Reading this masterpiece of a thread has been somewhat surreal. You have a stubborn, chaotic, self-inflicted unorthodoxy that has thrust you irretrievably into this endlessly dog-eat-dog world for your livelihood. Yet that urge for a sense of community and long-term purpose is so profound that you do the only thing you can - you build up that community and purpose around yourself, and share unrestricted all the elements of your success, each one as reproducible as the next by any and all who care to listen.
As you have every right to do.
Unfortunately, I cannot partake in your community, though I certainly admire it from afar. I am what you call a 'dirty nit'. I play more or less an online game, I hate straddling and will do at most one round per hour, I table hop, I seat hop, I take several seconds for every decision postflop, and I refuse to allow friendly professionals like you to have more information on mucked cards just because you are sitting next to your mark and have assumed your faux camaraderie with him (or real, in the rare case of you). What's worse, I engage in no table conversation, and will only respond in the most terse, banal, uninteresting manner when spoken to by anyone. In fact, I'm terrified of all conversation directed at me.
The reason is not that I'm a misanthrope, or that I'm trying to ruin your games, or I don't care that there's a social entertainment component to my job. The reason is that my ability to execute is wiped out by any type of distraction whatsoever. Even getting texts is enough to make me lose track of a hand I'm witnessing. Earlier in my stint at live play I would try to have somewhat normal social interactions with my opponents, and I would CONSTANTLY miss critical reads on people - forget who raised preflop, mostly. And there is no replayer in a casino. Anyone who has been spoiled by PT4 for most of their career is immediately confronted by the massive learning curve to the quotidian chore of simply storing data - ON TOP OF WHICH one must do the usual business of reconstructing two (or more) ranges, sometimes modified for the showdown just observed; considering who is more likely to be exploiting whom; make a best guess as to optimal strategies on each street; make a best guess as to what strategy the exploitative player is nodelocking his opponent into; and so on and forth. How anyone ventures to do this with a drop of alcohol in them is beyond me.
To be true, I wish I had your charisma and social intelligence, off the poker table but especially on it. If there were a magic way I could download your character as a mask in exchange for paying you 20% - 40% of my winnings, while maintaining full mental capacity, I would probably do it. You've convinced me through this thread that my returns would multiply by that much. But there's no such magic, and EVERY attempt I've made to be even moderately engaging shatters my thought process to the point I'm questioning why I'm at the table.
As a direct result of your thread confirming some negative real life experiences, I've made a conscious effort in my last two sessions to speed up my play. By sacrificing that 5 to 10 seconds per postflop decision, I've added an ENORMOUS number of mistakes to my game (at least once every 90 minutes) - the majority realized as mistakes, predictably, 5 to 10 seconds later (sometimes mid-hand, in which case I'm in an even less familiar spot with even more complex nodelocking to do). Now, I don't do as much soul-searching as you, but the one thing I know about myself - and I think I can speak for most so-called 'nits' on this one - I absolutely loathe mistakes. I'll get 2-outed all in with nary a care in the world, but bluff a few combos too wide, or miss a little value, as the poster in the recent
£7,000 pot thread seems to have done, and the next ten minutes is spent fuming and internally berating myself for my bad play. In fact if I was the Hero in that hand and Villain had turned over QQ I would likely be too enraged to stay at that table for a minute longer. You can imagine I wouldn't be the most jovial of conversators for a fish to have even if I tried to be you. Again I wish I could be you, but the reality is the reality: I am more angry, self-hating and miserable at the card table than I have been at any other post in my life, and I'm not suave enough to conceal it. It's all about the profits, of which there are a lot.
I know your response will be to get out of the cardroom and go back online (which will be unbeatable by humans by end of next year, at least one person will see to this), and again, you have every right to say this. I applaud you for saying it, in fact, to drive others like me off our mutual games. And I am not stupid. I've been through the Stars boycotts (we all know their impact) and understand the prisoner's dilemma you're trying to get us out of. But until Google Glass and a quantum fictitious play algorithm allow our skillsets to fuse, I request that you silently, in your own head, refrain from begrudging me my livelihood, as I maintain quite the respect for yours.