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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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

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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 started playing gin a few years after I had become entrenched in the Columbus poker scene. One night I’m sitting around before the poker game, playing gin, and Hanz walks in. Hanz was this ancient Jewish guy. He had some great lines. They all had a certain Hanziness to them. For example, at the end of a hand, when a player gets caught bluffing, lots of times you’ll hear them say, “I got nothing.” Anytime Hanzie heard someone say that at the end of a hand, he would always say, “You got nutting? You can sleep wid my wife!”

I had recently started playing gin, and I’m sitting there playing, and Hanzie walks in. He looks at me real surprised.

“Since when did you start playing gin?”

There was something pushy about his tone, so I reacted accordingly. “I been playing a little while. What’s the big deal?”

“I’m just surprised, that’s all.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well,” he said. “I just can’t believe you would play a game where you can’t fold.”

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Many of my conversations with my buddy Alex begin similarly:

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It doesn’t matter who starts the initial hellos. All that matters is who ends them. If I start talking next, the conversation can start anywhere and go anywhere. If Alex starts talking next, it goes like this:

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ME: So how much are you ahead?

See, he always starts out with a negative report of some kind. Every single time. When he tells me about a hand, it’s always a hand he lost. And when it comes to patterns in the data, it’s like this: He might be in the middle of his best session of the year, and he will extract losing stats. Alex can change black into red.

Sometimes, seriously though, its hurts to hear it. He really gets himself worked up over absolutely nothing. And the sick part is, he knows it. He knows it’s 100% mind clatter. He knows he can … poof The Hunchback of Notre Dame II rip Funny Money buy

… make it go away, and he knows exactly how.

One day I was thinking about Alex and I thought man it’d be nice if I could come up with a gimmick or something that worked like a faucet. If only I could turn off the flow of sewage going through his mind and out his mouth, just for a few seconds now and then. Hmmm. Okay! I have it! What is the source of his suffering? It’s the thinking he does about bits of negative cash flow. So I’ll just offer him positive cash flow, to think about positive cash flow! I’ll pay him money every time he tells me about a hand he won. This is brilliant! And it’s guaranteed to work. There is no way he can be in the middle of telling me about a pot he won, while at exactly the same time be dwelling in misery and woe over a pot he lost.

Just one problem. It wouldn’t work. Well, it wouldn’t work at a price that I was willing to pay. Which is entirely the point of all this. How many dollars would it take to get Alex to tell a good win story? I was in position to force him to put a price on his addiction to his pain.

What I really wanted to do, besides tighten the faucet if possible, was to show him what he already knows – that he’s a total fucking moron for suffering like he does.

So here’s the deal I offered.

“Hey Alex.”

“What.”

“I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Every time you tell me about a hand you’ve won, I will pay you $10.”

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I continued on…

“And there’s more. You can just tell the hands to my voice mail. As many as you want. And you can tell them real fast, like, “I had pocket aces and won.” That would be a whole hand.”

At this point, a frenzy was mounting, as we both realized how completely Alex was in the process of being had.

“And, if you want, you can just make up the hands. You don’t even have to have played them. The bottom line is – for every hand you tell me about that ends with you winning the pot, I will pay you $10. If you tell me 100 hands, I will pay you $1,000 cash.”

It was a couple months ago that I made this offer. I’m still even.

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I’ve made a new friend at Lucky Chances. His name is Django. (Pronounced Jango.) He’s a young, instantly likable player, very sharp and well-respected. The first dozen times we played together was in early 2007 when I played a few times a week for a few months. It was right after my book came out. I hadn’t played for a year and a half. During that time, he had become an established regular in the big no-limit game at LC.

One day, I raised preflop, he called from the blind, he checked the flop, I bet the flop, he checkraised, and I folded.

Another day, the same thing happened.

During those sessions I saw him do the same thing a couple times with draws.

So the next time I went up to play, I decided in the car that if this pattern came up again, I was going all the way with my hand if I had a pair.

