This post, and your 500th post over in HSPLO, are both brilliant. It's a pity that they're buried in a poker forum where only poker fanatics will get to read them.

But I am certainly glad that I got to read them. Thank you.

Regards, Lee

P.S. It's an utter joy to see Tommy Angelo becoming famous for his life lessons. It wasn't all that long ago he was far better known as a live mid-stakes LHE grinder.

wow amazing post, thanks for that, ill try to do some of the things u mentioned

Thank you very much Lee, flattering to receive such praise from someone like yourself who ran such a great operation over at pokerstars and had a lot to do with shaping the current landscape of online poker.

Also, here are the sections from my 500th post about real life stuff/decisions away from the poker tables:

Combating Poker Losses Affecting the Rest of Your Life Adversely

“Remember there’s a whole other world out there beyond the felt.” –Larry Phillips

This is one area where I have made dramatic improvements in the last few years. A few years ago, poker governed my moods to such an extent that my family and close friends could almost always tell if I was on a winning streak or losing streak just by my demeanor. Now, even though I still have my problems with tilt, my suffering from poker ends almost as soon as I quit my session.

The best way I have found to combat a bad mood brought on by a big loss is to get some type of exercise. A close second is to spend time with people you enjoy the company of. Going out to dinner or something along those lines with your girlfriend, significant other, or a bunch of friends or family is ideal. Don’t mention poker at all, and if someone asks you how you’ve been doing, laugh and say something like “Today wasn’t so great, but you gotta take the ups with the downs.” Even if you have to force it, make sure to act as jovial and upbeat as you can. I think that after only a short while you’ll find you won’t have to fake it anymore and you’ll be having a good time and back in a good mood even if you started out feeling rotten.

If spending time with other people or exercise isn’t an option, find another distraction, the best ones being sleep, watching a movie, or playing video games. One distraction that can work in the short term but which I wouldn’t recommend is going degen by either doing drugs or alcohol by yourself or ordering an escort (hookers and blow ftl, imo). This will tend to put you in a less focused and more depressed mind state when you get back to the tables, might cause you to get more depressed and dwell on the loss (in the case of drinking by yourself at least), or might cause you to gamble while impaired. In addition, if you consistently do these things, your mind’s reward pathway system will tend to associate losing at poker with pleasurable, addictive activities afterwards, and you could potentially get hooked on the drama of losing big and then playing recklessly or for high stakes or doing a bunch of flips and either getting back to even and feeling great or losing huge and then drinking/smoking/snorting/screwing your melancholy away.

A couple other things that might give you relief from poker loss induced suffering is cashing out some of the money you have online or going on a shopping spree and buying some things that you’ve had your eye on for a while. Just make sure you leave enough money online to grind with and don’t buy stuff that you can’t afford.

You could also go out and perform a random act of kindness. Though there are definitely better and more rewarding ways, the easiest way I’ve found to do this is to give away money. Give a waitress or a food delivery guy an extravagant tip. If 100 bucks isn’t a big deal to you, go out and give a hundred dollar bill to a friendly supermarket teller (or someone else in a menial minimum wage job) when buying your 1 dollar bottle of water and tell her to keep the change. For someone who lives paycheck to paycheck and grinds out 40 hours week to make only a couple hundred bucks take home that’s a big deal, and to know you singlehandedly significantly improved their week might make you feel good (I know the few times I’ve done this it has, and I find it’s more rewarding than giving to a homeless person who though he may be in greater need is probably just going to booze away or put in his arm whatever you give him.)

You could also go to Charity Navigator, find a worthy charity and ship some loot and see if that makes you feel fulfilled. You could also use that as incentive to stop when you’re tilting, by saying to yourself, if I keep playing now, I stand to lose money because I am in a poor mind state, so I will stop and donate some of the money I didn’t lose today to a good cause.

If you’re on a really bad losing streak, a prolonged break could be a good idea, both for your mood and your finances. Consider leaving your computer behind and taking a vacation somewhere you’ve been itching to go. This will serve to get you away from the vicious loss cycle, and when you come back you’ll be refreshed and ready to crush.

One thing I’ve found that helps when you are feeling down after a loss or losing streak is to put things in perspective and remind yourself how fortunate you are. There are people in the world starving to death and without clean water, people with horrible health ailments, people working in sweat shops and sex slavery, and you’re in good health and living a comfortable existence supporting yourself by playing a game you enjoy. Furthermore, think of how lucky you are to exist, to be alive. You out-swam millions of sperm, and had any one thing happened slightly differently to your parents up to the moment of your conception, then you never happened. Life is precious and fleeting, and you’re spending some of the time you have here distressed because a number in your still healthy bank account or poker site cashier balance is smaller than what it was? Be grateful for what you have rather than worrying about what you lack.

