Eastern Illinois Recap

First post in over 2.5 years...here...we...go....

Anyone who's still reading this (which at this point I'm sure has to be like 95% people I actually know) is surely aware that over the last decade I have moved more and more into sports betting.  It's actually part of the reason my blog kind of died, because I no longer really felt comfortable being 100% honest about what I was doing (both in terms of the activities and the dollar amounts involved, but I've decided to give fewer fucks about that going forward). The pandemic really pushed that even further along, as myself and a few other noted Gamboleros found ourselves out of poker work and joined forces a bit more formally to try to beat sports.  And boy oh boy have we beaten fucking sports lol.  Maybe I'll do a post on the general happenings of that, but right now I owe a story.  So here it comes, this is gonna be really technical but I promised the hero I'd write it up for posterity.

A year or two back I had a sports account that was very...unique.  The site let you bet HUGE money line dogs (we are talking like +5000, where as many other outlets stop posting numbers above even +400).  I actually hit the nine overtime win by Illinois over Penn State on there for some just ridiculous number, like I wanna say they were +2500 and I had down like....several thousand on the game...for a win in the middling 5 figures.  The site had another quirk, in that it was old school Vegas rules for the max bet, which means that when you fired, they'd (often, but not always) move the line.  Once they moved it (even a single penny), you could re-fire the max cannon.

Now the combination of these two quirks resulted in some truly absurd sweats and positions, as you can imagine.  Not only can you fire off the +2500 ML, you can fire it again at +2498 if they triple dog dare you to do so.  And let me tell you, I am a big fan of accepting the triple dog dare.  The first day I had the account was actually during the "winter wsop" event, and the dirty agent called me the next morning asking if I was drunk and gambling in Vegas because I smashed all big NFL ML dogs.  I assured him I was not, encouraged him to keep his 50% of the action, and we eventually won a metric fuck ton of money.  Then we lost about the same metric fuck ton of money back, then my dirty agent's connection (apparently?) went to prison and I lost the account.  

Fast forward like a year and I get another one of these, and so does the guy I work with who writes, maintains, and runs our bot (lovingly known as Hal).  Let us call this man, the "hero" of our story, Mr. White.  So because of the way this site works (what with the moving of the lines after someone bets), Mr. White and I are effectively racing to get the best prices.  Sometimes I get it in first and alert him, but MOST of the time Hal beats me, because Hal is a machine (nothing stop Hal).  At first we are a little worried about getting pegged for having similar action, but that becomes kind of a non-issue after we just get utterly skull fucked for about the first 2 months.  We are both steadily losing faith, and discuss the idea of just running the accounts sequentially (first using mine, then if/when we get shut down, using his).  We talk about it, but I only have 50% of my account to start, so it really is hard to chop it up that many ways and we don't do it.  Then we lose more.  And more.  We really just lose all the money, to the point that the dirty agent who got me the account decides to give up his piece.  Lo and behold, I now have 90% of the action on an account that can get down $2500 (per fire, with re-fires allowed) on +5000 college basketball dogs.

So I'm flying home to visit the parental units for Christmas, and on my day of traveling I decide to open the conversation with Mr. White.  We decide to combine forces formally;  he will shut down his account for the time being and have Hal run mine instead.  We'll split it up the action 60% me, 30% him, 10% my dirty agent.  My account is more than big enough (and bigger than his anyway).  We agree that Hal will never re-fire (as a general principle I was never re-firing on purpose anyway.....just sometimes on accident...and Hal was never firing a bet more than once cause Hal machine Hal makes no happy accidents).  We also agree that on "big" college basketball dogs, defined by odds of +1000 (10:1) or higher, we would not fire the max bet of $2500, and instead just bet $1000.  At this point the account was down, and I shit you not, about $220K in the previous 6 weeks.  I had just been blasting away on these huge dogs and never winning a single fucking bet.  The very first day of college basketball season I went 0-28.  Mr. White was also buried under the very earth itself, and so we decided to tighten up, be smarter, and see if we could claw some back.

I eventually get to my Mom's house around 2am Pittsburgh time.  I sleep.  I wake up.  I drive over to see my Dad (they live 10 minutes apart).

Mr. White texts me that "I think I fucked up" and explains that Hal fired the full $2500 unit on "a few" big college dogs.  He asks me if I want him to keep the extra, I think very briefly and say no it's fine I'll just keep my piece (60% for me, and 10% for my dirty agent), whatever it's fine.

Me and my dad do some stuff.

Mr. White texts me again....apparently no only did Hal bet the max $2500, but in an effort to not bet the max (which he clearly already fucked up), he broke Hal's ability to refrain from re-firing.  A few teams got bet more than once, and did I want Mr. White to keep the extra.  I think (slightly less briefly but still briefly) and come to the conclusion that you know what, yeah, this is on you, you gotta keep it.  We are talking about stuff like triple firing EASTERN ILLINOIS for $2500/click at +2500.  So it is agreed that I will keep my 60% of the first play of the day on every team, but for re-fire Mr. White has his 30% + my 60% for 90% of the action (my dirty agent is not consulted, he only has 10%, he can deal with it).  

I now take the time to explain most of this, as best I can to my father, and do not mince words, laying into Mr. White with colorful language and fervor befitting a man who just traveled for 15 hours, is short sleep, and on his first day home for the holidays.  Many f bombs are deployed.

The day goes on.....I go back to see my mom, I don't really remember the details of when what what happened, but it was my understanding (and that of Mr. White) that Hal had fired three bullets on EASTERN ILLINOIS at around +2500.

Then they win the fucking game. 

Mr. White had tried to hedge out.  Tried to sell action.  But really didn't get rid of much.  He is elated and logs into the account, expecting it to be up something like $185,000.  That is not a typo, that is how much you win when you bet $7500 at 24:1 odds or so.  He logs into the account, and, turns out, Hal had not fired the game 3 times.  He went and fired it....5 times.  And it wasn't all in the 2400-2500 range.  The first bullet went in at +5002

WON /  MONEY LINE  /  BASKETBALL - 729 EASTERN ILLINOIS +5002 FOR GAME

Game ResultsRISK: $2,500.00 / TO WIN: $125,050.00

Again, not a typo.  The other 4 tickets won a bit less than half that each, making the total won on that game something like $365,000, the majority of which belonged to Mr. White.  Most of the other re-fire bets lost (I think three or four of them), but we hit another +1000 for a triple unit, so the account won $416,000 in a single day.  It did so because of the following parlay:

1.  We got crushed to the point that my dirty agent gave up most of his action.

2.  I decided to let Mr. White let Hal run free on my account.

3.  We agreed to not bet $2500 on big dogs, instead just $1000, but that got messed up.

4.  We agreed to not re-fire anything, but that got messed up and we bet this game five times.

5.  EASTERN ILLINOIS pulled off the biggest upset in modern college basketball history.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen.  When I die, I think that will be the most absurd gambling story I have ever told.

Managing the Curve

I was talking to my buddy Phil earlier about the nearly ideal conditions being presented for day drinking, which is basically my single favorite activity.  I told him that my new-found ability to sleep until 8:30 or even 9am has had some incredible consequences;  there are days when I can start drinking less than 3 hours after I wake up, and the extra 2 to 3 hours of sleep I get after waking up at dawn basically can kill off any semblance of a hangover.  It's wonderful.  It's like I'm a new me.  Never you mind that I am abusing NyQuil and taking double the suggested dose of melatonin on a daily basis, or that I just ordered four packages of edible gummy bears.  Never you mind that at all.