And sure enough, it happened again. I had a pair (a pocket pair of eights), I opened for $120 preflop, he called from the big blind, he checked the flop, I bet $200, he made it $700, I called, he bet $1100 on the turn, I called, he bet $1700 on the river, I called, and he mucked. I won and no cards were shown.

(The flop was 9-4-2 rainbow. The turn was a queen and the river was a jack.)

He took a break right away. When he came back, he started talking to me about the hand. I knew right away I must really like this guy because I spoke.

“What’d you have?” he asked.

“I would like to answer your question, really I would, but I am incapable of telling the truth in situations like this, so there’s really no point in me saying anything.”

“You had pocket kings.” He said.

Fastforward to last week.

I hadn’t been to LC for about a year. I had been playing for a few hours, when Django took a seat in the game, across the table from me. Right away he started talking about the hand from a year ago. He asked if I remembered the hand.

“Yes.” I said. “The flop was 9-4-2 rainbow.” Before that sentence, it had been five or six years at least since I had mentioned actual cards at a poker table.

“Wow! Nice memory!” he said.

He said some more stuff about the hand that I didn’t reply to. A couple hours later, he moved to a seat right next to me. We chatted a little bit about this and that, and then he brought up the hand again.

“I’ll tell you what I had.” I said. “I had pocket threes. I decided in the car, on the way to the casino, that I was going to call you down with any pair if that pattern came up again.”

“I don’t believe you.” he said.

“I believe you.” I said.

“You believe that I don’t believe you?”

“Right.”

“Well, I had K6. Totally nothing.”

“I don’t believe you.” I said.

“Huh? Are you calling me a liar?”

“Yes. That’s what ‘I don’t believe you’ means. It means I think you are lying.”

“Well, I didn’t really mean it when I said I believed you had pocket threes.”

“I believe you.”

“But before you said you believed that I believed you had pocket threes?”

“But you forgot something.”

“What?”

“That I am incapable of telling the truth when it comes to talking about hands, or talking about talking about hands.”

“You’re a sick fuck.”

“I believe you.”

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Dear Reader,

Let me end this little intro with my current perspective. Led Zeppelin summed it up succinctly in the title of a song. These days, anytime I get upset about anything, I know that “It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine”. Here’s the story…

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Me and Rita had a dang near perfect thing going. That’s because she was dang near perfect, except for the gambling. We’d been to Atlantic City and Vegas a couple times each and I vowed never again because it was such a strain. See, I went to casinos to try to make a buck at poker. Rita went because that’s where Miss Jekyll turned into Miss Hyde. And she liked being Miss Hyde, a lot.

She pestered me into a quick trip to Vegas and we decided this time it’d be different. No gambling. That was the plan. This time around we would go and see stuff, like maybe Hoover Dam or Red Rock Canyon, and there was a new strip hotel to check out, the Monte Carlo, and we’d heard about this huge new canopy thing downtown made of light bulbs. We were both really looking forward to pretending we were like normal people. So the plan was Friday night to Sunday night and poof – back home. I would bring just enough money for food and a rental car and that’s it. Rita would bring no money as usual which was fine by me because she’d be bringing her enthusiasm, her charm, and that laugh.

Our flight was detoured to Phoenix because of a flash flood in Vegas. It was only two days after TWA flight 800 blew up in mid-air and nobody knew if it was a terrorist attack or what. To be on the safe side, President Clinton had put sudden and severe emergency security measures in place at airports and everybody was jumpy, especially employees.

So we’re sitting inside a tube on wheels full of people itching to do the Vegas thing, at midnight, in Phoenix. Someone came on the microphone and told us the situation was not good. They told us there were ten other planes like ours in Phoenix that had been diverted from Vegas, and that the airport was way too understaffed to deal with all the extra planes and people and luggage and headaches until the morning crew came in. They told us that if we stayed on the plane, they would take us to Vegas in about nine hours, probably, and that if we got off the plane, we could not get back on, period. We would be totally on our own, with very little hope of getting a different flight out in the morning on any airline.