Living a healthy life to play better

Put simply, the better you take of yourself, the better you will play at poker. This is indisputable and every single mindset/performance coach will tell you so. That means the healthier you eat, the more you exercise, and the more you are able to stay well-rested and stick to a regular sleeping routine, the sharper your mind will be and the better you will perform at the tables. In general, the less drugs and alcohol you use, the better off you will be too.

For diet, I recommend you eat several smallish meals per day, consisting mainly of chicken, turkey, fish, vegetables, nuts, and fruits. Fast food, processed foods, wheat, milk, refined sugar, and anything with preservatives or artificial things in it are things you should try to minimize your intake of if you can, as humans have only recently started eating these products and so our bodies are not really evolved to handle them, which is the reason why so many people are allergic to wheat and dairy and why if you binge out at a fast food joint you feel like garbage afterwards. I know for myself I am sharper when I stay away from those foods, as delicious as they are.

For exercise, I recommend getting at least 30 minutes per day at least five days per week. Either cardio or weightlifting work well. A mix of both would probably be ideal. If you are very lazy, and the prospect of exercise is too daunting, basketball, similar active sports, and walking are good options as they don’t feel like hard work to do.

In general, I don’t think alcohol and drugs will have a beneficial impact on your game. The only possible exceptions are weed, adderall, and caffeine which some people say improves their games. However, I wouldn’t advise taking adderall as I don’t think you should mess around with meth in any form and the times I’ve taken it I’ve felt extremely tweaked out. Some people say they can play fine on weed or that it actually improves their games (I haven’t found this to be the case, for the most part) and if that is the case for you then I guess it’s fine, as long as you are honestly assessing its effect on your game. Caffeine is whatever, but it is addictive and can have some negative side effects, and just know if you consistently play while under the influence of any of these three substances, you can become dependent on them to focus at the tables.

As for smoking herb or going out and drinking at night after you are done playing, you can probably get away with that as long as you aren’t getting blackout drunk all the time or playing with nasty hangovers, but I think overall it will probably impede your judgment at the table at least to some extent even if you never play while under the influence, especially if you’re partying a lot. I’ve found that the periods where I have my meltdowns tend to be those when I’ve been doing a lot of drinking and smoking, even if I’m sober when I’m at the computer playing. But hey, it can be tons of fun to get messed up on these substances, so really you got to do a cost-benefit analysis when deciding how much you want to live it up vs. how much you want to perform at your peak. Moderation is key.

It should go without saying, but never play drunk, unless you are just messing around at stakes you don’t care about (I’ve probably lost over 6 figs lifetime playing while s-faced). And if you are going out drinking (or are cracking open a 12 pack to drink while you watch a sporting event on TV at home), it could be a good idea to get a 12 hour self exclusion at the sites you play at.


Gambling Addiction/Balancing Gambling with the Rest of Your Life

“The surest way to end a gambling career is to gamble.” –Tommy Angelo

Scientists performed a study on mice, where if a mouse pushed a button, it received either a food pellet or a shock. If a mouse received a food pellet for the first several times it pushed the button and then started received only shocks, it would stop pushing the button after a number of shocks. But if half of the time the mouse received a pellet and half the time a shock, the mouse would continue pushing the button even when the machine had switched to doling out all shocks, until it electrocuted itself to death. Obviously we are much more sophisticated animals than mice, but I believe this is a good representation of the dangers of gambling addiction (and in fact, addiction in general).

Ideally, the only thing you should gamble on is poker and financial markets, and possibly also prop bets which are either small bets made largely for fun against friends, or ones in which you are certain you have a big edge in. Neutral EV sweats like credit card roulette, vig free sportsbetting, superbowl squares pool, and flips for a small % of your roll should also prove to be relatively harmless, if done in moderation and if you are not risking a significant percentage of your net worth on them.

I advise staying away from –EV bets such as sportsbetting with a vig and pit games as much as possible. The problem with doing this type of betting is that 1. You will lose money in the long run and 2. You could get hooked on the rush of gambling and get used to the idea of risking money on things even if you’re not getting the best of it, which might lead to your play at the tables creeping in the direction of action seeking degeneracy away from carefully thought out decision making meant to eke out the most possible EV.

