You Don't Want To Sit Next To Me

Interesting thing happened to me at the casino last night. Well, interesting for me, but that’s all that matters anyway ;) I sat down a at a $2-$4 game. I probably shouldn’t have because the rake is insurmountable, but I wanted to test this hypothesis that I had. I usually played during the day when I went to the casino. The day shift is full of regs, mostly retirees trying to eek a few extra bucks out of their social security checks. I wanted to see how the games were at night. My guess was the games would be better.
There is one old obnoxious guy named Charles. He plays a lot of hands. It’s as if he is donating all his money, but the weird thing is I feel like he knows better. He knows a little about the game. If he would focus and screw down he could beat the game. Watching him gave me an epiphany.
People don’t always gamble to win. Most people don’t even expect to win. They see poker on TV and see people win consistently. They have to know that there is a way to win, but most of them never look into it, or if they do they don’t use what they’ve learned.
I saw one guy praying for a third heart on the river. I didn’t come, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it did. The third heart will come on the river 18% of the time. If you stand to win more that 4-to-1 on a call then you call. You make money even though you only win 18% of the time.
I expect to win 55% of my sessions. That means I am losing 45% of the time I play. If I dedicated more time and learned how to table select better and became an expert I could probably only win 60% of the time. The first thing I did when I walked in was remind myself that I only win 55% of the time. I was hoping there would be a lot of loose players at night that just played to unwind after work. It was a Wednesday, so it wasn’t as good as it could be, but there were several loose players. I responded by playing tight.
I also told myself I wasn’t going to hide anymore. Hiding isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind. I just let everyone at the table know I played online, a lot of heads up. Poker is a game of manipulation. Most of the books and the podcasts say you should never let anyone in on the fact that you know how to play. That’s probably true for the most part, until you have reason to do otherwise. One of the things that drove me crazy when I went to San Manuel before was that everyone was trying to change seats all the time. Some change in hopes of increasing their luck and some change to get position on a bad player. When no one knew me they frequently sat to my left. I don’t want that because money has a tendency to flow clockwise in poker. It’s a game of position. If I have a decent aggressive player to my left, he’s going to put me in some tough spots. People always flocked to my left when I sit down. Last night they wanted to be on my right. I just said I played a lot of head’s up online, but now it’s for ridiculously small stakes. I complemented a guy on a good play, even though he lost the hand to me. It really was some textbook check raise the turn on a pair and a draw to the nut flush. The next hand he moved away from my left.
The reason why they don’t want to be on my left is because they realize when I come in I’m coming in for a raise. And when I come in for a raise I’m going to have a better than average hand—especially compared to the rest of the table. The guy that did the fancy correct play still lost a huge pot. If I play head’s up—You can bet that we will never chop. I miss head’s up. I play 95% of my hands when.
If it get’s down to the two of us pre-flop, we’re not splitting three bucks—it’s going to be mine the vast majority of the time and anything else that comes into the pot along with it. Just by subtly throwing that out there the aggressive regs didn’t want to be to my left. They knew that every time everyone folded they were going to have to face a raise and they have no idea what to do in that situation. They love to chop, it gets them excited. Why didn’t I think of this before? It made it much easier to win and I felt like the regs gave me more respect too. Sometimes it feels pretty good when people don’t want to sit next to you.

comme d’habitude

I’ve been doing a lot of reading these last few weeks or so. I came across something by Ayn Rand in some compilation book about comparing yourself to others in your career. She said it is not necessary to compare yourself to others, just do the best you can do. That was not the most eloquent way of paraphrasing, but you get the point. She used the career of a writer as an example. She said a writer should not choose to be a writer because he is the best writer in the world. A writer should choose to be a writer because he has something to say.
Queue epiphany sounding music.
Look at the cartoonish light bulb above my head.
By the way I chose to omit “he or she,” because I’m purposefully avoiding the androgynous form everyone uses nowadays. It’s just this idea I have, but I digress.
I’ve started writing some short stories, well I guess a single short story would be more accurate. I think the reason I never tried to publish anything was because I always thought I had to be the best god damned writer in the whole fucking world. The problem is I want to live a life with the least amount of regrets as possible. I find that I’m more prone to regret the things didn’t rather than the things I did do.
I used to read Henry Miller in high school and I had to look up a lot of the words he wrote. People always tell me I have this stellar vocabulary. Again, “stellar,” used by choice. Most of the words that people get so impressed by are words I learned from Henry Miller. I mispronounced a lot of them. For years I totally said voluminous and polysyllabic incorrectly. Now you can get the MP3 pronunciation on the internet—That’s so much better than Webster’s dictionary. There’s still shit in that book I don’t understand because some of it was written in French. I understood common terms like cul-de-sac, or c'est la vie, but I didn’t get things like “comme d’habitude.”
Having an extensive vocabulary is not as difficult as it seems. All you have to do is read books by authors that have great vocabularies. In high school I had to keep a dictionary besides me, but now we have the internet. Now, with the internet, the answers are at my fingertips. You can highlight a word on you kindle or kindle app and the definition automatically pops up. What could be easier?
Henry Miller wrote Tropic of Cancer in France. It was published in 1934. It would never have been published in the United States of America at that time.
It was deemed obscene until the supreme court deemed in not obscene in Miller Vs. California (1973). Rappers can say Mother Fucker because Miller dared to write “international cunt.” I can’t say international cunt. I’ve only used it in a sentence maybe one time before this. IT just doesn’t flow right for me. I can’t think of a possible practical application of this phrase in contemporary America. I can’t use the word quim. No one knows what that is anymore because no one uses the word quim. They say Va-J J. