Tommy Angelo

Six of the eight episodes of The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment have aired at DeucesCracked.com.

(Here’s a blog post that answers the question, “Huh?”)

(And here’s a page at my site with all the music and other stuff: EPTPE Lee Mack: Live move

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I’ve been answering lots of questions at the message boards at DeucesCracked.com. Today’s blog post is a revised version of a reply I wrote over there.

POSTER: “While I watch this, it occurs to me that I am mindless near to 100% of the time. This series has given me some tools to defeat that, but I have pretty severe ADD and I do not like to take the medication I am prescribed for it. I’d rather learn skills that help me succeed.”

ME: If you consider your severe ADD to be a mental problem, then what you should do is do the same thing as if you had something you considered to be a severe physical problem. With a physical problem, we do things do make our body better and stronger. With a mental problem, you should do things to make your mind better, as in, stronger, more resilient, better able to fix its own problems. Since all mental problems are in some way related to thinking (since thinking is the only mental activity there is), then the place to turn to mend your severe mental problem is to take many long, slow looks at your thinking. And the way to do that is to sit still for long stretches every morning and just be with yourself and your body and your mind, and practice the skill of concentration by concentrating on your breathing. Call it meditation. Call it medication. Doesn’t matter. Those are just words. It’s the act of deliberate, repetitive taming of the mind that matters, and works to increase your ability to be mindful.

POSTER: “How can I learn to be more mindful of myself, and less mindful of distractions, but also more mindful of my opponents?”

ME: This is where the math doesn’t add up. You would think that by intentionally detouring your thinking hundreds of times per day to pay attention to something material and current such as yourself or a reflection in a puddle, that you would then miss things that you would have otherwise not missed, such as the betting patterns of your opponents. Well, in my experience, and that of others I’ve spoken to, it doesn’t work that way. Paradoxically, the act of paying attention to things that are not your opponents will cause/enable you to pay better attention to your opponents.

It does matter what you pay attention to, and how. That’s why they call it “practice.” You do it, and you keep doing it, and you keep doing it, and you keep getting better at it, like playing guitar. No one has every learned how to play a guitar without playing one. You can’t acquire new concentration skills from me or a book. What you can learn from a person or a book is how to learn how to acquire new concentration skills. Then you have to go off and do it.

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Heedless. Is that a beautiful word or what? It takes something that’s hard to put into words, and puts it into one.

Here’s are some synonyms I found online: careless, negligent, thoughtless, unthinking, inattentive, unmindful, and unobservant. Those last two especially made me want to start remembering to use this word.

I recently saw the word “heedless” applied to the phase change that happens when addictive behavior really kicks in. Or anger blasts. Or food orgies. Or poker tilt. Or anything that can make one suddenly… heedless. There’s before heedlessness. And there’s after it. It’s a pretty clear line. At least it is when I watch myself cross it.

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I’ve been doing some piano recording here at home the last few months. Most of it is short bits of music that I’m inserting between segments of a poker video series called The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment that you can read about (and download the music) here: EPTPE Resurrecting the Champ

I’m posting now about one of those inserts.

Most of the recordings are of one piano played with two hands. On some of them, like the one you are about to hear, I did some overdubbing. The link below is to an mp3 that is ten seconds long. It’s one piano, played with one hand, four times, plus a shaker.

So much for the man behind the curtain. What I’m really here to share is a nifty musical rhythmic thing. The Mission Impossible theme music can be conceptualized as having 10 beats per measure, broken down into groups of three beats and two beats, thus:

3-3-2-2 / 3-3-2-2 / 3-3-2-2 / etc.

It so happens that the song “Living in the Past” by Jethro Tull has the same distinctive timing. And the music of these two songs – the notes themselves – happen to meld well. So here comes the Mission Impossible bassline and the Living in the Past melody at the same time. Ready? GO!

Click here to hear it.

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The label on the spray can says zero calories per serving. But it’s a can with nothing in it but olive oil. But they said no calories. But how can that be? Olive oil has calories. Really good ones. But wait. The label has still more to say. In addition to there being no calories, there are especially no calories from fat. Okay, that does it. There’s a mystery here needing to be solved.

Let’s zoom in on the fine print here…

Servings per container: 421

Now there’s a curious number. The total amount of olive oil in the can is only five ounces. How, dare we ask, are the label makers defining the word “serving?”

Serving size: About 1/3 second spray (.27g).

