Procrastination
Two years ago I found and bookmarked a post on the top page of Reddit titled along the lines of "Watch
this video and never procrastinate again!"
I watched it today for the first time
A lot of the video is standard rational emotive Psych PhD gobbledygook, so I'll give the most basic cliffs: we procrastinate because it feels good in the short term. Later, when the consequences hit us, there's a disconnect between the pain we feel in the present and the pleasure we felt from avoiding it in the past. We treat them as two separate events, only tenuously related.
The negative conditioning of avoiding pain > the punishment later on. Punishment rarely ever establishes a good conditioning link; it only leads to more avoidance behaviors.
I'm a grown man who has literally pumped his fist in the air after deciding to put off an arduous task until some unspecified later time. As an example, I've avoided buying health insurance for months. I've looked into it and it looks complicated as ****, because it is as complicated as ****. But if I don't get it, and I get hurt or sick, I'm ruined, busto, bankrupt. I'll look into it tomorrow.
So yesterday, I had 7 more hours still to play at the Flamingo to make their 15 hour nut required for their weekly freeroll. It's a good freeroll: $5 (nuisance fee) entry, usually 100 runners: top 20 get $400 each, 21-40 get $200 each. $500 in, $12,000 out. Easy game.
The freeroll starts at 10AM on Friday. At 2PM on Thursday, I'd had a big buffet lunch and was feeling a bit logy on my way to the cash game. I went home instead and took a long nap, helped along by two big cans of 14% alcohol Four Loko Gold.
No problem: I would simply play from midnight to 7, have breakfast, and hit the freeroll. I had all the time in the world.
I got on the table at 11:40PM. After that it was a grind. I was up and down, up and down. Around 4 AM a terrible thought hit me and I checked my poker log to confirm. I had underestimated my hours. I had actually needed 9, not 7 hours, to make the freeroll.
No problem: I would suck it up and play until 8:40 instead of 6:40. I'd still have enough time to grab breakfast at the end. I'd just have to roll with a 9 hour session, although I've never been equipped to go much past 7 hours at one table.
Around 7AM, with the morning sun beating through the glass doors, and the morning smells permeating, and the fresh scrubbed faces walking around, I was dead even and dead tired, thinking of myself as being in an overtime purgatory of my own making. That's when I picked up TT on the button multiway and saw a T4489 board.
I almost never slowplay the flop at $1/$2. You make a hand and you bet and raise it early and often, and that's how you make money at this level. But I had smashed that flop to splinters, so I just flatcalled the opener on it. On the turn I ran into an unfortunate fellow traveler holding 88, and I got his stack. Massive cooler sir.
Around 8:20 I was in the home stretch. Only 20 more minutes...19 minutes. I heard the dealer explaining the freeroll to one of the players. I heard the words 'up until 8AM'. 18 minutes....17 minutes until 8:40 and my 15 hours.
I popped up in my chair. "Is there a cutoff? For today's Freeroll?"
"Yeah, it's 8AM." The dealer told me.
I racked up and double checked my hours for the week with the floor. I had a few extra minutes in there from previous sessions. I had 14.68 hours for the week, cut off at 8 AM. Anything after then didn't count towards my 15 hours. I was not going to the freeroll.
Flamingo: 9 hours:
+$313
Last edited by suitedjustice; 10-12-2018 at 08:54 PM.