So anyway Phil and I are talking and I told him I had some days when I was propping at Hustler about a year ago where I was off and literally would wake up at 2am (on days I was on my alarm was set for 12:48am, and I had to get out of the house by 1:14 to get to my shift on-time at 2:00) and just couldn't do anything.  Like...nothing is open.  All the bars in Laguna had literally just closed.  And it wasn't like I could do much of anything in my apartment.  I felt guilty even walking around, it was the middle of the fucking night!

So obviously a few of these days I end up going to "breakfast" at either the White House or the Cliff at 8am and just start drinking immediately.  I mean, we're talking like waiting for them to open level here.  It was great.  Phil then relayed to me a story of his greatness.

"Yeah I did that once for the world cup final at 8am.  Probably had 6 drinks in two hours, then the waitress called me a pussy for not ordering another one.  So we split a bottle of wine, then decided to go out sailing.  Ended up getting towed in by the coast guard"

"My.  Man"

"We were never that hammered but upon review we obviously weren't operating at 100% lev"

"Yeah, eventually it's like calculus.  The area under the curve matters, not just the current height"

"Oh, you don't have to tell me that.  Managing the curve is probably one of my top 10 skills.  #flattenthecurve"

"Phil Johnson:  Flattening the curve since 2003"

And that got me thinking about, well, a lot of stuff.  And I couldn't really figure out where to go with this post and it sat here for a day and a half literally 15 words ago until Phil gave me the punchline.  And he's right, it's a good punchline.

It's REALLY hard to be REALLY good at something.  Anything.  I played a lot of Duke Nukem as a kid, and it lead me to the following truism:

No matter how good you are, there's someone better than you could imagine ever being.  And no matter how bad you are, there's someone worse than you were the day you picked up the activity.

Think about it.  And there's two ways to go here....you can either think about things that you consider yourself "good at", or just a random activity and how good the best people in the world are.  Either way it's mortifying.  I don't consider myself to be much of a writer, but even I'll admit I have to be like top 20% or something.  Stephen King writes for several hours EVERY day except (sometimes) Christmas.  No matter what you think of him you have to admit he is prodigious and has sold a ton of paper.  This book is fascinating, and it explains a lot about how he came to be...well.  Himself.  At one point he's talking to someone and takes him down to his basement library, which is the entire bottom level of his large house.  The man asks if he's read every one of the books.  King looks confused and then says "I guess there are probably a few I've only read once?"  You see if you want to be a good writer you almost have to be a voracious reader.  And he's perhaps the most voracious of all time.

The level of dedication to a craft that is required to reach the highest level is mind-boggling.  But the natural talent required is perhaps equally stupefying.  There is no amount of work, no amount of dedication, no amount of sacrifice that would allow me to have become, say, a world class pole vaulter.  Because what do you have to be before you can become a world class pole vaulter?  A world class pole vaulter!

That's exactly right.  It's dumb, but it's true.  You think there's a universe in which I could have been Phil Ivey?  Absolutely not.  Could I be a lot better at poker than I am?  Sure.  But could I be Phil Ivey?  Not a fucking chance.  Just not the way it works.

So that's how you get these incredible outliers, the combination of absurd natural talent and other-worldly work ethics.  Know anything about Michael Phelps?  His coach was accused of abusing him as a child.  Stuck with him.  He's gotten in trouble for drugs and alcohol on a few occasions.  Not a problem.  He swam two a days for for 20 years to become who is he, which is basically a goddamn monster.  Same deal with Jerry Rice.  His workouts were the stuff of legend.  But could anyone else have been him, no matter what?  Nope.

And the reason for that, I think, is that talent and work aren't additive, or at least they don't project that way when you get to the highest levels of activities.  They're multiplicative.  Hard work gets you more when you're absurdly talented.  When you're up in that rarefied air gaining ground on your competition becomes almost impossible.  They are already so good, and most of them are working just as hard or even harder than you and becoming better everyday.  Or if they aren't there are new younger stronger people on the way up to replace them.  And they are all naturally gifted.  If you want to really stay in the top 1% of anything you need to be gifted AND work hard basically forever.

So yeah, I guess that's a little depressing if you think about it too long.  Hard work can really only get you so far;  the distribution of talent is uneven and unfair, and there isn't much you can do about it.  Except perhaps try to focus your efforts on things where you do have some natural ability, because by doing that your hard work will get you further.  I've read a few books, about this concept, and it goes something like this.

First of all, you need to figure out what you're good at.  People sometimes have a hard time assessing what they have talent for because, typically, those things have always been easy for them.  Other times people just assume they are good at everything and overrate their skills across the board (they say that only the clinically depressed can accurately assess their own abilities).  The point is it's kind of hard to know what you're good out without outside advice.  

Once you know what you're good at, just try to build a life that takes advantage of those skills.  This may seem obvious, but it goes counter to a lot of corporate culture these days.  Employees are encouraged to address the weaknesses on their performance reviews in order to get promoted or in general just level up.  Now don't get me wrong to some extent this is useful (if you're just a rude asshole that's going to hold you back; you need to work on getting up to basic 4/10 people skills if you want to succeed), but as an overall strategy it is somewhat misguided. 

Instead of focusing on the things where you have lots of room to improve (and therefore probably don't have much natural ability), consider focusing your efforts on improving your strengths even further and getting into situations where those strengths are extremely valuable.  If you can achieve that, even to a small degree, you'll find that your life has basically been set to easy mode, since you'll be constantly solving problems that feel easy to you (even though they really aren't).  And wouldn't that be fucking wonderful?

That moment when you know it's fucked

We've all been there.  I've been there 5, maybe 6 times.  You know it's just completely fucked, the whole thing, there is no way out.  What do you do in that moment?  Whatever it is, it's not a small thing.  It matters.    It's a job.  A girl.  A person.  Something.  But it's fucked and you cannot get it back.

People who are good at life know exactly what to do.  Relationship, job...a fucking cat.  Doesn't even matter.  When they know it's fucked, they cut bait and run.  Because it's completely fucked...they know they can't fight their way out, and even if they could what would be the point?  It's fucked. 

Then there's me.  I don't quit, I don't give up on anything.  Ever.  Ever.  How's that worked out for me, you ask?  Real bad.  Real, real fucking bad.  Pretty much in the history of my life I can't think of a time I should have quit and didn't.  It's a damn shit show, I miss every off ramp every time.  I get hurt again and again.  Or I fail, again and again.  Then I get left.

So once that happens 57 times in a row you have to ask yourself....are you trying to get hurt?  Are you even trying to protect yourself?  Surely you can't be that stupid....But I am that stupid, and it's a huge "character" flaw.  Apparently I like to "play the victim", and that's horrendous.

So...I'm gonna work on it.  And you should, too.  When it's fucked, it's fucked.  Don't hang on to something that's not there.  Just do something better.

Priorities and Crutches

The apocalypse really gives you some time to think.  I tried to write yesterday but I just couldn't make anything stick to the page.  Hopefully today will be better (I feel like I say that literally every fucking day).

We all have things that are important to us, be it values we learned as a kid or maybe decided were important along the way (for me they are things like kindness, honesty, and humility), or actions and achievements we value (generating financial independence, running a 6 minute mile, or fostering an animal).  These are our priorities.  The one thing I can think of worth mentioning is that it's really valuable to actively identify your priorities and values through conscious effort, then analyze if your day to day life actually lines up with holding those things in high regard.

For example, I have this out-dated priority of achieving financial success through poker.  It's not that that's still not important to me; it is definitely somewhere on the spectrum of my priorities.  But my actions the past year or two (maybe longer) aren't really congruous with it.  If it's my number 1 priority (as by my time allocation would appear to be), why does it not give me pride?  Why does it not make me happy?  And why have I not mustered the energy to do the extra things (like studying, learning, reading, hand reviews) that would allow me to continue to succeed at it?  Don't get me wrong, succeeding at poker used to be my #1 priority and it used to make sense.  But lately I think I've just been limping along because I haven't replaced it with anything else.  Inertia perhaps?  It's easy to do the same thing again and again.  Or it's not and we turn to crutches.

What's a crutch?  Some people I guess might call it a coping mechanism, and it's something or someone you use or do to help you cope with other, less pleasant, aspects of your life.  I had a couples therapist who called them "escapes".  Obviously the ideal is to generate a life that you don't need to escape from, one that requires no or very few crutches and coping mechanisms.  Back here in reality we accept the need for some of those things (we call them "me time" or "self care") and I think they are completely fine.  Having a glass of wine and a bubble bath?  That's self care and that's great.  Getting blitzkrieg drunk at a bar for no reason on a weeknight?  Probably less good....

As I was thinking about this post (and the one I failed to write yesterday) I realized something.  The reason I failed yesterday and the reason I'm still going today is that today I have a fucking point, something to tie the whole thing together at the end.  That sounds absurd now that it's out on the page, who starts writing without a point, but for someone who has close to 800 blog posts and doesn't know how that's even possible maybe it's not obvious.  Anyway, here's the point.

Crutches are OK as long as you treat them like crutches.  As long as you use them as intended, they can be a perfectly healthy way to keep yourself going (that's the whole self-care thing).  The problems creep in when you start treating crutches like priorities, when they start getting in the way of you doing things that are actually important to you.  Hopefully you see where I'm going with this, but here are some examples.

You like to drink, but you've started scheduling your life around your ability to get blitzed with your friends.  You are often hungover the next day and can't work effectively.  You can't get into shape because of the excess calories.  But still you make sure you find a way to get to the bar with your friends as often as possible.  Your crutch is being treated like a priority.

You play a dumb internet game on your phone.  You used to really enjoy it, but now you're just going through the motions and it's eating away at time you could spend doing other things.  It's fine if you need a distraction now and again, but you should know when too much is too much.  What are you really getting out of it, anyway?  You're prioritizing a crutch.

You're in a stagnant relationship that's not giving you what you need or really even want.  It has become a crutch to avoid feeling useless and lonely.  Obviously at some point it was giving you those things, or else you wouldn't have gotten into it in the first place.  Maybe it has changed, or least it's forward projection (what it could turn into in a perfect world) has, or maybe just your priorities have shifted.  Who fucking knows.  It's OK to stay in something like that so long as it's not interfering with your priorities, but it's important to make sure you know what those priorities are.  Do you want something more, something different?  Are the good parts worth the bad?  It's always easier to limp along than make big changes, trust me that I of all people get that, but here's the thing.  If it's a crutch you have to treat it like a crutch.  You can't make it a priority.  If you do you're just selling the rest of your life short, and that's no way to live and will eventually eat you up.  But in this case....if your relationship isn't a priority, then I mean.....is it really a relationship?

So yeah that's all I've got.  Take the time and effort to decide what your priorities really are, and make sure you live your life in such a way that the majority of your efforts and energy go towards those priorities.  It's OK to have crutches, but you have to limit them to just helping you re-focus on your priorities.  You can't let them become priorities themselves.

And then it got real

Everyone I've talked to this whole time has KIND OF understood how real this is.  Kind of.  Myself included.  But now it's finally real for me, and that's because I've accepted that I won't be able to convince anyone how long this is going to last.  I can't, just like I can't convince anyone who voted for Trump that he's literally a danger to "the free world". 

This current situation, the quarantine, the don't go outside, the "stay home" stuff?  That's not going away.  It's going to last probably a year or 18 months.  Maybe with breaks, but only if we had some competent asshole at helm, not this literally retard lemur.  I hope a million americans don't die, but I'd bet the over.  It's going to be a shit show.  We are stone cold fucked.  The response was too soft, too late, and it's going to be bad.  So bad.

But what do I do now in the interim?  Do I just stay at home and hope?  Do I find someone, anyone, willing to accept me into their small social circle?  Is that safe?   Can I survive 18 months without touching another human being?  Should I have intentionally infected myself while good medical care was available, so that I could work to help people after I recovered?

Fuck man.  Fuck

So like Tuesday?

A good friend of mine posted something on Facebook recently about why we are not being super productive during this pandemic.  The basic conclusion was that like everyone is feeling a lot of anxiety and during times of anxiety you spend a lot more energy just trying to be yourself and you actually regress to a premature emotional state because that takes less energy and you just kind of sit there and try to survive.

I thought about it and I was like yeah.... So that's like Tuesday. 

Seriously though in like a kind of weird way this whole disaster has reduced a lot of people to like my general way of being.  There's only so much anxiety that I can feel there's only so many nine out of tens that I can deal with.  When I get them twice a week I don't really know what to tell you now that the world is in jeopardy.  I can't feel that much worse.

So next time you have a panic attack about this pandemic... Don't minimize it or anything. Just realized I've spent two out of the last seven days for seven out of the last 10 years feeling exactly like that. 

Where do you go when the demons come?

We all have demons.  I know it's a cliche but it's very true.  I have demons.  You have demons.  We all have demons. 

Where do you go when they come?  We all have places we go...a friend.  A bar.  A drug.   To bed.  Most of us at least have a way to deal with the demons.  Put them aside.  Something.

That's what scary about this whole thing, you cant't go to your usual places when the demons come, oh and by the way they added more demons.  Read that again.  You can't put just hide them away, and they are legion.

Some of my friends talk to me like "surely he is fine everything will be ok" and some others text me like "oh haha you can play poker online". 

The demons are still here, and you can't dodge them now.   You can't just hide from them, you can't run away, you have to face them, straight on.  And it's horrible.  If you're reading this and you need help with your demons you call me.  I can help.  We can talk about mine; they are legion.

Year in Review (from 36,000 feet)

I just ran what felt like a mile across the Houston airport.  It couldn't have been that far, but good lord did it feel like it.  My plane in Pittsburgh loaded a bit late, then we had some "rivet" or something that looked suspicious on our wing.  I swear to god the pilot said "we have maintenance on the way to see if that is 'pertinent piece' of the airplane".  Like, he said that.  So we take off around an hour late, land 40 something minutes late, and I haul ass....you know what, it doesn't fucking matter.  I made it.  My lungs are burning and my legs hurt and I'm sweating but whatever I made it.  Half the plane has the fucking flu pray for me.

I just reread my last post and boy was it brutal.  I don't feel quite that bad now, but close.

Anybody who knows me well knows this has been one of the hardest years of my life.  The only more difficult one I can think of was 2014, the break up year, and in retrospect while that sucked ass and was incredibly hard it was probably the best thing that happened to me since I got into MIT.  This year has been really hard and honestly I don't think it's going to be something I look back on and am like "yeah man, I'm really better off for having gone through all that".  Pretty much just everything has sucked. 

I'm starting to have some health issues; all mild but pretty annoying and nothing I'm going to go into detail about here.  I'm drinking too much.  I'm not sleeping well.  My anxiety is acting up.  Poker has been an abject disaster.  As of this writing I'm winning about $10 and .36 bets per hour for the year (which obviously means that I've run poorly when playing in my bigger games) when playing "freelance".  And in not that many hours.  It got so bad that I took a prop job for a bit in the Spring, working stone cold graveyard (2am to 10:30am).  I lasted 7 weeks before realizing the job was going to kill me and there was no hope of getting onto a human shift.  And for my trouble I basically lost almost exactly the amount they paid me, including a 50 bet loss followed by a 90 bet loss two days later.  And this doesn't count whatever I lost playing on KingsClub, which I have written down somewhere and is not...insignificant.  Basically I've broken even for something like 16 months, give or take. 

So when something like that happens everything basically falls apart around you if you're not careful.  I have to be playing badly, I just have to be.  I think I've manged to plug up some of the leaks and flawed thought patterns recently, but even then it's still difficult.  I still have days when I just don't have it;  I didn't even realize that until recently, when I forced myself to bring all my focus and tools to bear and realized wow you really were coasting through entire sessions there bro.  I don't have the armor I used to have.  I can't let mistakes go.  I get emotional (that was happening more early in the year when Glenn was literally bullying me like a middle school playground gorilla trying to get me fired from the Hustler) from time to time.  I get angry at my idiot opponents, sometimes even at people I call friends, for things that just should slide right off my back (and certainly did when I was winning $100/hour).  I have to take early outs.  I don't have the confidence to stick around in mediocre games.  The traffic is killing me (nothing worse than driving home at 7pm in still bad traffic stuck 50 bets wondering when you'll ever win again). 

I had a week recently where I won $18k, 10 of it on the same day spread across two 40/80 sessions at the commerce then the bike (that's right, I played 2.5 hours at commerce, won $5000, decided my game was about to get bad, drove to the bike and played 4 more hours and won another $5000) and I didn't even feel that good about it.  In fact I had a panic attack at the table the next day at 5pm the next day because the woman I'm "seeing" told me she was going into town for a few drinks and I fomo'ed because I wanted to see her.  I mean come on....Sure that can make you feel not awesome, but a full blown anxiety attack at the table?  That's just not healthy.  That just can't happen.

And this would all kind of be ok, I think, if my personal life was somehow firing on all cylinders.  But it's not.  Not even close.  I've lived alone now for 5.5 years, but up until this year only very rarely have I felt truly lonely.  It's happening more and more lately.  Maybe what I want is changing?  Maybe my value system is?  Maybe I'm starting to feel like I'm wasting my life?  Maybe I can no longer handle being in the same casually undefined relationship for 3 years?  Maybe I'm just bored of poker and not hungry anymore after achieving basic financial freedom?  Could it be as simple as I'm not learning and therefore not having fun? I used to think I'd go back to software after a few years of this poker stint.  Now....I'm not so sure.  Do I need to make things easier or harder?  I just don't know.  But I gotta do something.  I gotta join a softball team or a gym or meetup or something.  Poker is supposed to allow me the freedom to live my life the way I want to and I'm just not doing it.

The last post I wrote made it sound like I was definitely quitting poker.  That's not the case.  In the last 6 weeks I've still mostly been playing (although there was quite a bit of time off between Christmas and Thanksgiving and a wedding in Mexico and of course drinking my face off on weekends) and actually kind of enjoying it.  I made an effort to improve my focus and procedures at the table.  I'm trying to get back to the basics of soft limit hold 'em games, just fucking punishing people for making the most basic mistakes of the game, not worrying about being balanced (just being aware when I've painted myself into a range corner) unless I'm in a hand against someone who has a clue.  I've worked Commerce back into my routine, and if the games go overnight I've found them to be pretty darn good and a nice fit to my natural rhythm.  And it feels good to play "big", even though I'm not playing anywhere near big (I haven't played a hand above 60/120).  My focus is a little sharper, I have a little more fun, I feel a little better about myself than I do bum hunting the yellow chip stone fish.

But I am attempting to make a substantial change.  A good friend of mine is an SAT/ACT verbal tutor, and he really likes enjoys it.  He's worked for a large national company for several years and suggested that I apply and give it a shot (on the math side, obviously).  I did a few phone interviews, went to their office and took a math test, and it looks like I'm going to get hired in January.  This isn't like panacea or anything, but it could be a nice complement to a part time poker schedule and there are opportunities to grow both my personal skill set and perhaps eventually build a small business.  And the market for math tutors is just absurd.  My friend gets billed out at $220/hour (which I expect is what they'll bill me at).  Obviously he (we) keeps only a small fraction of that, but you can kind of see where I'm going.  If you're good at it and able to get new clients, it's pretty easy to charge $100-$150/hour for your services.  And if you're able to get enough new clients that you can't handle them yourself....and you're able to hire people to handle them....you get the idea.  There are lot of ways it could turn into something good, and in the meantime making $40/hour to do something constructive while learning a valuable skill doesn't sound that bad at all.

But now on to the point of this post.  This year hasn't been all bad; I've got a lot to be thankful for and I'm going to run down through the list now.

Despite my claim of health issues I have actually had a good year in terms of my physical fitness.  I'm down over 20 pounds from "peak fat" as I call it, most of it this year.  My cardiovascular health could improve, as well as my strength, but for right now I'm going to focus on losing another 15 pounds or so hopefully by summer.  And the important part here is that I (re)learned how to lose weight.  I simply have to count calories, I have to write down everything I eat.  That keeps me accountable and gives me the satisfaction of skipping that last snack before bed because it makes it so clear that eating it will mean I made no progress that day.  For the first time in several years I'm confident that I'll be in better shape every quarter this year.

I've developed a few valuable friendships (you know who you are), maintained some other ones, and rebuilt some that were deteriorating.  I went the entire year with really only burning one bridge (and it's not burnt down completely and wasn't that strong of a bridge to begin with).  That's a good year for me!

I saved a life.  I'm not sure if it was even mentioned on here, but I fostered a pitbull named Bronson for 5 months, eventually finding him a forever home with my neighbor's niece.  He was out of time at the Ramona Animal Shelter, going to be put down that day, and I volunteered, stepped the fuck up, drove to the IE to get him, and just figured it the fuck out.  For five months I lived in my 500 square foot apartment with him and....

Cora!  I adopted a cat this year and love her to death.  She originally just moved in as a foster because....well it's a little complicated.  The woman "I'm seeing" is deep in the cat rescue life and was fostering Cora and another adorable little guy I refer to as "Baby Chark".  Those two cats were going to be moved to "the cattery" which is basically a closet in an animal adoption center to make room for some more difficult cats that she could handle.  I volunteered to take the two of them, but Baby Chark was adopted before he could even move in.  So I got Cora, fell in love, and decided to keep her.  It's a little terrifying to think I'm going to have her until I'm in my 50s, but I have no regrets.

I bought two houses.  Well, half of two houses.  Very cheap houses with a partner.  We're gonna rent them out and it's gonna be fine if they don't fall down.

I'm getting really tired now, probably because I'm on east coast time and I ran my equivalent of a marathon 2 hours ago, so I'm going to stop writing.  Long story...well...long.  2019 sucked ass but I did do some cool things.  I'm not quitting poker, but I know I need to be smarter about it and work harder than I have been.  I'm pursuing other opportunities so that I don't end up stuck in poker like some of my friends.   So it's not all that bad.

The End Times

Everything ends.  Jobs.  Relationships.  Your life.  And apparently some things end more than once.  This blog hasn't really ended I guess, although upon review this is my 12th post in 4 years, so I mean let's be honest it's been "mostly dead" (which is part alive!) for some time now.  But it looks like my poker "career" is coming to at the very least some sort of long hiatus and (if things go to plan) basically ending in its current form.  And I mean this has happened before, I'm not saying I'm never going to play cards again.  But for right now I just have to face the facts that things are horrific, getting worse, with no reason to expect big improvements.

Honestly I don't even know what all I want to say, I'm just gonna write until I don't feel like it anymore.  It's therapeutic.

Nothing has gone right for 15 months.  Shortly after Vegas 2018 I just...stopped winning.  I had been on an amazing run for nearly 2.5 years (basically since the day I quit EMC), and was enjoying every minute of it.  You see, I had assumed when I quit software a second time that I'd get bored with cards fairly quickly.  Turns out you don't get bored when you're winning nearly 2 bets per hour for 3000 hours.  I ran so good for so long that I started to believe, while I must have been running hot, the results I was posting had to be somewhere near sustainable.  I mean, how could I possibly be winning literally THOUSANDS of bets more than I was supposed to be?  Sure, I was running hot, but you couldn't run THAT hot, could you?   Turns out you can!  I know a guy who beat the Hustler 25/50 for and I'm not even kidding, over $200/hour for something like 800 hours.

August 2018.  Cue doom switch.

I'd love to say it's all run bad, but it's not.  I haven't been working as hard as I should be away from the table.  Getting your head kicked in day in and day out affects you're play.  I'm surely, undoubtedly, playing worse than I was in 2017 when I won literally $100/hour (before promotions and jackpots) playing mostly 25/50.  $100/hour worse?  LOL obviously not.  But $25 or $30?  Maybe.  I'm not as sharp as I used to be.  I got really out of shape and don't have the energy or focus to play for as long as I used to.  My back hurts (from being old, from bad posture, and probably from the existential angst I'm putting myself through).  I just can't recover mentally like I used to.  I fucking stink, basically.  That's hard to admit, it's hard to say, but I fucking stink.

And on top of that games are getting worse every year, the rake is going up every year.  Fish are literally dying off and not being replaced (you just don't see 25 year old kids out there blowing their brains), and it's going to get REALLY bad when the economy turns south.  Like, hold on to your hats n glasses, this is the wildest ride in the wilderness bad.  The big games are mix games, and apparently I'm terrible at those (I played on kings club for a year and a half, lost a loaded Toyota Camry before I gave up).  And when this fantasy land made of money and 20% returns takes a shit, it's going to be a big smelly one for limit hold 'em for sure.  If I can't win now, what chance do I stand when half the games aren't even running anymore?

I already spend more time driving around the fucking urban hellscape that is LA county than ever, more than could possibly be considered reasonable.  Why?  Because it's harder to find a good game than ever, and with my confidence as shot as it is I can't even justify sitting in mediocre ones thinking "well I'm still winning I can just keep playing".  I just broke even for almost 2000 hours playing in the best games I could find;  how the fuck could I possibly be winning more than $15/hour in a shitty one!?!  And part of playing poker for a living is taking early outs when you're losing;  well guess what, that really adds up when you never win!  And of course I haven't moved closer to the casinos;  I didn't have to while I was running like God and inertia is a real thing and I do like it down here and ostensibly I have lots of friends and relationships but lol sure what the fuck ever.  If I just picked up and moved to DTLA or Long Beach or god I don't know fucking Australia I'd probably hear from like 3 people here in Laguna ever again.

I guess the hardest part of all of this is admitting that while a lot of it is bad luck, I definitely could have been working a lot harder this whole time.  I could have been studying more.  I could have been doing more to stay in physical shape.  I could have been doing more to foster and engender real, supportive, and positive relationships.  I could have worked harder to learn other games, to keep myself engaged.  I could have done a whole lot of shit.  But I didn't and now here we are.

And where exactly is that?  Here is basically broken I guess, at least in terms of poker.  Most of my friends, the ones I have left, have to just be completely sick of my endless negativity.  I have people in my life who are like that, for whom just everything is awful and woe is me I am such a victim.  It's awful.  How many bad beats can you listen to?  How many times can you hear someone bitch about how bad things are going, give them advice, and watch them make zero substantive changes?  How long am I going to feel and act like a victim?  Honestly.  This isn't me.

And I'm no fucking good to them either; I'm no fucking good to anyone like this.  I'm angry.  Depressed.  Anxious.  Scared even.  I never had an over-abundance of self confidence but shit now I've got basically none.  Try sitting with these people for 2000 hours and not winning.  They are stone fucking idiots, the lot of 'em, and yet me and my supposedly big brain cannot defeat them, day in and day out, month in and month out.

So yeah, here is no fucking place to play poker.  Here is losing all my friendships and not building new ones.  Here is completely out of balance.  Too much drinking, too much Netflix, too much driving.  Not enough learning, not enough working out, not enough sex, traveling, sunshine....not enough of anything good.

So I'm just not gonna stay here anymore. 

Going Insane: A Two Part Instructional Guide

Fun fact of life....a lot of processes have basically two ways they can go.  Someone can play a hand of limit hold 'em and look like st1ckman, mostly because he had two options and just happened to flip heads.  The st1ck rides again.  Next hand he aborts every street and you stop wondering what you were thinking.  The st1ck is dead; long live the st1ck!

Going insane is no different.  You can go insane in two basic ways.  The first one is just what everyone accepts as going insane.  It's not as clean as they show on TV (nothing is....the white house...a court room...being a cop....saving the universe from a guy with a big chin), but it happens roughly the same way.  One day you wake up and your brain simply can no longer process and handle the world it is currently occupying.  You cannot cope with your environment, it's all fucking madness, and to the outside world you look like a stone lunatic.  You effectively cease to function.  I've done that one and let me tell you it's no fucking bueno.  Nothing makes sense, you can't solve the simplest of problems, everything is insurmountable, and waking up in the morning becomes a herculean effort that, once achieved, you literally question the point of.

The second way, unfortunately, walks the first path, but continues on to a more interesting place.  You wake up one day and realize that your brain can no longer function in the world you've built for it.  That's the same.  But there isn't a sense a panic, loss, or failure.   You aren't incapacitated.  You don't cease to function.  You realize that that the problem isn't necessarily with your mind, with you, but rather with the world you've carefully constructed around yourself.  That's the source of the madness.  In effect you're going insane, but what you're actually doing is leaving behind your past (insane) choices and moving on to a different (scary) place.  To the outside world, and to all but your closest friends, you probably look the same as you would in the first method.  And that make sense, as you have to basically go through there to get to this place.  But it's very different.

I suspect that many extremely successful people have gone insane in just this way.  They wake up one day and simply decide that their world is bullshit and that they no longer respect its norms and customs.  Elon Musk, as much as I hate him, is extremely successful and probably didn't want to flip the world on its ass at age 7.  The same argument could be made for Donald Trump.  It's entirely possible that the ability survive going insane could be a driving force in human evolution.

5th Most Drunk Wedding Protocol

I'm on a flight to a wedding which historically is a good time for me to actually write a blog post. I was talking to friend who asked me the following simple question:

"Are you going to be the biggest drinker at the wedding?"

Innocent question. Fair question. Good question. The answer is maybe yes, but I explained to him that the goal is always to be somewhere around 5th most drunk, at the wedding or otherwise. You ever been to a wedding where 5 people got kicked out? They can't kick out 5 people! And even if they do by the time they get to you all bets are off anyway and the bride is either loving it and number 6 drunk or in tears anyway so fuck it, it's not on you and at least you got your money's worth for the personal foul.

I've been number 1 drunk at a wedding before. That's an entirely different magilla, because you can be number 1 drunk and just WAYYYY out in front, settin the pace, lappin fools. That's not a good place to be. Things can go very wrong, very painfully, very quickly, out there. You can come around a turn and put it into the wall at 170 MPH like it's nothin out there. You do not want to be out there. It's scary out there.

Somebody has to be there, though; someone is the most drunk. We can't all be 5th most drunk; that's not the way counting works. If you find yourself number 1 most drunk, I have great news! The fact that you noticed you're most drunk means there is still time to get things under control! Choose your next steps very, very carefully. Proceed directly to the dance floor with a glass of water and let someone pass you right on by. Everything is gonna be fine!

Failing that you need a good friend who can simply explain the situation to the groom:

"Either you didn't know Jesse well enough to invite him, or you should not be surprised here. This is at least a little on you, man"

5th Most Drunk. That's where you wanna be.

Evolutionary Pressure

My favorite professor in college was Patrick Winston, who taught me basically "Intro to AI" and "How to Communicate".   One of the cooler things I remember him teaching us about was the subject of genetic algorithms, which in a nutshell is a way to solve a problem that works in the following way:

1.  Define a problem space and a measure of fitness for a solution.
2.  Randomly generate solutions to the problem with some parameters.
3.  Let the randomly generated solutions fight it out (solve the problem).
4.  Take the fittest ones, mutate them, and let them try again.  Etc, etc.

Basically the idea is to mimic the evolutionary process we see in nature in a computer simulation in order to come to some reasonable solution for a very complex (perhaps NP complete) problem.  The example that was coded up in the class involved little creatures made of blocks who had to figure out how to capture the piece of food in the middle of their little world.  I can't find it...but you get the idea.  You started off with a few simple block beings and eventually you'd get all sorts of crazy things fighting over the food pellet.

Poker ecosystems are no different.  People have seemingly random strategies, they test them out against each other, the ones with the best results get to play longer, the ones with the worst results usually go broke or play less.  People adapt, and mutate....but not really.

So I was thinking the other day about the poker games I've been playing in these past few years, and something occurred to me seemingly for the first time.  I've always known that "mega fish", your truly special game starters that everyone wants to play with, that even regular fish know are terrible, are extremely important to a poker ecosystem.  But something that had never occurred to me was the following reason for it related to long term (very long term) game health.

True mega-fish remove evolutionary pressure from the ecosystem.

And that's really the simplest way to say it.  If you have a game that features some truly terrible players there is far less pressure on everyone else to improve in order to survive.  Regular fish don't lose nearly as much when there is a mega fish in the game for a few reasons.  First, because of schooling....if someone is playing J7o for two bets it's far less of a mistake for the regular fish to play JTo behind him.  Also they don't get bum hunted as hard.   Mediocre players (break even players) stick around longer.  And perhaps most importantly or at least most interestingly winning players can leave large leaks in their games unaddressed for months or even years and still get along just fine. 

And it's kind of that last part that I was really thinking about when I was driving home from a game the other day and texting with Pete and The Hammer.  The games I usually play in just don't have any truly good players.  Nobody has even a modicum of game theory knowledge.  Everyone goes on tilt.  Almost everyone chases losses and quits amazing games when they've won "enough".   And the winners can just get away with this because the games are so often just balls nuts amazing that they can make large glaring mistakes (both in tactics and meta stuff) and still win enough to just keep going, month after month, year after year.

And I mean don't get me wrong, I'm definitely guilty of this stuff, too.  Spending the last 2 years playing basically no higher than 40/80 has definitely left me in a spot where I struggle to remain comfortable if I ever get into a reasonably tough game with 3 or 4 actually good players.  I honestly figured I'd be back to software by now, but I've frankly been winning so much for the last 3000 hours that I'm just under no pressure whatsoever to make a change.  And there you have it again :)

Tasks, Goals, and Resolutions

I just spent an hour walking on the beach (well not entirely on the beach, but like along the beach and some on the beach and you get the idea).  It was incredibly peaceful and relaxing, to the point that I kept going after I started to get a blister on my foot.  I'm going to try to "make more time" to do that sort of thing, which really just means waste less time watching NetFlix.  Which brings me to my point of the day, which I've always kind of had knocking around in my brain but had never really articulated until just now.  And that is...the difference between tasks, goals, and resolutions.

For the purpose of this post I'm going to define a task as something you can do basically "right now".  At the upper limit it has to be something you can finish "today".  I'm very good at tasks.  I can make a to-do list and knock them down one by one.  Completing tasks makes me feel good about myself, and performing them (even menial simple ones) usually results in a break from the day to day background static anxiety I tend to feel.  The fact that I'm good at tasks is sort of the reason I've been able to be a live poker grinder for so long, and it's the reason I took to scrum mastering toward the end of my stint at EMC.  Playing poker for a living on a day to day basis is very task oriented.  Wake up.  Find a reasonable game.  Get to the game.  Play poker.  Quit when you're playing bad, get tired, or the game turns bad.  I gravitate toward poker because it's a way that I can productive without exerting too much effort.  The point here, however, is that you can achieve a task "right now" and get that little jolt of positive feedback that comes along with it.  Every hand of poker is a task completed.

Now a goal is one step up from a task, and a goal is the level of this chain where I kind of fall down.  A goal is something that you cannot achieve "right now".  It's something you have to work towards over at least a few days (although some of those could really be just big tasks) and more realistically weeks or months.  A simple goal most of us have is "lose weight" or "get in shape".  The problem with those goals, at least for me, is that they aren't quantifiable and you cannot achieve them "right now".  I need to lose about 30 pounds (that's right), but I cannot do that today, this week, or even this month.  That's like a 4-6 month day in and day out grind, and I tend to fall down on those sorts of things.  My Ex was incredibly good at medium term goals, to the point that she would always seem to sacrifice the current moment for some promise of future betterment.  I seem not to be, and I think it's because I don't really get any positive feedback along the way in any easy to digest "chunks".  And if I eat some extra tacos or have a few beers, that doesn't really affect my goal status for tomorrow.  4 months from now when I've not lost any weight it's like "well gee why" and that's why.  I'm just not good at it.

And the item here is the resolution...and that's something is even harder to do than a goal because you can't really measure it and/or you can't even ever really achieve it.  "Quit drinking" is a resolution.  You cannot actually quit drinking (they say this in AA).  All you can actually do is not drink today, or more accurately "right now".  That's it.  "Be more mindful" can't really be measured.  There isn't like a mindfullness meter or app you can get and just track it.  Resolutions are even harder than goals, and that's why people fall down on them.

So what's the point?  The point is that when you get down to it everything you attempt to achieve in your life can be broken down into some sequence of tasks.  When I'm being my most productive I have an active to-do list that just has things going on and off it constantly.  If I have a goal then that just needs to be broken down into tasks that will eventually lead to achieving that goal.  And resolutions....that just require....you guessed it....resolve!

I thought maybe this was going to be some large grandiose thing, but really that's it.  Hope it helps you think about some stuff.

CryptoBossing

“Sir, is it true that you are a certified professional cryptocurrency baller?”

“Yes, that statement apparently is true. I’m at least as surprised as you are”

“How did you get to this point? What steps should one take to become a professional cryptocurrency baller?”

“Well Babar, to be honest I don’t have a fucking clue how I got here. But there’s just one thing you need to do before you can claim professional status. You have to quit your job.”

“I don’t have a job to quit”

“Then you, too, are a certified professional cryptocurrency baller.”

“Deuces”

I got into crypto currency officially a little less than a year ago. I had been holding some bitcoin for a while, but basically piled on when it was still trading for 3 figures. I bought some other coins here and there and there and here. I’ve sold a lot on the way up (goodness if I hadn’t sold...goodness). I’ve still made, in the parlance of our times...a pile. A big ‘ol pile. You see….you buy bags (big bags, little bags...it’s all bags) and you hold the bags. The stuff in bags either pamps or is rekt. You don’t wanna be the one holding the bag (trust me, someone is gonna end up holding these bags whence they are rekt), but you also don’t wanna miss a certified MOONING. That’s more than a pamp….a mooning involves lines indistinguishable from vertical. I swear I’ve seen some graphs that appear to go backwards in time they are so steep, like those rock climbing dudes who somehow don’t fall off.

I’ve missed some moonings, but I’ve caught my fair share, also. I mean for crying out loud BTC itself almost touched $20K and at the time of this pecking was trading in the 15k range. Etherium ran from like ones of dollars to $300, stayed put for a while, and is now just bouncing around like an ADHD 7 year old between 500 and 800. I’ve nailed some alt coins also….but honestly everything has just gone up so much that it would be impossible to miss. I’ve held BTC, ETH, lots of other coins. I’ve done some ICO presales. Shit, I’m even part of a mining operation.

So how did I get here, and what’s my plan going forward? I did so by following the advice of Patrick Henry Winston, who taught me most of the truly important things I got out of my $100k education.

Ask someone who knows.

And that’s really the answer to most of life. If nobody knows you can get a Ph.D, that’s basically the way we’ve set it up is my understanding. Usually someone knows. Anyone who has worked at a software company can attest to the uncomfortable phenomenon of being pinned down as the guy who knows.

“Oh really you should ask Patty, she knows more than me”

“I did, she sent me to you”

“What about Oleg?”

“Sat with him for an hour, he said to go see Jesse”

(Fuck)

“OK...what do we got?”

At your job sometimes it’s in your best interest to avoid being seen as the guy who knows; that’s just going to get you more work, more responsibility, and more time helping people. That attitude could be why I didn’t seem to get promoted very quickly in SWE roles…..In crypto, however, it’s the opposite thing going on. EVERYONE claims to be “the one who knows”. Everyone. And that is super dangerous. Pete said to me this last Vegas that the reason he likes me, that we get along, is that unlike everyone else in the world I actively try to downplay my achievements. And you know, he’s sorta right. It’s not that I try to downplay what I’ve done, I just don’t believe that anything I have accomplished has ever been that special. Maybe that means I’m clinically depressed. I am extremely comfortable arriving at the answer of “I don’t know...what’s everyone else doing?” and then just doing that most of the time except a little better.

The catch is you have to be smart enough to at least determine who is smarter (or more accurately, who knows more) than you. Ideally you’ll be smart enough to get even more granular than that. “This guy over here knows more than me, but he’s still pretty freaking oblivious. This other dude on the other hand knows all sorts of other stuff!” Up until a few weeks ago I was basically just working on the assumption that other people were try-harding and they were pretty sharp and I could ride their coattails and hopefully make some more piles while I continued to play poker for 30 hours a week.

NYET! NO MORE.

I am going balls deep. This market (if you can even call it a market….it’s a freaking joke really) is probably the opportunity of my lifetime (except perhaps for the Floyd v Connor fight….lock of the century I can’t believe I only made a few thousand). I’ve never really bought into technical analysis for stocks, and I didn’t really see how it could apply here since there are like zero underlying fundamentals, but when you can go on an exchange and literally see the order book for all the buys/sells that are live for a coin….I mean, that’s not too hard to figure out. You can actually see the walls of support and resistance. The new guy I’ve found, who apparently was giving his picks to the guy(s) I was working with, knows what’s going on and is basically batting 1.000. And I’m not talking about like they went up some. I’m talking about hitting 5 baggers. 10 baggers. He has a 60 bagger. He does the legwork. He schedules calls with developers. He has zero confidence that he’s actually better than anyone else at this, but is just working kind of hard and trying to stick very basic buy and hold principles (backed by some technical analysis of support and resistance lines).

I have hitched my wagon, and if necessary I will attempt to ford the river. Or perhaps I will caulk it and float it across. It does not matter, my wagon has been hitched. I’m gonna start doing the legwork myself. I’m going to gamble big (muy big...big big) and see what I can do. And yeah, i’m probably gonna end up holding some bags at the end, but I’m not going to be one of those people who basically just let it ride the whole way. I’m gonna take stuff out, try to keep my bags a reasonable size, you know the drill.

So yeah, more cryptobossing posts to come, I hope. And no, I don’t fucking know anything and I don’t know what coin you should buy, just like sports. I do however believe that cryptocurrency is here to stay and will be one of the most disruptive forces in our lifetimes, and anyone who doesn’t at least attempt to understand how it works is doing himself a big disservice.

Musings from Spirit Airlines Flights

So I’m on my flight home to Pittsburgh for the holidays and I only have one book so I figured I’d try and write something. I should have brought two I guess, but whatever. I haven’t actually read a book for pleasure in years (I honestly can’t think of reading one in Laguna Beach). I guess it’s because I’ve let Netflix/Hulu/Amazon take over that aspect of my life; the list of shows I’ve watched in the last 3.5 years is quite simply mind boggling and horrifying. But back to the point….I’m trying out Spirit Airlines which quite frankly hasn’t been that bad. Sure I paid $6 for a coke and a water, but honestly I’m OK with that. There was TONS of space in the bins because they really only let you bring on a personal item (I have my man purse, which is way more than I need). And boarding took like no time at all because nobody was tryign to bring all their luggage for a week long trip in roll aboards. My middle seat is empty so I guess I cannot speak to the lack of legroom but honestly it doesn’t seem worse than usual. And actually it appears that the plane is devoid of exceptionally large humans, an effect that I suppose could actually make it better for everyone else? I mean probably not….but people don’t look too crammed.

The thing I can’t really abide is there is no option to pay for internet. I’d pay a lot. I’ve proven how much I will pay time and again by paying every single time. $30? A bargain! But they don’t even have it, which doesn’t seem to fit with their model of nickle and dime you for everything. Like, how can sattellite internet at $20/pop not be a profit source? I get that I can’t stream 17 episodes of the shield, I get that I really do. But like….my village could be BURNING and my troops are awaiting my orders and 14 people have probably nudged me in words with friends.

So I’m writing because I don’t want to run out of book! It’s proven to be a great book so far; a detective/pyschological thriller almost as old as me. But I can’t waste it! That should give you a decent look into the inner workings of jesse8888 (who by the way has sort of morphed his online presence to “da yung jeeze” thanks to someone once calling me jeese a million years ago). God bless dat young jeezey. As an aside, wow way to go Google somehow every doc I’ve ever had access to is saved and ready to go on this $200 flipbook that weighs about 17 ounces without me preloading a word. Should I actually destroy 2/3rds of those documents? Absolutely. Was it enlightening to read the journal entries from January 2014, 2 months before Danielle and I broke up? Absofuckinglutely. Wow...I was MISERABLE. I was ANGRY. I was HATEFUL. I was….wow. Just wow. Definitely not reading the shit I wrote after the breakup, that’s for damn sure. We’re going to go with those were just a therapeutic exercise.

As I’d guess most people reading this know I’ve had a bit of a weird two years (fuck, 4 years...8?). I quit my job at EMC (now Dell) in early 2016, with the plan of just playing poker for a while and seeing where things took me and probably eventually moving and getting back into software. At the end of my tenure at EMC I was actually morphing into a combination scrum master/engineer. I’m well suited to the task of scrum mastering, honestly. But none of you really care about that, right? Shit I never really understood why anyone cared about any of this blog, but to this day I get people wishing me well, telling me they read (or even reread) the entire thing. I guess I had flashes of interestingness? Honestly the reason the whole thing stopped is that I sort of felt the need to stop being completely honest, and the blunt honesty was my best guess as to why it was popular. Like, I realized that people in the real world were gonna read it and the whole sports betting thing made me and I guess more specifically Danielle extremely uncomfortable. Man you should have seen the fit she pitched when sailboats stopped in for goodness I don’t even remember what. He laughed about it and said “so you’re not allowed to have friends over” and i just kind of um...went to my room and cried? She treated me like a disabled child. Lol anyway.

