I decided to make a habit out of my n * 1000 -th being sort of a record of what I've been thinking about since my last one, and so here is my 2000th post.

Note: For reference, here is a link to my My 1000th Post.

Quote Originally Posted by d0zer
Quote Originally Posted by spoonitnow
internal growth
Elaborate on this one willyah?
Here we go.

People Keep Asking Me Why I'm Playing 50NL Right Now

This is the question I get asked the most recently, and it usually gets a smart-ass remark in reply since I don't really think it's anyone's business why anyone decides to play any particular stakes unless there's some sort of staking agreement. Truth be told, the real reasons are just too long to explain over and over again, and the general mindset of the aspiring poker player usually doesn't like what those reasons are in the first place, but I've decided to set it all out there once again since it's allowed me to achieve breakthroughs of the type that are rarely talked about on FTR. After all, I will admit that it's kind of odd that over a period of a few months I went from being up 200nl to taking my time at 50nl. I realize that this is probably going to be really, really long, but here we go.


A Few Premises

One has to investigate the principle in one thing or one event exhaustively... Things and the self are governed by the same principle. If you understand one, you understand the other, for truth within and the truth without are identical.
-Er Cheng Yishu, 11th century; taken from Sources of Chinese Tradition by William Theodore de Bary

This short blurb above is easily one of the most important concepts that I've ever learned in my lifetime, and without it everything that I've ever tried to accomplish in chess, wrestling, mathematics, poker or anything else for that matter is basically meaningless. We learn about ourselves by learning about other things, basically. It's really hard to say, "Okay today I'm going to work on improving my self-control," and be effective without having some medium to improve through, and that goes for any characteristic about yourself. My first love was chess, then came wrestling, then came mathematics, and then came poker. Through each of these mediums I've learned more about myself and the world around me than anywhere else, and it goes a bit beyond that, but I don't want to end up writing a novel without even touching on the implications for poker.

When we play, we must realize, before anything else, that we are out to make money.
-David Sklansky, our fearless leader

While the point of Mr. Sklansky's rather famous quote here is well-understood and important for the type of player who would be looking at page 5 of Theory of Poker (where this quote is found), it certainly brings up some interesting issues. At what point should we balance improving as a player and as a human being with making immediate monetary advancements? Is the theoretical profit we make from the time we spend improving ourselves just as good as the theoretical profit we make when we lose with AA all-in preflop in NLHE? It's hard to quantify these types of things, especially when we move outside the immediate realm of poker, so we turn to another viewpoint: Tommy Angelo.

Mr. Angelo's book Elements of Poker is the only good poker book dealing with aspects of performance psychology that I have encountered. Honestly, it's probably my favorite poker book and I highly recommend that people read it, but I digress.

Mr. Angelo presents this idea of a "theoretical score" which is sort of like Sklansky Bucks except for the mathematical aspect of it. The main idea of defining the term "theoretical score" isn't to quantify it, but to identify things that we can do to improve it. Anything we do better than our opponents raises our "theoretical score", and this idea is discussed at great length in Mr. Angelo's article Reciprocality: The Cause of Profit at Poker. I will assume you have read this article and understand what it's getting at before reading further.


Some Problems That We Don't Actively Fix

There are a decent list of problems in poker and other competitive/artistic/whatever outlets that aren't often addressed in detail at all, except in the "You should do X and not do Y" fashion. Some of the common ones for poker are money management (not to be confused with bankroll management which is a sub-item of money management), another is managing emotions, another is fatigue/boredom, and another yet is work ethic. I'm sure there are others out there, but these four are the important ones for my purposes. Mr. Angelo would likely say that all four of these can be factors in or causes of tilt, so according to his definition of tilt (anything that takes us away from our best game and best mindset) he's probably right, and we're going after the big tilt-monster that haunts us all. I'm going to touch on each of these briefly now.

Money management has to do with the walls you put between different portions of your money and what you do with each portion. Since money is a very important item in the poker world, having the discipline to handle it responsibly is obviously important. If you don't believe me, ask any one of the Internet pros who have lost five or six figures doing stupid stuff like playing Internet blackjack or playing drunk. These incidents are proof that some of the better technical players don't have these skills.

Emotional management is another fun one. Some people like to deal with this by throwing things and punching walls, which is obviously -EV. Other people like to deal with this by completely denying their emotions, but once the pressure reaches a certain point (which it always will in poker, without a doubt) they tend to have a breakdown. When people are winning, they tend to feel happy, and when people are losing, they tend to feel like shit. This causes an emotional roller coaster that makes playing a lot of poker really beat you down over the long run if you can't deal with it effectively.

Dealing with fatigue and/or boredom while grinding is likely the most ignored of these four topics, and it's rare that any answers or suggestions are ever given on the subject besides "play more tables", "pay more attention", "get in #flopturnriver on ThunderCity", or "browse the Internet". It's really a shame too since this probably effects just as many, if not more, players than bad emotional or money management.

Work ethic is the topic that everyone hates, and luckily this one isn't much of a problem for me personally, though I like to think I have lots of room for improvement in all areas. People really don't like to think of poker as work in my experience, and for that reason alone I think a lot of people avoid working on the amount of time they put into the game. It's really a shame because it's probably the one area that's the easiest to improve on in isolation.