Another problem is if you are constantly gambling on things in life, it can be difficult to derive excitement or pleasure out of anything in your life that you don’t have money riding on. For instance, ever since I started betting on sports, I have a lot of trouble focusing on or caring about any sporting event I haven’t bet on. Making sure you are living a balanced life and having plenty of non-related gambling activities is important to your overall happiness in life. Do you really want a large part of your level of happiness and well-being to continuously be determined by sheer chance?

Gambling is fun, having your life consumed by gambling isn’t and/or losing a large percentage of your net worth gambling without an edge isn’t.

Mindfulness/Buddhism Concepts

”The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it” –Thich Nhat Hahn

"Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone." -Louis L’Amour

"Mindfulness is simply being aware of what is happening right now without wishing it were different; enjoying the pleasant without holding on when it changes (which it will); being with the unpleasant without fearing it will always be this way (which it won’t).” – James Baraz

I’m not going to spend too much time on this section, lest I sound like a Jehova’s Witness going door to door trying to convert people. However, using these concepts has significantly improved my poker results (not to mention dramatically increased the amount of happiness and decreased the amount of unpleasantness in my life), so I’d like to at least touch on some mindfulness stuff.

Basically, mindfulness (which is in other words, the practical, non-mystical teachings of Buddhism) involves living in and savoring the present moment as much as possible, being accepting and carefree, seeking to minimize stress, worry, anxiety, anger, fear, sadness and other suffering, and practicing love and kindness towards all people and animals. It accomplishes this by focusing on breathing and putting intense focus and awareness on your senses and on what is currently transpiring at this very moment. It seeks to eliminate ruminating on the past, worrying about the future, other unnecessary mind noise, and the ego.

There’s a misconception that mindfulness equals meditation. While meditation is a form of mindfulness (and probably the best and most effective one), you can mindfully do virtually any activity. A good way to mindfully breathe while you are doing something (like poker, walking, or driving), is to inhale deeply through the nose. If you put one hand on your belly and one hand on your lungs, your belly should expand more. While you are breathing in, you could say to yourself “Breathing in, I am aware I am breathing in” or even just “In.” The exhale is the most important part: you should breathe out through your mouth slowly and evenly and with great focus on the air escaping, until every last bit of air is out. While you are breathing out, say to yourself “Breathing out, I am aware I am breathing out” or “Out.” Repeat this process for as many breaths as possible, and you should find your mind settles after a few breaths.

That’s all I’m going to write about that, but again I just want to reiterate that this stuff really does work and rates to improve the quality of your life if you are able to do it consistently. If you are interested in learning more about mindfulness, good starting points are Episode 3 and Episode 8 of The Eightfold Path series on Deuces Cracked, Tommy Angelo’s Meditation webpage, Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hahn, and The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

Final Thoughts

“No one is tiltless, which means everyone can tilt less.” –Tommy Angelo

Playing poker professionally can be a wonderful thing—it allows many people to make more money than they could otherwise, and the lifestyle demands very few responsibilities and provides a great deal of freedom. After playing poker for three years, averaging maybe 20 hours a week at the tables, supporting myself and never having anything close to a desperate need for money, I can’t imagine working a 9-5. Nevertheless, playing poker professionally can be a cause of great agony. I can’t count the number of times during my career I’ve sat at my desk and alternated between staring at my drastically depleted cashier balance and the ceiling, in utter disbelief and despair, feeling like I was trapped in a nightmare.

In order to maximize your profits and minimize the suffering from poker, mastering yourself and the mental side, mindset, and intangibles of poker is absolutely critical. Developing the discipline, awareness, motivation, and self-control to do this will be very hard work. Jared Tendler like to use the weight-lifting analogy. He says that you need to practice over and over again to develop the skills necessary to play your best a high percentage of the time, much as you would need to do a lot of reps weightlifting to get stronger. You need to push yourself to get better at poker (or anything), as in the way you need to push yourself past the point of discomfort in order to increase the amount of weight you are able to lift over time. The best advice I can give you on the subject of developing discipline and motivation is “Just ****ing do it”—it comes down to sheer will.

Once you start consistently making smart decisions for your poker career at and away from the tables, they will build on each other and eventually become habit. When you’re on a streak of making good healthy decisions, every subsequent one will be easier. Every time you quit when you’re tilting and every time you use coping strategies to prevent tilt when you start to lose it will be good for you in both the short and long runs. But you can’t give yourself excuses, you can’t say “**** it, I don’t care that I’m fire tilted right now, I’m going to keep playing so I can try to get unstuck.”

