OMG, It's Like, You Know, So Dire

I was going to continue the series of dire, ominous entries this week, all pointing out the shortcomings of poker, when compared to other pursuits. But I think instead I'm just going to say, Ahh, fuck it.

My problem of late isn't with poker at all. It's with me. So it's sort of pointless to enumerate all the potential pitfalls and traps that lie within the pursuit of poker, as the real tiger pits and pungee sticks are right here, lurking within me.

More than anything, I've become impatient at the poker tables. Not so much in execution but in my general mindset. I'm not sitting down with the idea that it's a long, incremental journey, and that in the most absolute superfabulous best conditions I only have a 2-5% advantage over the players at the table, aware of the fact that one poorly played hand can wipe out hours of profit. I'm not sitting down, happy and eager to sling chips, learning from interesting hands, even when I lose.

I sit down and I want expect to make money. That's it. That's my sole motivation.

When I win money, I turn off the computer and don't think about poker until the next time when I sit down to play. When I lose money, I lie there, grinding my teeth, before I finally fall asleep.

I watch lemurs sit down with $800 at a $20/40 short table, literally play any two cards, for any number of bets, and have a stack of $15,000, just an hour later. While I know on numerous intellectual levels that they'd likely be better off playing roulette and that their success is an obvious short-term aberration, more and more I find myself begging the universe to just once, one solitary time, have a session like that.

What's that, Internal Voice? You're saying that I'll never have a session like that, because it takes idiotically capping with any two cards pre-flop, repeatedly, to build a stack that quickly? Shut the hell up. I wants lots of money and I wants it now. I deserve some crazy luck, too, as I've been grinding for forever, plus some.

Impatience, on both land and sea.

The fact that I'm busy, juggling all sorts o' projects (plus, you know, a life), only adds fuel to the impatient fire. I can carve out time for poker but it's at the expense of other things. This arrangement works fine when I win money but shows stress when I don't. The most visible sign of stress is that I push harder and play more, trying to recoup losses in order to swing the needle back into the "proper" position, so that everything is safely in happy stasis land.

The solution?

Be more patient.

(Wokka wokka. I'll be here all week. Wokka wokka. Tip your wait staff. Wokka wokka.)