Archive for the 'poker' Category
Posted by: Tommy Angelo on November 5th, 2009
You’re playing live poker and you just folded before the flop. You’ve got a minute or two, maybe longer, before you get more cards. What to do? What to do? You could watch TV. You could turn the volume up on your headphones. You might order a beverage, or converse with a player. Maybe you’ve got some urgent tweeting to do. Heck you might even just sit there and watch the players play the hand. Whatever you do, it’s okay. You can still recover from it. Just as long as you do this one last thing:
Assume the position.
Imagine you’re in the middle of a big and dramatic headsup pot. On the turn, your opponent bets out. You have him covered. You say, “I’m all in.” And you freeze.
Your opponent pauses. His pause stretches into a delay. The delay elongates into a stall. After a while, the stall extends itself fully and becomes overtly annoying, to everyone, but especially to you, and he keeps poking his eyes at you, then looking at the wall or something, and then he stares at you again, and you look away when he does, and you’re trying to keep still and not give up anything, but you feel yourself squirming around because your body is not in a stable position. It’s weak. It’s out of control.
Have you ever found yourself semi-frozen in a slouchy, undignified posture and been stuck there during the all-in freeze frame? I sure have. Lots of times. And I’ve seen it too. It reminds me of that original Star Trek episode where people are frozen in time in whatever posture they happened to be in. It’s as if saying the words “all in” commits the speaker to a ritualistic stillness ceremony.
So, what to do? How do you insure that you will look strong when you’re being looked over?
Assume the position.
download film No matter what you are doing or thinking between hands, when the dealer starts dealing, stop. Stop, and pretend. Pretend you’re playing that big pot. You make your big all-in raise, and you freeze. Your opponent looks like he is going to take a while. Stop and imagine that moment. Imagine the posture you would want to be in. The one that makes you look good and feel good. The one that says I got no worries or hurries. And then assume that position. If you do this before every hand, you will know you have done your best.Inhabited move buy The Sword in the Stone
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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on October 25th, 2009
Whose fault was it? According to Bob, it was Mary’s fault. But if you ask Mary, she’ll tell you it was Bob’s fault. Joe – (Joe is a big picture kind of guy) – Joe saw the whole thing, and he doesn’t think it was Bob’s fault, or Mary’s fault, because really, the problem started with something nasty that Susie said last week, which was probably the result of the way her mom raised her, so really it was all Susie’s mom’s fault.
But why stop there? Shouldn’t a logical examination of “first blame” always bring us to the same conclusion?
“It’s the universe’s fault!!”
Yes it should, except I’ve got an even better idea.
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When I was growing up, two of the first things they taught me about God was that He is everywhere and you can’t see him. When I was learning physics, two of the first things they taught me about atoms was that they are everywhere and you can’t see them. Atoms are therefore God.
Like God and atoms, the universe is also everywhere. The difference is that the universe is not invisible. For me, this makes it much harder to blame things on the universe, since I have to look at it while I do so. I like the idea of shouting “It’s your fault” at something I can’t see. It appeals to my cowardice. So the universe is out of the running. The choice is God or atoms.
That’s an easy choice for me. Lots of people blame God for things. I’ve never heard of anyone blaming atoms. So I’ll do that.
I’m now ready. Maybe later today something will happen that makes me want to shake my fist in rage, and there won’t be anyone or anything I can blame for whatever happened, but that won’t stop me…
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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on October 19th, 2009
In March 2009, I got a letter from Guillermo Gonzales, editor in chief of Sportivo Magazine, the top hard-copy poker magazine in Italy. Guillermo asked if it would be okay if he translated some of my poker articles to Italian and published them in his magazine. I immediately sent a copy of Guillermo’s email to my huge Italian family and asked, “How do you say ‘HELL YES!’ in Italian?”
Guillermo and I talked.
“How many of my articles do you want to use?”
“Eight,” he said.
“Do you know which ones?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to choose them for you?”
“Hell Yes!!”
So I went through my articles and picked out the ones that have been linked to or referenced the most, and I sent them in.
A few months later, my first issue of Sportivo arrived. I went to the Table of Contents. It was very exciting to see my name there, in the middle of what looked to me like an Italian restaurant menu. The name of my article was Reciprocita: la ragione del profitto nel poker, which I knew translated to Reciprocality: The Cause of Profit at Poker
So, ragione must mean cause. This was going to be really fun.