You have to make a good decisions in the moment, now, right when the spokes start to come off. If you keep telling yourself “I’ll quit in thirty minutes” every half an hour, you won’t stop playing until you hit a lucky streak and get back to even, bust your account, have to be somewhere, or can barely keep your eyes open. If you keep telling yourself “Tomorrow/next week/next month, I’ll work on my game away from the tables/put in a bunch of time at the tables/do some serious work on tilting problem/start living healthy,” that time will never come because you’re always delaying it to the future.

Tommy Angelo has a concept derived from old TV game shows called “Door A, Door B,” the essence of which is that you can divide all your decisions in life in to decisions that rate to improve your score in poker and your happiness in life (Door A) and those that figure to do the opposite (Door B). For instance, Door A is quitting or taking a break when you see a lot of your tilting triggers and warning signs, Door B is to keep playing and chasing losses. Door A is folding a marginal hand oop after taking a bad beat, Door B is 3-betting it. Door A is making a fold on the river when you estimate you are good 1 in 4 times but are only getting 2.5: 1 on your call, Door B is calling. Door A is eating, sleeping, and exercising well, Door B is living in an unhealthy manner. Door A is saying “OK sorry” when someone blames you for something inconsequential even if you don’t think it was your fault, Door B is getting in a fight about it. Door A is living in the present and experiencing the deep joy of being and existence, Door B is constantly ruminating on the past and worrying about and anticipating the future.

The more you open Door A, the happier you will be.

Finally, since people seemed to like the "soundtrack", here's a bunch more songs that are appropriate to the theme of this thread:













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^

Weekly bump

This. So very much this.

Awesome format, love the use of quotes, music and your ability to convey exactly what it is that you want people to receive.

I'm a little embarrassed to say I had not read it until today.

Deserves a lot more exposure than its had.

for me it was second only to the post above this one

(seriously tho, bookmarking to read when i get a chance)

Thank you very much, it gave me a lot to think about how I approach life in general.

OP replaced by mod with new revision, thx ggaj

copy+pasted everything (500th and 1500th) to a word ducument, changed to font to arial, size 10...22 pages

will read it again tonight to fight my current demons....has helped earlier and i have no doubt will help again

Somebody should write a massive manifesto where you get quoted! :-)

Great work. I love the songs, in concept, and in my ear. I'm listening to Let It Be right now.

Thanks for stopping in the thread and the kind words Tommy.

As you can probably gather from reading both this post and my 500th where his work is extensively quoted and referenced, Tommy was a huge influence on me. Through his Elements of Poker book and Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment DC video series and the mindfulness material he led me to, I was able to get a better handle on my tilt, and moreover, be a better and more content person. As I said in my review of his latest book, http://www.amazon.com/Rubber-Story-O...3432052&sr=8-1, on amazon and in the commercial marketplace thread on 2p2, I think Tommy may very likely be, no hyperbole, the person who has had the net most positive impact on my life with the exception of my parents, and that's with the only direct contact I've had with him coming from a few email exchanges. I'm not sure I ever would have been turned on to mindfulness/buddhism concepts if it hadn't been presented to me in the context of how to win more money at poker.

If you haven't already do yourself a favor and check out Elements of Poker, and Eightfold Path, and if you're looking to read some entertaining and clever poker tales, both non-fiction and fiction, get rubber band story too. At the very least, I think you should read the first ~40 pages of Elements of Poker, the last ~25 pages, and the last episode of Eightfold Path, as I think there tons of jewels presented in a more engaging fashion than I think I have been able to do in my two milestone posts about how to be happier and win more at poker, and how to live a better life.

THIS!!

Love the line: happiness is the ultimate currency (just so true )

Thanks for the tip, I went ahead and purchased the book last night. So far I have only read 6-7 first stories but I'm extremely impressed. Very smart and entertaining.

Hence the new location.

thanks for sharing. I can personally attest to the benefit of reading John Kabbat Zinn's mindfullness books. I had many self-worth/depression issues, and his ideas on mindfulness have made me a more happy, content person overall.

Happiness is the ultimate currency

I so loved this line and have been using it frequently since. The conversation usually goes like this:

"Blahblahblah, but of course, happiness is the ultimate currency."

"Wow - what a great sentence. Where'd you get that?"

"A poker forum."

"No, really Where'd you get it?"

"A poker forum. Really. "

Regards, Lee

^^ LOL

that "everything's amazing" video was the first thing of Louis CK's I ever heard.. my life has not been the same since

Thanks crashwhips. Great read and one I can tell I will come back to.

And now for something completely different.

thx a lot for this + your 500th post!!!!!!

Really really a great article !!

bump

Great post, needs to be bumped/shared more often!