20 months on the lamb and I’m not so sure that return to software is imminent. Last time 6 weeks turned into 5 years, right? So if I was planning for a year, carry the one….I have over a decade to fuck off! Laguna Beach has been fantastic. Sure I go out drinking too much, but that’s kind of the point, right? I’ve met some women (not going to go into how that’s going presently because that seems like something I’d want to ask her about posting and honestly I have plenty of other stuff to write about). I’ve made some friends. I don’t go to the beach itself enough, but just SEEING the ocean is amazing. I’m too out of shape to surf; heck I’m probably too out of shape to ski but we’re going to find out about that in a few weeks. And actually things there are getting better (I’m down 10 pounds from Vegas). Not quickly, slowly, but as my friend Victoria says to me like once every few months “if you want to get out of a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging”. Several years ago I got pretty into weight lifting (I was processing a lot of rage, I think) and I got quite strong and gained a bunch of good weight. Then I stopped pushing the plates and continued eating and drinking like a workout fiend and well….yeah. How do you gain 35 pounds in 3 years? 1 pound a month! In theory that’s less than running a 100 calorie/day surplus.

Somehow I accidentally started following Pete’s advice from years and years ago, which was to make sure you have multiple streams of income. I had a job for a while; most people have a job and that’s really all they have in terms of making money. During that time I picked up two rental properties in Pittsburgh (with a big assist from my dad). The management company I’m using is possibly the least competent entity I have ever actually paid money to, but it comforts me to know that I at least have those buildings. I’ve of course been doing sports for at least 5 years now. 2016 was a phenmonal year in that regard. 2017 has been about 40% as bad as that one was good (changes are probably coming down the pipeline in that regard). Of course if the superbowl goes my way and Tommy doesn’t teach me a lesson about respect after I got down something like 20k at ATL +4 +100 (something like 30 cents better than the close I think), the year looks just kind of meh. But as it is it looks like a damn dumpster fire. So I don’t really know if that’s going to continue, the guy I work with at first was just getting sick of my bitching, but in our most recent communication he stated pretty plainly that he needed to figure out what was up and take a good hard look at things. Honestly I wouldn’t miss it one bit lol. The running around, the people taking shots at you, the occassionaly getting stiffed, the wear and tear on friendships (I lost my “acting best friend” over a petty sports square up earlier this year), the endless spreadsheets and accounting. I dunno. I liked writing because it usually gave me energy, but right now I feel like it’s giving me some fresh perspective on things. Maybe I do need to just shut down or clam way up on sports. Who knows. Moving on….

Here’s maybe where I’ll get to the meat of an actual blog post! This year I’m on pace to play about 1400 hours of limit hold ‘em (in 2016 I played a slightly smaller number). That’s nowhere near a fulltime job, and I’m sure is much lower than all of my posted totals during my 5 year “shot” (I had a year where I played 1900 butt in seat hours). But I actually am enjoying it the vast majority of the time. I’m driving 45 to 60 minutes each way, and there are days when I quit after 3 hours (either because I’m losing or because the game prospects are less than amazing). And there are 11 hour days also (probably more of them than there ever were before).

And this year I am going to post my best result by a vast, vast margin. I am winning at a frankly impossible rate. Going all the way back to the middle of 2016, it is something like a 2200 hour heater of over 2 bets per hour. For my five year shot I believe my total number over all medium to large stakes LHE games was like .7 bets per hour. Point. Seven. I’m winning close to 3 times as much. At .7 bets per hour when you’re mixing stakes the downswings can be truly brutal. At 2 bets per hour when you’re basically always playing the same you pracically can’t have losing months. It’s been….amazing. Wonderful. Fucking great. Fucking amazingly wonderfully fucking great.

Obviously I’m running hot, and obviously I haven’t solved limit hold’em or anything like that. I get it. But I’m doing SO many things SO much better. I’m quitting bad games, camping out in good ones. I’m playing the majority (all?) of my hours in smaller (softer) games with a huge home field advantage. I think I’ve gotten much better in terms of my true “A” game, my standard “B” game, and avoiding playing hours really any worse than that. Like I said, obviously there has to be some rungood involved here, but you don’t just triple your winrate over a nearly 100k hand sample on run good. I mean OK, maybe you do. But from a bayesian point of view (maybe I’m using that wrong) it’s pretty likely that conditions have improved, or more accurately the conditions I’m putting myself into are vastly better. On the technical side I have truly embraced my inner lagbox and just fire away relentlessly. At every step of my career there as been someone in my ecosystem who was just unimaginably laggy to the point couldn’t believe he/she could possibly win. And yet the evidence pointed to he/she winning. I don’t think I’ve gotten to WTK or Kim levels, but I’m probably closer to them than the 2008 version of myself. And big shocker, playing that way when you’re super duper hyper dyper over rolled for your games is really fucking fun. It’s cool to go on 100 bet rushes, it really is. It’s fun. I’m having fun playing cards, people!

Everyone has been sounding the death knell for limit hold ‘em in LA since I fucking got here. And maybe they’re right, maybe there are fewer games and fewer people making a living off of it. The rake has just gone up and up and up and up (I pay $7 in most of the pots I take down, if I don’t tip) and I firmly believe that has forced a bunch of breakeven or even slightly winning players to go broke or simply give up. The games that we’re left with sure SEEM to be pretty freaking good on a pretty regular basis. That said I’ve logged probably 90% of my hours at the same freaking table, so maybe I’m just talking out of my ass and as soon as that game dries up I’m going to in for a 3000 hour break even stretch. But from where I’m a sittin’, everything appears to be fine.
(Trip home happens….5 days later)

The only people who can afford to play fulltime are strong winners and those who can afford to be huge losers. And most of the strong winners seem to have promoted themselves to white chip games or draw games and stuff like that; not a lot of people slumming it at the 25/50 table trying to make a living, and those that are typically have huge leaks and are pretty easy to exploit. But the key really is just to never play on tilt, and I probably do that better than almost anyone else in the game. Even if it appears that I’m tilting, and I probably am, it’s nowhere near the demolition tilt other people go on after the simplest of beats. A hand….

Super easy to play against guy either limps or raises the HJ, I raise with 65cc in the CO, dude who takes himself way too seriously and is very bad raises the button, it gets capped, one of the blinds is in, I don’t fucking remember that’s not important

755

Infinity bets go in. In this case infinity is 4 (not 10, which was infinity in AP calculus...here infinity is just 4)

755-8

Infinity more bets go in. Again, 4. The blind finally folds 44 when facing two cold which should have been folded several decisions ago obviously…..

75594

I get raised for the 15th time, 3 bet, am rage called by his aces, and extend my arms with a shit eating “it’s a boy” grin on my face as the dealer ships me the 5 pusher.

What’s important isn’t so much that I won a $1500 pot that should have been half that size (that’s not not important, but it’s just a little you know less important). The main thing to realize here is that not one but two of my opponents advanced directly to full-fledged, demolition, banana, poo-flinging tilt. The guy who folded the pocking 4s was beside himself for 30 minutes, playing every hand until the eliminator (the turn...which determines if you pick up a draw and can see the river or are eliminated) at a minimum. The guy who raised me 2 to 3 times more than necessary with the aces...his day was done. He couldn’t believe how a “good player” like me could “go that far” with 65cc. You see, you only get aces once every 4 or 5 hours, and those were his and I basically stuck them up his ass. And he wouldn’t let me forget it, which obviously means he wouldn’t forget it himself, which means 50 hands later when I three street value towned him with like ace jack high he could do nothing but shake his head and lament his misfortune.

And that’s kind of the point of being a lag box. I’ve been saying things like this for years:

“You have to bet that river….it makes you harder to play against”

And you know what? It’s true. I’m hard to play against. And I run like the very wind itself. Just ask that guy….he probably told the story at the Christmas dinner table. He probably had a nightmare about that hand lol.