I opened the magazine to my article. The layout was superb. I started reading. I’ve heard a lot of Italian, but I barely speak a word, unless you count things like “pasta” and “That’s amore.” But because I was extremely familiar with the English version of what I was reading, the language center of my brain starting pulling lots of extra blood, with patterns and puzzles coming and going like crazy.
My article in the latest issue of Sportiva was particularly fun to read. It’s like, everything sings in Italian. The name of the article is Folding. The very end goes like this:
And all of a sudden, I can’t lose. I love folding.
Which in Italian, sounds like this:
E d’improvviso, non posso perdere. Amo foldare.
I love Amo foldare.
Posted by: Tommy Angelo on October 5th, 2009
.!.
I just got off the phone with a mouse smasher. Or you could call him a mouse masher. (It sounds the same either way, whether you are saying it, or doing it.) I’m going to call him Humphrey. The topic was poker coaching. During the conversation, Humphrey asked some questions I had heard before:
Q: Did you really fold pocket aces before the flop just for the hell of it?
A: Yes. Can you think of a better reason?
Q: I tilt. Can you straighten me out?
A: No. But you can.
Q: What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?
A: I don’t know. And I don’t care.
Okay, I admit. Nobody has asked me that last question. But I’m ready if they do!
I asked Humphrey to elaborate on his tilting. Here’s what he told me…
“Usually my tilt is merely a percolating, churning, grinding, retching, undercurrent of suckiness and ill-being.”
“You don’t say.”
“But sometimes,” said Humphrey, “it gets really bad. It’s as if a tightly coiled spring of Reardon metal suddenly unwinds at the speed of insanity. The metal impales my arm and seizes control. My hand grabs my mouse, and then, with the zip and accuracy of a third baseman throwing to first, I fling the mouse at the wall and – kaBLAM, chinkle tink thunk – the mouse comes to rest, in pieces, on the floor, as do I.”
“And you call that tilt?”
“Of course it’s tilt! What the hell would you call it?”
“I’d call it a religious experience.”
“A what?”
“Think about it. You were redeemed. You were liberated. You were saved. Sounds like religious talk to me.”
“I wasn’t saved! I was violently enraged!”
::: insert soothing exhale here :::
“Let me ask you something.”
“Okay,” said Humphrey.
“How much is your typical win or loss per session?”
“I’d say it’s in the $200-$400 range.”
“Let’s say that instead of smashing your mouse, you had sat there and kept playing, swimming against your undercurrent of suckiness. What do you think your EV would have been for the rest of that session?”
“Not good. At all.”
“Okay. One more question. How much does a mouse cost?”
::: pause :::
“You’re right, I was saved,” said Humphrey.
“Yes you were. This time. But from here on in, it won’t be so easy. Now that you have seen The Way, you will need to develop an entirely new disciplinary practice, one that has never before existed on this earth. Are you ready for a challenge?”
“Possibly. What is it?”
“When you venture forth to acquire your replacement mouse, you will be tempted by the tilt demon. You must be prepared to defend, like a warrior, or else you will surely be slain.”
“Go on.”
“Hanging in the aisles of merchandise, or browsing through an online store, you will see many mice before you. But you must purchase only one. For if you were to…”
“Okay, okay, I get it. You’re saying that if I’m such a tilt monkey that it’s sometimes hugely plus EV for me to smash my mouse, that I should embrace my rodent-killing ways. And to ensure I make money from mouse smashing, I must never buy more than one at a time. This isn’t the world’s most complicated idea.”
“True. Yet there are few master mouse smashers.”
“So is that it? Aren’t you going to break into some speech about how I shouldn’t let myself get that tilted in the first place?”
“Sounds like you already know that to me.”
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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on September 27th, 2009
Lee Jones sent me this screenshot. He added the comment in red and the two red boxes. You can click on the image to see a larger version.
That’s my book, right between the laser mouse and the lens cleaner. At the top is the item Lee was shopping for, a 30-inch monitor. That’s the item for which it is true that: Customers who bought this item also bought Elements of Poker.
