Return of the Blog (For a while...)
So it's been over a month or so since I've had the urge to do any writing but the bug has finally hit me again so here we go.
Last time I checked in I'd been having sort of a hiatus from the stresses of higher stakes stuff and had been focusing on zoom. I was in a bad mindset for playing live and wanted to just concentrate on schedule and discipline.
I ended up moving from staying with my buddy at his temporarily into an awesome new flat with 2p2's own superstar GazzyB. More on this later.
In the new flat I started to get a little lonely within the first few weeks of being here (at this time Gazzy was in LA) and I'd been on a good schedule. I'd been going on several dates with a girl I liked (more on this later) and I was in good health, was eating well and overall was in a good head space.
I decided to return to play some Live Poker in order to just spend some time away from the computer screen and in order to get a little social integration. The decision was certainly very fruitful for the back end of October and most of November. I went on an absolute tear and was in cruise control, felt I was bringing close to my A game everyday and the results reflected this. We didn't have many regs in town and 10/25 was still getting up everyday; this should give you a good enough insight into the quality of the games during this period. However...
A Spanner in the Works
During the end of November we had an GUKPT Main Event here in London. Now the first interesting takeaway:
1) For the first time ever (since living in London) I didn't play the £2k Main Event. Now undoubtedly the GUKPT Main, as those who have played it before will know, is probably the softest main event of this size in the world and therefore I'm sure I'd have an edge in the field, even with my questionable MTT game. However, I was in a good place with PLO, had been doing a ton of study and I had told myself that if I hadn't done any MTT study then I wouldn't play the event. Alas, I didn't do the MTT study and thus decided to exercise good discipline and forego playing the main.
2) WE HAD CHEATERS IN THE BIG VIC GAME - Do not adjust your screens this is correct. This isn't a private game, this is a supposedly well regulated public game ran in one of London's most historical poker rooms/casino. Where to start with this little sub story? So a few random faces were playing the 10/25 game during the GUKPT week, this didn't raise any red flags as this is pretty normal when a tour is in town. They played a strange style and seemed generally quite tight but a little fishy, again completely normal and not enough to raise any red flags. A few of the new faces were running pretty good and cleaning up, again this couldn't really be viewed as a super red flag given over the course of a few nights we're playing a few hundred hands and we all know the variance of PLO. Anyway, we get to a session later in the week and I'm sat in the game alongside a London legend called Jeff Duvall.
Fun facts about Jeff:
1) Has been around forever, has played poker all over the world, in casino's, private games etc.
2) Very shrewd guy, worked in an MIT Blackjack Team, very aware of what is going on.
3) Is always suspicious of new players who turn up to the game and clean up. This perhaps is the most important thing us 'newer' grinders probably need to sharpen up on.
..anyway, digression over. So I'm next to Jeff and he turns to me and goes 'these lads in seats 8 and 9 are about to get thrown out'. Alas about 30 seconds later the card room manager goes up to these new 'crushers' who didn't speak any English, or any other language for that matter, apparently they were just mutes and quite forcefully asks them to stand up from the game. A conversation (not sure how this truly worked given the perpetrators muteness) takes place and the two players (turns out they had a 3rd who had been operating with them throughout the week) were escorted from the room and then money they had on the table, £10,000 or so, was bagged up and confiscated.
It turns out their operation was 'passing cards' under the table both pre flop and post flop in hands. Sounds completely ridiculous and borderline hilarious but they were professional and apparently, according to the card room staff and security, 'almost magician like with their skill and speed of doing so'. So essentially they were sat next to each other at the table and had the benefit of having 8 cards every hand where they could pass the relevant cards back and forth in order to make a very strong hand on the flop. Jeff, the legend that he is, had watched them really carefully for a few days and whilst he couldn't see any card movement noticed the two guy would quite often put their hands under the table at the same time in hands. Therefore he had messaged another reg in the game who was sat in the seats beside them and said something along the lines of 'watch these two guys next hand under the table if you can and tell me if you see anything suspicious'. Jeff and the reg looked under the table and both said they thought they saw a card being passed incredibly swiftly and alerted the front desk who checked the security and that's how they criminals were uncovered.
All in all they were able to win about £50,000 from the game in a few days. Not a bad little haul from a £10/25 game.
My takeaways from that story:
First and foremost we all, as professionals, really have to be diligent in keeping an eye out for shady going's on. I mean in hindsight, as regs, we should have noticed something wasn't right. These guys were skilled in terms of mechanics, ie it was going to be incredibly difficult to see the cards being swapped, even when reviewing footage apparently it's close to impossible but there were just too many occasions where their hands went under the table at the same time and they've randomly then smashed flops. This was happening hand after hand, day after day, that they were sat next to one and other. I mean when they weren't sat next to each other these guys played literally no hands and in general showed no interest in the game; which on reflection was a laughably big giveaway and is something us pro's should have probably picked up on earlier.
