Frameworks, Part 1

My thinking about my relationship with poker shifted dramatically around the beginning of this year.  I've been playing poker professionally for eight years now, and I'd say I've been through three such shifts, and those shifts are the first things I consider when I reflect upon my poker career.

When I started playing part-time in college, I treated poker like a competition.  For a long time, I wasn't making a meaningful amount of money, and, more than the money, I was consumed with earning the respect of fellow players from the 2+2 community (for non-poker players, this is/was the largest online poker forum and in 2004 was the best place to learn poker strategy as a layperson).  Even when the money started to matter, my ego was more attached to how my posts were received on 2+2 than my results at the table.

The first shift in my thinking came right before I graduated, and it wasn't a revelation as much as it was a gradual admission to myself about who I was and what I cared about.  Instead of being a competition about "who played this hand better?", poker became a business competition, with the battle taking place at a higher level.  I remember realizing that my online persona (screen name: gonores) had actual, real-money value.  How I managed the gonores brand influenced several aspects of my poker career...
- Which top poker minds would discuss strategy with me
- Which players (and how many players) would loan me money in a pinch or take a piece of me in a bigger game
- Access to juicy private games

 So I studied the best "brands" on 2+2 and started acting like them.  That feels like kind of a douchey thing to admit to, but mimicking others on an online forum was actually a good learning experience for me, in that the real life version of me actually became more comfortable using gonores's voice than my own.  Maybe some day I'll write more about that...

 Anywho, the point is that, to an extent, gonores was a vehicle to aid my progress as a poker player.  It's not that I was being inauthentic or misleading, but I was concealing parts of myself from the online poker world, and I was doing it consciously to improve my image.

And it worked.  Despite having what I consider to be a lackluster poker strategy mind*, I was able to connect with some very brilliant players and glean knowledge from them (that includes some of you reading this, I would imagine).  I had a couple things going for me to help connect with such intelligent players: 1) I was a witty internet forum writer willing to work hard and share myself and my stories with others 2) I liked drinking and having fun and 3) I was good at studying what these people liked.

That led to this night. This is when the line between gonores and myself started getting blurred.  Part of me enjoyed having such a fun night bonding with good people, but another part of me stayed conscious of the fact that this was really fucking good for my career.  Not surprisingly, being good at creating a good time is a GREAT way to bond with people.

For the next 14 months, that was my game.  Go have good times, write about these good times, get others to want to have good times with me, go have good times with others, rinse, repeat, eventually trick others into talking about poker with me.  The summer after that post, I moved to Vegas.  For those of you with business skillz, this is fucking synergy at its finest.  My proclivity for a good time and Vegas's proclivity for facilitating good times led to A WHOLE FUCKING LOT OF GOOD TIMES.  Gonores gave way to a new alter-ego, Doug Fucking Meyer: one-man poker circus (who happens to say "fuck" a lot), and my strategy yielded my highest grossing poker year to date (though the income statement might have gotten a little less flashy after factoring in strip clubs and Strip clubs).

And then shit got all E! True Hollywood Story on me.  Out one night with friends, I had exactly one too many glasses of wine with dinner when the girl I was dating texted me to go meet up with her.  On the way, I rear-ended a pickup truck containing a mother and daughter (they were unhurt, luckily).  Cops showed up, I blew .08 (.077, actually, but considering I rear-ended someone, officers' discretion led to rounding up).  Having $10k in cash on me probably didn't earn me much sympathy, because I was never offered an opportunity to post my own bail, my one phone call was botched, and I ended up spending the weekend in an orange jumpsuit at Clark County Detention Center.  If you ever want to seriously re-evaluate your life and values, I suggest wearing an orange jumpsuit, preferably with stiff, cheap, county-issued mesh underwear. Suddenly I didn't like being Doug Fucking Meyer any more...



*No, seriously, I don't think I ever meaningfully expanded the "Should I bet/raise/check/fold/call in this situation" discourse.  I do think I've contributed to the poker world in a "What's the best way to learn about poker" sense, but brilliant poker minds rarely need help in that department.