atoms vibrate in tune across the universe and alter FTP's "random" number generator and let me spike.

Or, we all just blog about the outliers and never talk about the standard day-to-day wins and losses because they're boring.

Anyway, my wife's a huge positive thinker/attitude person. I'll ask her if it helps.

8:07 AM

 
Blogger Jordan said...

I think one's mood definitely affects play, and that's how one's attitude comes into effect. It is not simply thinking good thoughts. But if you are confident in your abilities, you will be more likely to tune in more with the game, follow your reads and hunches and play well. When you go in expecting to lose, then you may find yourself playing more hands than you should or making other mistakes because you are not thinking clearly.

The Dhali Llama had a parable about acting out of good emotions and not bad emotions that I think is very useful here. He said that the mind is like a body of water. When you are experiencing tumultuous negative emotions, the waters are choppy and the sediment is brought up from the floor to make the water murky, so you can't see (think) straight. When you are calm, your mind is like a calm pool of water. The sediment sinks to the bottom and you can see (think) clearly. I think there is a lot of truth to that parable.

9:20 AM

 
Blogger Loretta8 said...

i thought you meant you get to the juicy drama at the end of this post, not a future post.

weak, waffles, just weak.

10:10 AM

 
Blogger KenP said...

I will talk about that more later. See the teaser to get you to keep reading.

Lame, you didn't say we'd have to wait until after the seven-day forecast.

8:23 AM

 

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