Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Expecting the Worst
Im thinking there are no laws of reality. Only traditions of reality. The world is an abstract construction. God's ever mutating piece of art. The laws of probability exist but our own expectations can change them. Since there are an equal number of optimists and pessimists, the overall probabilities are upheld. But individually we can change our luck. Im talking about expecting the worst possible card to come increasing that likelihood. Lets say I run bad for a while but within the laws of probability. Since Im the pessimistic type Im likely to get discouraged quicker and start to believe the cards are against me. There are several new age spiritual books that talk about being able to manifest things through thought. Maybe the most well known is The Secret. Many theorize that fear of something increases its probability of happening. Maybe its a built in punishment for lack of faith. I believe this stuff but I cant seem to do anything with it. I forget to be positive. TJ Cloutier talked about people changing their games but that its very rarely truly successfully changed because people tend to revert back to playing how they are naturally programmed. Thats why few people are naturally Tight and Aggressive players. Because these are conflicting natures (I think that's a Sklansky observation). Naturally tight people tend to be conservative. Naturally aggressive people tend to be risk takers. Logically interweaving these is a conscious choice usually caused by many sessions of losing poker and learning some very hard lessons. So back to my point. Its hard to change my nature from pessimist to optimist. In the book Conversations with God, God basically tells the guy he can have anything he wants by deciding it and then believing it will happen. The problem is that we rarely ever believe something can happen in that way or we choose a path to what we want and quickly get distracted. The trick is to keep choosing and re-choosing it with every fiber of our being and keep trying to believe it and trying to remove all doubt that it will happen. The faith of a mustard seed can move a mountain but its hard to truly have faith that the mountain will actually move. I bet a mustard seed of doubt is all it takes too. Why am I droning on about this? I keep playing people who are just terrible at heads up poker. I have them green tagged as players I want to play. Yet they are winning. They seem to catch every card they need and/or win all the coolers. I said "they seem" which is just to say they win way more than their fair share. I had this feeling before I moved from full ring to headup. Maybe switching games gave me a boost of optimism and I felt the benefits of that and when the laws of variance swung low I moved back to my natural way of thinking and now Im experiencing the consequences of that. The three games in a row I lost last night force me to step back and figure this shit out. Obviously from a poker theory all I can do is get my chips in ahead. But if thats not working I have to believe there is a deeper reason for what is going on. Im going to give this some serious thought and I will come up with a plan of action other than just trying to think positively. Im sure there are some daily drills which can keep my mind right for the long haul. Im sure the problem is that its hard ot stay positive when you are pissed off at the 2 outers you get crushed by on the river. Ok thats enough philosophy. Oh and I also have another conspiracy theory that once I green flag someone Full Tilt has it written in their program keep them in the action. Yeah I know that is very far fetched but its just how my mind works.
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It is worse than you can possibly imagine. I think it just matters where your focus is. Right now I am totally focused on losing and playing bad that is what is manifesting itself. I know when I have been totally focused on winning and doing rituals everyday to keep that focus, followed up by exercising everyday that I have had unbelievable streaks of wins. 3 losing days out of 90! So what do I do at the end of that? I think, well that is working so well I must be just born to win so lets cut out all this extra crap and just play. Yea that works well. I am in the same boat right now. I am taking a week off to get my head on straight by doing some step work followed by a lot of surfing. For some reason I still haven't decided to do what I was doing on that incredible streak. I am a genius.
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