Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob148
I'm not trying to take a shot at you, but it's curious to me that we can spend days on end discussing other people's problems, but then when you pose a very interesting introspective view here and nobody bites.
Someone asked me what I meant, and basically at least for me -- I was a hyper-competitive person when I was younger, to the point where I always wanted to beat everyone, everywhere. Mike Tyson "eat your children" and all that.
So when I started playing poker, basically my strategy was fully exploitative. I actively tried to understand people, find holes and weaknesses in their game, and then smash that hole wide open and crush them that way. So basically search and destroy flaws in decisions people made. I still pretty much play this way, as I think most people do who play exploitatively.
I've spent years and years actively thinking this way, to the point where my brain pretty much automatically always sees mistakes people are making all the time, in every situation. In LHE, you have to see and identify every tiny mistake players are making, and then poke that mistake over and over again for the tiniest fractions of bets every hand.
While great for beating people at poker, it's not really a happy way to live your life and interact with other people in a normal setting. But it's also hard to shut that off and completely ignore what you can recognize as constant tiny mistakes over and over.
I think a lot of poker players have turned out this way, by evidence of the types of arguments we see, even in this forum, over the most trivial of points.