Video Games and Mental Anguish

Poker is a brutal game. Those who play regularly already know. You much do constant math, attempt to guess at your opponents' range of hands, guess what your opponents think you have, look for any any every tell you can, etc. Brutal. And sometimes a good, educated guess will come up wrong. Most of the time, with careful study, I can beat my opponents, but on the days that I cannot, I can become disheartened. So I took a day off.

After doing my weekly round of laundry, I decided to play this old-school computer game from the late 90's called The Pandora Directive. It is one of those humorous detective games that forces you to observe and interact with the environment. It is good for honing the mind without stress. After a while, I turned on the television, and some cheesy commercial caused me to re-evaluate life and the purpose of this trip. When my goals were to make such-and-such amount on this trip and I'm coming up way short, what is my purpose? I have all of my expenses covered with poker earnings plus a little, but what are my opportunity costs? What is the meaning of life? I love reading Daniel Negreanu's blog at fullcontactpoker.com, and this particular entry came to mind on what I was experiencing:

http://fullcontactpoker.com/poker-journal.php?subaction=showfull&id=1204894481&archive=&start_from=&ucat=&

Luckily, a talk with Michaela greatly encouraged me, and I went to a late night tournament at Binion's and took first. This time, I took it without a chop. Things were just going my way again. After a string of losses, it is easy to wonder if poker is a game that is consistently beatable, and the answer is that it isn't. Weaker players beat me by collectively playing draws which eventually hit, and stronger players can outplay me. Either way, it is difficult. My results are still way in the positive, but the "making money with poker" is not something that comes without a lot of hard work and repeated attempts. Although this is a vacation for me, it is also an attempt to make money in a different, more non-conventional way. Mental struggle is just part of the experience. Professional gamblers have a tendency to be addicted to puzzle solving. My playing poker is no exception. I need to combine a player's past patterns with card, chip, and position plays with my own card, chip, and position plays, which is to say that poker is very situational. When I am not playing poker, I've been working on solving the Rubik's cube (especially before bed), and my new fastest time is 1 minute 18 seconds. I was able to do a second one at 1 minute 38 seconds, so it probably wasn't a fluke. Yep, I'm bringing nerdy back. How's that for a blog entry filled with a bunch of random thoughts? Thanks for bearing with me.