Yesterday was one of those dull days where I was forced to spend 5 hours at the dentist and as a result neglected to partake in any of my responsibilities or duties for the rest of the day. "Why did I not call the doctor?" "Shit, my room is still a mess, but why does it matter if it's messy another day." "I still owe that dude money." Basically the continuous circle of 30 questions you ask yourself when you are feeling apathetic. Decided to celebrate this uninspiring day with a fantastic bowl of chocolate ice cream, whole milk, maraschino cherries. The whole shabang.

I made too much ice cream and was exhausted from going over the list of 30 questions in my head. I also had to wake up to consider what I was going to do about those 30 questions. So I went to bed with the stupid, no longer desirable ice cream just laying there on my night stand. Alarm decides to wake me up at 7 Am and I violently attempt to turn it off. It retaliates by throwing the remaining bowl of brown sauce right back in my face.

Somebody. Slightly different because of hereditary traits. Limited control of uniqueness. Wolves wouldn't discriminate. Simple. Boring. Body.

I, you, or we may never get what we really want. My wants are pretty unique for someone who is pretty decent at a card game; maybe not unique, but insatiable. From the start of my attempt to redeem previous failures in wrestling, I've realized that there were always going to be bigger fish to fry. There's not going to be a final boss like Phil Ivey. I'm in kill mode now, but when it feels like I'm going nowhere I don't have the capacity to let it go even when I could be taking more productive routes. It's also difficult to learn a productive career when you could care less about money. Just a tumble of weed rolling through the desert type thing.

Wrestling is, of course, a horribly brutal sport. Even in practice it's common to end up bruised, battered, and bleeding as a result of intense wrestling from your closest of friends. It's Fight Club without the appeal and suave of Brad Pitt and Ed Norton. A month ago I separated a muscle on the left and lower side of my rib cage(oblique). The pain has mostly been dull, throbbing and sensitive to pressure on the area or any stretching or sit-up type of movement. A month later the pain has decreased by about 33% while mobility and flexibility has increased 33%. Today I was put into a situation that exposed my character a little and I'm still not sure if I was right.

Wrestlers want to act, appear, and think like tough sons of bitches. For some, they are willing to compromise this attitude for anything. 90 minutes into today's practice I paired up with a guy 20 pounds heavier than me who I knew was very good. For the first few minutes he controlled tie ups and was close on one shot before finally taking me down in a front headlock series. Immediately legs came in stretching my left side out to it's maximum. Excruciating pain set in, then short frustration from being in this position by getting taken down and letting boots come in, and it was at the moment that I had to decide if I was either going to get to stomach and build a base or if I was going to just bail out on wrestling him. The season is long, my pride is where it should be, and I'm an intelligent, relentless, ferocious competitor who is confident in my abilities to perform under the most unfortunate of circumstances when it's appropriate.

So far on the year;
Puerto Rico; (1-2)
Georgia;(4-1)
Alumni(1-0)

When I was 11 or 12 my Dad was engulfed in the electronic music world which happened to be techno and some trance. Fatboy Slim, the Prodigy, and the Crystal Method were his favorite his favorite artists and he himself decided to venture into music mixing and producing under the alias Energy No. 13. My parents ended up getting divorced when I was 9 and I knew enough about human interactions to know that my Dad was torn apart. A year after the divorce, music equipment was spread throughout the living room showcasing my Father's elaborate plans of something spectacular. The Roland 505 and 808 were his two favorite toys during this time period and they were complimented with an assortment of special functioning synthesizers that made obscure noises at the wave of a hand. For a few years, I observed my father's obsessive behavior towards electronic music, but it was only until I was older did I realize that he was escaping.

I distinctly remember the month that I attempted to make beats and music on my Dad's Mac software. His setup was innovative for the time being and I felt spoiled, yet overshadowed by his understanding of the equipment and ear for techno. I spent about 30 hours total attempting to put together drum and bass segments together, but ultimately gave up on the venture because I felt like I was accomplishing nothing. A 10,000 hour idea is just not compatible with a pre-teenager. It was also around this time when I started feeling anger towards my Dad for spending so much of his free time with music and started feeling distant of him. Naturally I started to hate the idea of techno music and hated the repetitive sound of his electronic music. I wanted to stay in my room and play nintendo whenever he played. Humans tend to incorrectly associate their feelings to sources and like to believe what is false if it makes the person feel comfort or security.

On a late Wednesday night, roughly a year and a half ago, I was with 2 friends from high school and we were stuck in a dilemma of how we were going to have fun or cause trouble that night. We went to downtown West Palm Beach to a semi-rundown music venue playing extremely loud bass. The venue was almost completely dark with the only light coming from quickly whirled glowsticks and a short girl with pink glowing necklaces and bracelets. The music was what I interrupted as some type of acid house music. Dark, obscure, wobbly and appealing for hipsters or people with abrasive tastes in music. I didn't know whether to dance or watch or stand and listen or get drunk. I ended up throwing down 8 cherry-bombs and found myself engulfed by the sounds of the music. I was an alien on a different planet than the humans that I once knew and I was the luckiest of either groups of creatures to be in that place, dancing the way I was dancing, listening to the music that the DJ was playing. The music gave me the opportunity to be as creative as I wanted with my body movements and the freshness of the feeling created one of the most intense feelings of euphoria that I've ever felt.

