Frameworks, Part 2

Soul-searching occurred after my DUI, and I grew a lot as a person.  Some day, I'll write more about that.  Poker-wise, I scrapped the "booze and schmooze", business-like approach to developing my game, and I retreated to a much more hermetic approach to poker and life.  This led to the second shift in my poker-perspective... I started looking at poker less as a business and more as a science.  I was going to start finding the answers on my own, in the underlying math and logic of the game.  I learned two things.

1.    The science of poker gets difficult in a hurry

2.    I didn't have the drive to achieve excellence in poker using this approach

The next couple years were mostly about using poker to make money while occasionally working on the math-y aspects and mostly focused on getting my life together.  It was boring and I'm not going to write much about it.  I didn't love poker and started looking for ways out.  I eventually returned to school to become a counselor, while playing part-time.  Then the Black Friday happened, and a big chunk of my tuition disappeared into the intertubes while I simultaneously lost my main source of income, so I decided to close up shop at school and return to casino poker. 

Having spent long periods of time playing both, I developed a preference for internet poker over casino poker.  I was fond of telling people that the people you meet in casinos are some of the worst people in the world.  And in a sense, that's pretty true.  As a group, casino poker players tend to mostly be some combination of selfish, immature, and scummy.  Internet poker players are like that too, but you never have to deal with any aspect of their personalities if you don’t want to.  It can be very draining on the soul to be in a poker room several hours a day.  It sucked to have Internet poker taken away from me.

I moved to California to start this new chapter, and the first few months were a difficult adjustment period.  Every day chipped away at my psyche as I dealt with the self-destructive and anti-social habits that Southern California casinos incubate so well in their players.  By December of last year, I had had enough, and went on a mini-rant at the poker table about having to be around all of this, which led to a conversation with fellow pro Mike L (Mike Landucci) that helped spark my next shift in perspective. 

I wrote the third and final post of Frameworks as a stand-alone post that I hope gets shared with the poker community at large.  It won't as much about my growth or my story, so I’ll sum up that part here.  Briefly put, my third perspective shift is from Poker as Science to Poker as Artistry, and it's my attempt to create something beautiful and meaningful, for its own sake, outside of a profit motive.  Since it's very idealistic and, by extension, paints me in an idealistic light, I want to put my caveats and disclaimers in this post. 

- I'm human and I sometimes act in contradiction to my principles.

- I still experience negative feelings when people act like jerks.

- I still sometimes hide under my headphones or just go silent and choose not to practice my "art" while at the poker table.

- My win rate has not suffered from this perspective shift, and I'm not sure how I would feel if about this shift if the financial ramifications were different.  It's easier to be idealistic when money is more abundant.

- Even though I don't refer to poker as "art" in that post, it really is the single word I would use to summarize my perspective on poker right now (it just seemed to clash with my little rant against "entertaining").