It so happens Rita and I were carry-on mobile. No checked luggage. We had the same thought at the same time. Let’s grab our bags and get the hell off this plane. Doesn’t matter what we do, let’s just do it elsewhere. How about we rent a car and stop by the Grand Canyon on the way to Vegas? Cool! Great plan! So just like that we were off the plane and skipping through the empty airport all giddy.

We were heading north on Route 17 in Arizona both yakking and driving at 100 miles per hour, in the dark, with no cars anywhere, and feeling like we were getting away with something. No dumb rainstorm hundreds of miles away was going to slow us down. No way.

Our timing was astronomically awesome. We reached the Grand Canyon just as the sun came up, making long shadows and saying good morning to the rocks and lizards and hawks inch by inch without even leaving spots in our eyes. I love sunrise, especially over a sharp horizon. We just stood there, quiet, in that piney western air. Watching that sun come up and looking into the canyon. We hung around for an hour or three. Hard to say with us and time standing still like that.

We stopped at Hoover Dam and went wow but we were now too close to Vegas and too slap-happy from sleeplessness to chill out. An hour later we were cruising The Strip. That place is energizing, like having one pot of coffee dumped down your throat and another one on your head. It’s like, Hello! I’m here!

We had a room reserved at The Mirage. After abusing the buffet we finally slept for probably not that long. It’s hard to rest in Vegas, no matter how tired. When we woke up it was like Hey babe! We’re in Vegas! And we were loving it that we had arrived basically broke and that this time we wouldn’t be getting all hissy over money stuff.

Everything was cool until Sunday night. Our flight home was a few hours away. Oh no. Here it goes. Here it comes. She’s got a ticket to Hyde, and she don’t care. Rita started freaking. She started out all bubbly and then popped.

Hey Tommy. Let’s use your credit card and get a few bucks and play a little blackjack before we leave. Okay? Please please Pleeeze?

I was thinking good lord, here we go again. A perfect trip with the perfect person about to turn into a perfect hell. She had me in the car with no escape when this went down. Man she sure knew how to put the pressure on at just the right time. No I said. No no no no no.

C’mon! Just take out a few hundred and let’s play a little blackjack. No biggy. Right? Sheesh, you’re such a grump.

Rita is a gal who gets her way. No amount of resolve can withstand her power. First she tried sulking and when that didn’t work she got desperate. I knew better than to fight on her turf but this time I was determined. It wasn’t just the money. It was a power thing. We were having our first real showdown because this time, for the first time, I was determined to not give in no matter what.

I got angry. I didn’t like it, but there I was, raising my voice and ranting about how it’s easiest to hurt those closest to you and asking Why are you doing this? Rita countered by turning the volume up to hysterical.

She had me on full tilt so I threw her a wicked but wild curve ball. Okay Rita, here’s the deal. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll take out $1000 on my credit card. Yup. You heard right. One thousand. We’ll go down to the Horseshoe…

That was her favorite place to play blackjack or anything else because she’s stayed and gambled there about a million times. She knows the staff by name without even looking at their badges and they know her, and she’d get all decked out and she was so hot when she did that, real easy to look at and everybody did.

After I said the bit about getting money out on the credit card, she didn’t care what came after. We were going to gamble. Rita was no different than any other addict looking as far ahead as the next fix and absolutely no farther. I told her my contingency plan anyway to make it official. Honey? You want to see some gamble? From a tight-ass poker player? Well, you got it.

I told her we’d go to the Horseshoe and play roulette. We’ll bet all $1000 on one spin, on red. If we lose that spin, we’re done. You can hate me all the way home if you want to for blowing the money before you could properly play princess, but you’ll love me again after a few days and it’ll be okay and we’ll laugh about it eventually.