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It seems that in labelland, one serving of olive oil, when administered on the nanoscale, is about 1/4 gram, which is such a tiny amount that the nutrition data all round to zero. Where did the calories go? They fell through the granularity. The main thing is, at least now I know why I have to keep spraying and spraying to get the right amount of olive oil out.

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We look at the mighty redwoods and we get all awestruck and we think majestically about wow, looky there. That’s a really big tree. And straight. At least I do, that is, I used to, before I realized how stupid redwoods are.

Let’s say you were a member of a species, and you basically ruled your world. Anywhere you went, you were the bad-ass. You controlled the resources, and no other species posed a threat to your species.

But no… that wasn’t good enough. You, as in you and you and you and you, the individuals, wanted more, more, more, more. Always more, always better, always … higher. So instead of kicking back and living a life of leisure as a species, there arose non-stop infighting, for the sake of having more than the next guy. More what? We could metaphorically call it: sunlight. But the tragedy is that there is plenty of sunlight to go around. You silly, silly, redwood trees. As soon as you got to 200 feet tall, you ruled the skies. You dominated wherever you went. You had your own ecosystem and it worked. But you were so used to competing against other species that you fought on, against each other. And now many of you are 300 feet tall. Some as tall as 380.

Think of all the additional resources it takes to make and maintain a 380 foot tall tree compared to a 200 foot tall tree.

Don’t worry, redwoods. I’ll still come camping and I will always be awestruck by you because let’s face it, you’re awesome. Even if you ain’t so bright.

Sean Lind at pokerlistings.com wrote an article that starts out really great, talking about me and everything. Then he goes into lots of fine ideas pertaining to Lopping Off the C-Game, and he ends by saying there’s more. Check it out…

http://www.pokerlistings.com/strategy/lopping-off-your-c-game

Drake Levin died a few days ago. Drake was the kind of guy who will have a party thrown in his honor that takes two weeks to plan. He had a smile that was bright enough to light up a poker room. He played guitar like someone who was a pop star in the 60’s and since then had been gigging in the blues scene for 45 years in San Francisco. Many great things will be said and thought about Drake because he had a golden heart and he touched everyone with it. So I’ll go ahead and talk about me.

I met Drake at Artichoke Joe’s Casino right after I moved to California in 1997. He played a lot of poker, and we played a lot of poker together. We made the music connection, and soon we were partying away from the poker rooms. We had made the conversion from “buddy poker” to “real life buddy.”

I’d been to Drake’s house lots of times over the years, so it was no big deal to go visit him during his final months, which I did twice. The second time, which was a couple weeks ago, my buddy Alex was there too. Drake was physically weak and feeble. Mentally he was all together. We sat around for a long time and talked about everything under the sun. When Drake launches into a story about “jamming with B.B.” or whatever, it’s stunning. The wealth of experience. And the casualness of it all.

Drake walked across the room and came back to the couch carrying the acoustic guitar. He sat down, and he hugged it on his knee. He put his left hand on the neck, and his right hand above the strings, and he moved his hands, but the strings didn’t get pressed hard enough into the neck, and his right hand wasn’t cooperating either. Not much of a sound came from the guitar.

After a few notes, Drake picked up the guitar and handed it to me. In the most unfrustrated tone, he said, “Here, take this. I can’t play it.”

I took the guitar. He said, “Play ‘Slowroller.’” That’s a song I wrote, about a poker hand. It’s a bluesy groove, in E.

This morning during my quiet time I was doing some deep recollecting about Drake. I put us both back in the Casino, and I watched him play poker. I put him on stage in San Francisco, and I watched him play guitar. I guess you could say Drake was a player. Then I beamed myself back to the last visit at Drake’s house, and as I was recalling the particulars I wrote about above, a wave of melodrama came over me, and it occurred to me that I might have heard the last note Drake ever played. And if that isn’t dramatic enough, he then, literally, handed his guitar to me. And when he said, “Take this,” it’s as if he had said, “Take this, the instrument of my life, and continue my song when I’m gone.”

Dear Drake,

I accept. I vow to remain smaller than the groove, and to let it have its way with me. Rest in peace.

Tommy

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I have a feeling that old people benefit more from yoga than young people do. Partly because older bodies rate to have more and deeper ways to improve. And partly because older people rate to be more spiritually ignitable.

If my conjecture is true, you could use it as a great excuse to not start your yoga practice yet. The longer you put it off, the more you’ll benefit from it when you do it! So you might as well wait until you’re like, I dunno, 95 years old or so. That way you’ll be getting the maximum value from each yoga minute.

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