Not jumping on the hate train but I am confused as to how someone who professes to be searching for himself, for lifes meaning beyond poker can possibly be in a position to offer his mental coaching to others while he is lost himself!

The blind leading the blind..

nonetheless his poker achievements pre-girah are impressive as hell and he writes very well and is simply afflicted with the same defect that many intelligent people have, vanity.

ah yes, the rigid literary standards of internet blogging

makes sense why his previous thread was bumped the other day...Just sayin.

I think it's safe to say that Haseeb definitively wrote everything for Girah. I strongly doubt he ever edited anything written initially by Girah unless Girah and Haseeb actually share the exact same internal emotions and ideas.

The moral conflicts, the way he applies symbolic relevance to random ****, the stupid and pretentious short, terse assertions in the text following a semi-colon -- they're all the same.

Where's the bit where he reads Kerouac and smokes pot in Marrakesh

Haseeb you old such and such!

Is it possible that his road trip and rambling is just posturing to prepare for his eventual reentry into the poker world after finding himself and cleansing his spirit so the poker world will forgive him?

def not below him imo

That's like soooo 2008

he seems to be writing a book telling all the **** hes been involved in.

he things it will be a best seller.

Sounds like a line right out of a dystopian novel.

This guy has done some scummy stuff in the past....but reading this provided some genuine lols.

His style of writing makes the stuff he says seem like hes being ironic, but I think he's being serious. That makes it even funnier.

http://inanitylane.blogspot.com/2012...roduction.html

oh lawd.. check out the first chapter to his new book

Yo Haseeb, if you're reading this, just read Carter Gill wants to write a book. Maybe you can team up? or even ghost write.

Chapter 1: "A naïve understanding of poker is going to be fixated on the things that are on the surface of the game – the numbers on the cards, the suits, the felt table, the round chips. "

Yes! The felt. All I could think about in my first live session was the goddamned felt. Really over whelming. Glad somebody out there gets me.

you were fixated on the felt??? Dude, you got problems.

You ever heard of sarcasm?

hmm pretty sure there is some multi-level leveling going on here

Def lm here (lm = lost mind).

is that where I know what poker is because I now understand I don't know what poker is?

wait, he actually does this? When I read it before I thought it was a joke.

Who is stupid enough to pay him to be their mental coach? That would be like paying to attend a jamie gold poker seminar.

My point is that though his writing is not great by the standards of high quality literature and he is frequently long-winded, verbose, melodramatic and at times downright clumsy, he does write in a fairly clear, engaging, and readable tone which made it easy for I and other 2p2ers to mistake him for a very strong writer.

For instance, I remember being captivated by his durrrr-isil and ashman prop bet posts, though in retrospect I can see that they weren't excellent like I thought, but just melodramatic and long-winded, and otherwise decent and readable writing about subjects I was fascinated by.

Re: the "people so focused on self-improvement are usually douches" point that someone made, it has some validity, I know from personal experience. The "I made some mistakes and I'm putting every effort into making myself a better person" narrative is one that can both resonate w/ others when you throw it out there and is very easy for a wounded ego to latch onto and just repeat the same bad patterns with.

The problem is it gives you an excuse and even somewhat necessitates being very self-absorbed if you're constantly working on improving yourself. And being self absorbed and in turn still egotistical is the recipe an awful person.

Assuming the only stuff Haseeb did wrong is that which has been proven is true (the ma'ing, chip dumping, and being responsible for the girah hype in order to reap promotional rewards), I think I might actually jump off the hate-bandwagon and say I'd tend to take most of what he's written lately at face value. One thing I will say though, and again something I know from personal failings of my own, is truly changed and great people don't have to shout their good deeds from the rooftop, and in fact know the greatest reward is the self-knowledge of helping out others and keeping it private, so the fact he talks at length about how people are telling him he's a great guy in his blogs and he's doing stuff like building houses for habitat for humanity and taking in drifters, that's all great stuff, but the fact he has to display those good deeds so prominently negates them a little bit.

And the fact that this latest blog paints him completely in a regretful and positive light is a little troubling, as is the fact that I don't think there is anything definitive on his exact level of culpability in the whole mess and the poker world in general.

But I'm starting to feel a little bad for making a few posts which were effectively made in the schoolyard bullying bandwagon mentality, and so I guess I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and take him at his word. GL on your journey haseeb.

jeez, apologies for tl;dr, and i was giving haseeb grief for being long-winded

I find it hard to compare quality of writing between different mediums. The writing in great novels is usually very different to great writing within journalism. The writing in a great script is very different to, say, a very well written academic article. Blogs are just another medium and, as such, effective writing in this medium will not necessarily (and I think is unlikely to) be all that similar to effective writing within a novel.

Just my thoughts on people comparing him to F. Scott Fitzgerald - until Haseeb starts writing novels or short stories, or Fitzgerald starts writing blogs, it will be quite difficult to compare them to each other. I find both of these possibilities reasonably unlikely...

if you look up douchebag in the dictionairy you see a picture haseeb taking a **** on the head of that spencer fleshbeard dude from the hills.

The reason fitzgerald's writing works is because he wrote a ***** novel, if you want to write non fictional blogposts that style of writing will just be mouthpuke inducing.