What all four of these topics have in common, and the reasons I have picked them individually to discuss, are because they all have major implications on everything non-poker in your life. So following our premises, our basic formula involves using poker as a medium for improving on these, and other components of our lives, eventually leading to major internal growth. Regarding poker, improvement in these things will eventually lead to more profits than we would have otherwise.


Presence, Routine, Lifestyle

We cannot expect to touch excellence if "going through the motions" is the norm of our lives... Those who excel are those who maximize each moment's creative potential -- for these masters of living, presence to the day-to-day learning process is akin to that purity of focus others dream of achieving in rare climactic moments when everything is on the line.

The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the boardroom, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage. If we have any hope of attaining excellence, let alone of showing what we've got under pressure, we have to be prepared by a lifestyle of reinforcement.
-Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning

1. When I wake up in the morning around 6-7 am, the first thing I do is eat breakfast which is usually some egg whites or a small chicken breast and some fruit, and then I come into my office area, sit in the floor in the dark and concentrate on my breathing for a while. It's not exactly meditation, because it doesn't have the same goals or purpose as meditation, but I just want to get myself centered for my morning to come and focused on the present moment instead of worrying about what I did yesterday and what is going to happen this afternoon or how I've been running.

When I'm content, I grab my notebook and open up a book from a group of books that I read through over and over again (these include Theory of Poker by David Sklansky, Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel, and about a dozen others on something poker, philosophy or psychology-related). I sit quietly and take notes on and think deeply about what I'm reading and how it pertains to what's going on. This goes on for a little while, then I hop up and start into my day. This short routine which only lasts an hour or so that I do each morning helps to prepare me for what's to come with the state of mind I want to have. It's daily practice.

2. Before every poker session that I play I do something that helps me relax and focus at a ratio of about 5:1 or 6:1 for playingregaming. Over time, I'm shortening the pregaming period and lengthening the playing period. The general idea is that I'm breaking down the time needed to get in a good poker-playing state while getting to the point that I can play longer and longer with a lower drop in focus. Eventually I'd like to be able to sit in my computer chair before I start loading tables with my eyes closed for a few minutes and that those few minutes will prepare me to stay sharp and present in the moment for four or five hours, but that's a somewhat far-off goal.

3. Taking a page out of Tommy Angelo's play book, whenever I pull up to a red light, I stare at it until it goes away while concentrating on my breathing. This is a variation of a pretty basic exercise that helps build better concentration and focus, and helps to improve the ability to concentrate or focus on something with immediacy. And I do this in a lot of different situations with a lot of different points of focus. When I'm waiting on an elevator, I stare at the opening between the doors. When I'm sitting in my floor relaxing, I concentrate on taking long, deep breaths. When I'm waiting for my turn to be up on waiting lists, I focus on a small bug crawling across the top of my monitor, or the source of the pains that always seem to be in my lower back and neck while grinding.

4. Whenever I have some intense emotion, whether it's being scared that I almost hit some kid on a motorcycle who was trying to pass me while I was making a left-hand turn in my girlfriend's car yesterday, or whether it's that fear turning into anger when the kid decides to turn around and follow me and try to start a fight with me at the next intersection (true story that happened yesterday), I think about what the conditions were that led to feeling that emotion, and how it is affecting my current decisions, but also how it could affect decisions in the immediate or even distant future. While it's a bit mundane sometimes, being in the habit of being open to this type of introspective process in what seem to be even the simple things makes it easier and more likely that you will be true to yourself when making decisions in the poker realm when you're tilting.

5. So right now I'm trying to concentrate on finishing out the rest of this so I can go spend the rest of my evening with my girlfriend. She's watching TV in the living room and it's kind of loud and distracting. I considered getting up to shut the door, but that would be missing out on the opportunity that having that distraction there would give me. By the time I've finished writing out this paragraph, the noise from the TV isn't bothering me anymore.

I've numbered off some examples from my own day-to-day activities to demonstrate the potential power of Mr. Waitzkin's statement. Some people would say these things are a bit of overkill and that I'm too worried about cultivating the ability to focus, concentrate, and perform under pressure. Those people would be absolutely wrong -- I'm not the least bit worried about it.


Transcending Poker -- Real Internal Growth

The reasons that there are problems that we don't actively fix is because they are hard problems to fix and it takes a lot to really overcome them. True internal growth occurs whenever we recognize something that needs to be done, and we recognize that it's going to be difficult, and we jump to do it anyway if for no reason other than it will be good practice for when something else comes along that is even more difficult. In this sense, adversity should be actively sought-out rather than actively avoided. Quite obviously, this goes way beyond poker, and the beauty of working on these types of internal problems for the sake of poker is that you are automatically working on them for the sake of other disciplines, and for the sake of being a better person in general.


My Personal Solution

So I came to realize that after I moved twice and had a lot of downtime that I wasn't able to play poker with the intensity that I had previously, and not for nearly as long. I lost a lot of the hunger and found myself going through the motions for a few months with mediocre results. I also noticed that when I played 25nl or 50nl for videos I was doing during the same time frame that the play seemed really boring and I thought to myself that I would absolutely hate to have to grind out another bankroll from the microstakes on up to "earn" the privilege to play 100nl and 200nl. And so here I am.