Why would people who buy big monitors buy poker books? It’s because when you play poker on the internet, you can do what’s called “multi-tabling.” That means playing in more than one poker game at the same time. It’s like what Bobby Fisher used to do at chess, except multi-tabling is spectacularly faster, and it’s for money, and you can bluff, and everybody can play as many games as they want. Okay, so it’s barely like what chess masters do. It’s more like what video gamers do, which is: AS MUCH AND AS FAST AS POSSIBLE OF COURSE!!!
How many games do people play? The most I’ve ever heard of is 16. Lots of online poker players play 10 tables or more. To those people, square inchage is vital. Imagine if you had a dozen programs open and you needed to see them all at the same time. That’s how it is when you multi-table. What would you do if increasing your visual real estate would increase your income? You’d buy a bigger monitor, or two. Which is exactly what many poker players have done, and do.
So it’s not all that surprising that a poker book would show up in a “Customers who bought this item also bought” section at Amazon when “this item” is a 30-inch monitor. But why my book? Yes, it’s well regarded and selling well, but that’s true of dozens of other poker books. Why would poker players who are expanding their playing capacity buy my book?
Lee’s email to me contained the only plausible answer to the question. Lee imagined being inside the mind of the professional poker player who just added more monitor space to his poker command center:
“Hmmm. I’m going to be playing a lot of tables at once. Now more than ever, I need to tilt less…”
Posted by: Tommy Angelo on September 18th, 2009
The meaning of “reconcile” in play here is “to make consistent or congruous.” In other words… How can someone walk the path of harmlessness if it has poker tables on it?
I anticipated that I would be asked this question after The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment Restless Natives rip came out. The title alone begs the question. Yesterday I was asked the question twice. In the previous weeks, about five other times. During the previous 6 years or so, I have asked myself the same question a few times.
Let’s say there’s a guy who plays poker, and he starts meditating every morning and doing mindfulness stuff all day long and reading about it and talking to knowledgeable people about it. He goes all-in with the practice and the teachings. He learns about harmlessness, intellectually, and it makes sense. He learns about harmlessness, experientially, and he watches himself and his world change. He likes where it’s leading. Eventually a day comes when there are no poker tables on his path. It might have happened suddenly, a quick turn: “Poker harms me and others! Therefore I shall no longer do it!” Or it might have happened gradually, with no forethought, just a naturally weaning. In either case, it was the move toward a life guided in part by an attitude of harmlessness that made him move away from poker, which, by his definition, causes harm.
Let’s look at another guy. He is a poker player, and last week he heard some things about meditation. He heard it would improve his concentration and make him less emotionally reactive. He thinks this would be great for his poker game. So he learns more, and he starts doing some of the practices, the ones that he thinks will help him focus better and therefore do better at poker. Over the next ten years, he builds his repertoire of mindful breathing and concentration exercises that he does while he plays poker, and he occasionally does them in regular life during high-stress situations. He and his life are made better (more tiltless) by the practices that he rightly thinks of as stemming from his poker life, in the same way that a businessman might think of poker as something that hones his people-reading skills. The concept of “harmlessness” is nowhere in the mix. Yet when he plays poker now, he harms himself much less than he used to. And when he plays poker, he harms his opponents less than he used to. The things he says. The things he does. The things he thinks. The vibe he sends out. The bitterness is gone. The meanness is gone. The need to make others small is gone.
The first guy quit poker. The second guy has no plans to quit poker. Both are walking the path of harmlessness.
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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on September 15th, 2009
Did a fun interview last night with Mike Johnson and Adam Schwartz at TwoPlusTwo.com Pokercast. My second time of probably many. As one of the original disciples of the Temple of 2+2, it is dreamlike to be a guest on that show. (Special thanks and howdy to Steven (*TT*), the maker of things that happen.)
Here’s a link to the interview:
http://pokercast.twoplustwo.com/pokercast.php?pokercast=88
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I am the second guest. My segment starts at 1:14:04 and ends at 2:03:30. We talk aboutThe Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment
and miscellaneous topics. I think my favorite line of the whole thing is just a few seconds before the end, when Mike plugs my book. He says:
“The book is “Elements of Poker” and if you haven’t read that, what have you been doing?”
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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on July 28th, 2009
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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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on July 24th, 2009
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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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on July 20th, 2009
.!.
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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