And lastly, I think it was an eye opener that although poker is becoming more of a regulated and reputable mental sport nowadays, it is still gambling and there will still be bad characters out there trying to gain unfair edges as well as just out and out cheating. For someone like myself who is relentlessly on the cusp of deciding whether I want to continue with poker as the way I make my living incidents like the continue to push me out the door as it's a lifestyle I don't want to be associated with.
Mental Health, the aftermath and why it's so important to implement intent.
Unsurprisingly in the aftermath of this cheating scandal the games were hurt in terms of what bigger games ran. 10/25 for the time being has been sort of wiped out again for a while with most of the action reverting down to 2/5 and the occasional 5/10.
As I mentioned earlier I had been dating this girl for a while and if I was fully honest with myself I had fallen head over heals for her. This was great for a while, it was motivating me to be my best self. I was structured, I was professional. It changed the care in which I dressed, groomed, held my posture even and all this leads into a confidence that'll reflect well in results. Alas, a few weeks ago she messaged me breaking it off and yeah, I was heartbroken a bit. She cited that we had 'lifestyle differences' that were going to me insurmountable and that she'd been in a 3 year relationship previously with someone who worked nights and that although she'd tried hard she'd been unable to make it work and didn't want to go through it again. It was a reasoned response and a fair concern. Therefore I had to lick my wounds and take my medicine.
All this left me disillusioned with poker even more so than I usually am. To me I'd just had to break it off with this girl I felt I had an amazing connection with and the reason was because of the stupid, vacuous career that I had and that I had always lauded as a cool career, one steeped in freedom and opportunity. Now the opposite was ringing true and as well as feeling like a constant job nowadays it was also a job that was holding my back from things making me truly happy.
All this led to me having a few weeks of mental torture. I was unable to operate within that good schedule. Drank a lot, slept late, bet big on sports and railed it into the early hours. I went into to play live a few times and lost like £15k in smaller games playing hands blind and just not caring. I know this isn't a good way to act and it's pretty damn pathetic.
My solution; to go back to an old therapist I'd seen over my anxiety and to start talking some matters out in order to find a healthier solution.
Early Takeaways he's recommended:
1) He was quick to point out that it's not uncommon to experience mental fragility when you fall hard and quickly for someone.
2) That I shouldn't view her responses as a negative necessarily against my career choice but to frame it in a way where if she didn't want to adapt to that then she probably wasn't the 'one' that I had envisaged.
3) That the spewing off of money comes down to a lack of 'Intent'. We discussed at length my gambling vices and why I self sabotage by going through periods of throwing away huge sums of money. He said it was because I lived my life without intent and played my poker without intent and this is essentially deathly. When I was dating the girl, I had intent, so I was able to frame the job in a manner that kept me a) on my A game b) adjusting my health and life to operate optimally c) and constantly having a reason to do well and maximise the profits and opportunities available to me,
The final point really resonated with me and is something that I'll discuss at length with him in the coming weeks. I think I have never really lived with intent, I've never had the longer term goals of thinking about what saved money could be used for, thinking about what I really want from life and if it is a wife/kids, why intent and goals are so important for achieving that goal. I'm a drifter, just essentially playing and living to survive and that's not really good enough, as it makes all the skill, effort and hard work meaningless because I'm not reflecting it or channelling it into something worthwhile.
Heading forward I'm going to use the blog as a bit of a diary again to try and document my path towards living with some intent. Currently, it may be embarrassing to admit, I'm too mentally fragile to mix up online and live. Live poker isn't for me right now, my emotional state is unbalanced and I'm going to be too easily triggered into doing the wrong/stupid thing.
I've been playing a little online and have been struggling to be honest, I'm running really far below EV though and this concerns me a bit about the bot situation on the site I've been playing on. That said, this is an easy excuse to make and I think the natural solution is to work and study harder and use that to allow the results to come!
The most important factor moving forward however will be this idea of living with Intent and the biggest thing to do with relation to that is to STOP WASTING MONEY. Wasting money is pathetic, it's low life behaviour and there's simply no excuse for it. Just because you have something doesn't been you should squander it recklessly, simple as.
I'll be on here tracking my poker play and discussing some real life stuff, being as open as always. It's likely going to be embarrassing to post my online results as I continue to get bashed up but as long as I'm playing hard and professionally I'll be happy.
Finally, a few weeks back GazzyB moved in and I have to say that Gazzy is a good inspiration for poker. We're in very different stages in our careers, this is indisputable, and we've had very different paths but one thing I can take away from him is hard work and a love for what he's doing.
Anyway, for anyone who was able to read on this long, congrats and my apologies. Thanks for reading and I look forward to posting again soon..
BigAisAok.