Then came the devious part. I told Rita that if we win that first spin, we’re going to let it ride. We’ll bet all $2000 on the next spin, on red. If we win that second spin, we’ll have $4000, and we’ll stay in Vegas and gamble and party and have a terminal blast until the money is all gone or until we win so much it’s stupid.

She was thrilled, of course, and terrified too. See, it wasn’t like I was rolling in dough or anything. If I lost a grand, especially at a pure gamble and not at poker where I mustered an edge, it would hurt me. I mean rent-wise hurt, and emotionally too for pissing it away. Only Rita could rock me one instant and wreck me the next. Only she could tilt me till I toppled. That scared her and she said so. But for now we were going to gamble and that’s what mattered more.

We went to the Horseshoe and even though Fremont Street had recently been, like, totally covered for five blocks by an indescribable Vegas-sized semi-circular awning, we barely looked up and we went straight to the cage. I did the deed and we bee-lined to the nearest roulette table. I put down $1000 in cash on red and said all of it, roll the ball. The dealer called the pit boss over to verify what was going down. These guys have seen everything but they still have to watch. Knowing Rita’s ways, I told the pit boss that the money was all mine. Right Rita? Rita reluctantly nodded.

WHIRRerrERRRerrr. The ball went round and round in time with that Steely Dan song, “Then you find yourself in Vegas, with a gambler in your hand.” Okay, so the actual lyrics are “handle in your hand.” What’s the dif. Round and round went Rita. She was jittery and pacing and mutilating a cigarette and totally freaking out. And there I was with my money sitting there on the altar like a sacrifice to the glittering gods of tinsel town. And I didn’t even care. In my mind that money was already gone. I was stabilized now. I was making a statement about how Yeah, I love you babe, but when it comes to money and gambling, from now on, don’t dare mess with me anymore, please, alright?

Clickety clickety click click click. Red. The ball stopped on red. Rita erupted. Let’s go! Let’s stop now! C’mon Tommy! We got $2000! Let’s just get a room right here right now and slow down for a while. C’mon hon. Let’s quit.

She was tugging hard on my arm. The strange thing was that it was still my money. My $2000. But she totally felt that she had rights over half of it because without her pestering I never would have risked $1000 in the first place. This was typical Ritalogic.

Let it ride, I said, all of it, $2000, on red. The dealer couldn’t help but pause for a moment before spinning the wheel with Rita screaming in his face, No! No! No! Stop! Stop! Stop! The pit boss thought he had seen everything but now for sure he knew he had.

WHIRerrERRerr, clickety click click. Red. We won. The ball stopped on red. Rita exploded. I mean, she did. Right there. You’d think she had just, well, I can’t think of an analogy. There isn’t one, since no one could ever be that tense and knotted up and then that relieved in that short of time over anything, except for Rita, in exactly this spot.

I said we’re done and I gave the dealer $100. I still didn’t give a rip about the money. I had made a deal with Rita and I was plenty happy to make good and live it up in Vegas and not fret. This was going to be fun. We had $4000 that was already gone, just a matter of when, and she knew it. My god she was the happiest person on the planet ever. Being around someone who is that happy you can’t help but be bigtime happy too, doesn’t matter what they’re happy about.

So there we were all zippity-do-da with a wad of cash and no certain day we had to get back home and we’re in Vegas babe, we’re going to do this town up right. And we did. We even saw a show.

It’s true what they say about not trying to change people. A few days later, we were sitting in the Vegas airport waiting to board the plane home, tired and sated like after a long fine meal with extra dessert and wine. Rita asked if we had enough money to rent movie headphones and buy beers on the plane. I pulled out seventy bucks. Is that it? That’s it. She kissed my cheek while she gently removed the cash from my unresisting hand. Then she bounced up, and off she went to the airport slot machines. Hey Rita! Save enough for the parking garage when we get home! She waved without turning or slowing down.

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