I could have been here many times since the last post.  I just didn’t want to.  No excuses, simply not interested in penning and mulling through the choices of the road I’ve decided to take since leaving poker behind.

It’s not quite a fair statement – “leaving poker behind” – and heading on down the road.  I seldom think about poker in my waking hours but I still dream about it.  Those dreams are vivid and stick in my thoughts when I wake up.  Mostly stress dreams.  Maybe sick, nightmare dreams.

If you have the ability to reason and take a walk through your own intricately developed personality – and you know your way around a live poker table, preferably in a casino because that’s where the show really begins – you should be able to dig through some of the layers of your opponents at the table and see what motivates them to return day after day.  While you’re doing that, you will be able to dig through your own layers as well and learn about you…that world of self that we sometimes bury because we don’t want to face it.

It took me a long time to start to putting it all together in terms of ‘MOI.’

Before I proceed, let me mention that there are players who can treat poker as a game of skill and rely on their own control and continual research to build more knowledge of money management, game play, position, different playing styles, deducing when they are set to be trapped and escaped with a clean getaway, making the most of the trap they set, knowing when it’s time to call it a night or a week or a month, and knowing if they played as good as they could or got sloppy or impatient.  That’s just a brief skim of the surface of a good player.

How many good players have I crossed paths with in my lifetime of dealing and playing?  Damned few.

I’m not one of them.

You can’t be a good player part of the time and a raging lunatic the next and think you will ever beat the game long term. Of course there is a luck factor.  And a skill factor. The mind controls both IMHO.  If you’re winning and think you’re running lucky, you are. If you’re losing and think your luck is shitty, it is.  If you know you can settle in and play your best game and cash out winner, you will.

It all sounds a bit on the ‘iffy’ side, doesn’t it.  There’s so much involved in the overall ‘mind game’ in poker that no one can ever touch the root of the nerve and say “this is what causes that.”  It’s not possible.

I know the reasons that I got hooked.  For over 35 years I could never see myself doing anything but playing and dealing poker.  It’s not that I thought the game would just dry up and die if I wasn’t there. It was more like I would dry up and die if I wasn’t there.  I had to be fed.

I don’t believe it will take me two months to come back.  Oh…I did start having a glass of wine now and then.  Reminiscent of old times.