It's been since this experience that I have immersed myself in the culture and my success in poker has inspired me to carry over my work habits and learnability has helped me the most in my first month of mixing. The EDM genre creates feelings that can not be felt by top 40 radio hits. 50 days of learning from my Dad, youtube videos, and experimenting with my equipment has given me the bug similar to the bug I got when I played cheap stakes with my friends. It's an escape that could possibly give me opportunities that are unfamiliar to me. I've heard second-hand sources of Sonny Moore locking himself in his parents basement to make EDM and dubstep after being at te top of the post-hardcore/screamo scene. Years later he is widely considered top 3 of the dubstep genre. Dubstep is going to be a dead trend in a year or two and I predict it to branch off into the hardcore scene while drum-and-bass with catchy vocals loops to maintain if not emerge. Of course, Guetta, Aoki, Tiesto etc will keep crushing.

I played a PLO hand this morning that has got my head all scrambled up. I was crushing the table and up a bunch of BB's and the game broke leaving it HU with a middle-aged guy from St.Louis who played loose passive, but made no errors in spewing off. He triples up his 20k stack to 60k and Rafi Amit sits in. Stakes are $100/200 and we are all putting on the $400 Mississippi straddle. My reads on the guy are that he doesn't make big bluffs and is content on letting me bluff, semi-bluff, and value bet him. Basically he tries to play his hand by not taking risks and not getting out of line. Btw, this style can be fine vs tilted aggro's who are 1) Bad at hand reading or 2) Bad at betting strategy. His confidence was up because he tripled and I felt like he was certainly not the type to risk losing his stack on a marginal spot.

$60k effective, He limps SB, Rafi folds. I pot 3388ss, he calls. $3k in pot. 34Kr he c/c $2,400 in rhythm. Turn Qd he C/R $7,400 to pot after thinking for a minute. I ask him if he would show if I folded and he says yes. I tell him I have outs and ask him how many times he wants to run it if I go allin and he says 4x. He doesn't look extremely relaxed and I do not think he would think for that long on the turn if he had THE top set. Definitely still a possibility. He also commented that he raised it $30k "I made it 30 you tell me if I have a good hand."

Help me.

Writing this at 6 am in the morning after a rhino trip with Brandon Crawford, a guy named Nick, and a female live pro named Suzie. I met Suzie just today and she was telling me her records for the summer in the $5/5 plo games. She's said she has grinded 200 hours this month and is making $200 an hour. She bragged about her discipline and her knowledge and understanding of the game. What I really appreciated about her conversation was that she had never heard of me before and had no idea of my experience or winnings at plo. I appreciated our interaction that much more because of this. Basically, she said I was horrible. If she knew me better I think she would have called me a monktard.

I've been losing. Your frustration from losing is a function of your ego. The bigger your ego is, the more you think you expect and deserve to win and the less open-minded you are to improving. Conversely, the more humble you are, the more you try to identify reality and the truth. In poker, the truth is equivalent to winning. If you knew the right answer to every decision possible, you have won. Of course the ego hinders you from identifying the truth and as a result you lose. The worst part for the egomaniac is that his arrogance is too much to overcome and for a poker player this leads him to bust or near bust. Sadly, it's a natural cycle and the ego forces this cycle to occur.

Of course, my career has been nothing less than this natural cycle. When every source that you know is telling you that you are the best, that you have utmost confidence and ability, that you will find a way to win, that losing isn't an option, that you can't accept defeat, then you are defeated. Some things just can't be won, nor should they have attempted to be beat. Winners let go, they are free. Their ego isn't driving them into oblivion. It's the hardest part about the game to understand.
Again, I've been losing. I've wanted what was once mine. I want what isn't mine. Getting back to the peak is an illusion of glory, plastic surgery to the soul, not a cure but a bandaid. The ego has made sacrifices to the well-being of the person to relieve it's pain and to continue to grow. Will power is the ability to overcome a certain expectation with strength and understanding of the truth. The further your results are from expectation, the more your ego is affected and your knowledge of the truth is also negatively affected. It's taken years of pain and an ego-driven agenda that has buried me to realize this. There is no escape route for the ignorant.

To summarize my career into one sentence, I had phenomenal poker results(see below), but my ego prevented me from holding onto money and I extremely negative results was the price that I paid.

all-time NLH


all-time PLO


Ego decides I can beat mixed games, chinese, backgammon, staking, sports-betting. poof.

P.S. Sorry about the wait and for how boring this is.

P.P.S. I lost a lot of money doing dumb shit. Be smart.

P.P.P.S. I'm coaching NLH and PLO. PM me.

You can choose my next blog entry by voting in the comments section. It can be one of the following

A. A career graph of the alias 'theashman103'. (I have ~14 other screennames, but I haven't figured out how to....I'm KIDDING : ]) This can include Pokertracker stud screenshots.

B. An MSpaint pie graph of my winnings and losses away from the poker table.

C. My top 10 most awesome played hands with analysis of each hand.

Choose Wisely


P.S. Obv I'm done with this silly game. I've been looking for an escape for ~9 months. Self-excluding myself would have been absurd though. Perhaps I should blog about my bitterness towards poker and my inner conflicts and past decisions that are still haunting.

Does anyone else feel like meeting up, sitting by a campfire, and getting wasted? We can talk about our love/hate relationship with poker and how you wish you would have never taken that shot at Sauce or how you wish you would have gotten into PLO earlier or how you wish you didn't get 2-outed with 29 left in the WSOP Main Event or how you wish you weren't such a fucking degenerate or how you hate yourself for not going to college and fucking a hundred girls. Let's spend a night together and waste away to harmful substances and nostalgia and come back as men that I ready to conquer the next *insert profitable activity* boom.

Sup??


Uploaded with ImageShack.us