Patience and Apathy

I seem to be on a bit of a kick here.  Confidence is good;  overconfidence is usually bad.  It's ok to be ignorant;  it's definitely not ok to be a bigot or evil.  As I was swimming I realized something else today, and that's that having the correct amount of patience in your life is something that a lot of people THINK they know, but in truth haven't really ever thought about (just like all the stuff in How to Win Friends and Influence People which by the way if you have not read you should).  It occurred as I was slowing down during a set of 10 150s (on 2:30, my progress has been just great the last two weeks) and decided to try the 5th rep making sure I took as few strokes as possible.  You see the tendency when you swim (and are out of shape like I am) and want to go faster is to take more strokes.  Strokes are the thing that make you go forward, right?  If you take more, you'll go forward more, right? Nope.  So what happened?  My fifth rep was actually faster than my 2nd (usually the fastest for me), AND I expended less energy because I had drastically increased my efficiency (for the record I was trying to keep these under 2:00) while it absolutely felt like I was moving more slowly.  Neat stuff that patience and discipline.  If I'm going to make it 26.2 miles in 7 days I'm going to need every trick I can muster;  this has been the closest development to a silver bullet I could possibly have hoped for.

Then I got to thinking on the drive home that while most people suffer from a lack of patience in many endeavors (their relationships, their jobs, poker, etc), if one were to have an excess of patience it could manifest itself outwardly as a sense of apathy.  The analogy isn't perfect, but you can probably see where I am going with this.  If you're too patient waiting for some good result to happen, but aren't actively pursuing it, what you're actually doing is being apathetic.  Sometimes the only thing you can do is wait, and when that's the case taking action can actually get you into trouble.  Letting your partner cool off after an argument is a great example.  It's fucking HARD to go to your corner and think about how on Earth you just got into a heated discussion over something that silly and just let it be for a little while.  But most of the time in that spot that's the exact right thing to do.  But waiting patiently for the situation to change, without taking action, being the correct course of action is likely the exception, not the norm (thank goodness, as I am horrendous at actively pursuing the course of action of "just wait for it").  There is a balance that needs to be struck.  If you want to affect change in your life you need to be working towards it, but at the same time you need to have patience and not get frustrated when you don't see those changes immediately.

Now it is time for a hand that I sweated!

The SK opens stone cold UTG in a pretty full game and hero three bets a few spots later with the ace and the jack of spades.  SK calls, they see a flop hu

964ssc

Or something like that.  There is no straight.  SK checks and calls.

5r

Again, I think that was the card.  Maybe it was a 3, but it was pretty much a blank regardless.  SK checks and hero..checks it back!  My immediate thought at the time is that he needs to be betting that card because he is at the stone cold bottom of his range in terms of showdown strength (I think....maybe he wasn't but I sure would have been) and has a flush draw.  Ergo he must bet.  But the more I think about it thinking about GTO stuff here is pretty silly.  He has the ace and the jack high, and we are in a decidedly narrow range spot.  The SK is going to be super good (even better than you know) against his specific holding in this specific spot, so maybe he does need to be checking.  I just don't know.

He rivers the 6 of spades because "that's the second best sweater in the business back there SK" and gets to raise and snap off two of the three remaining aces (whoopsie) and we all have a good laugh.  But I thought the turn spot was kind of interesting I guess.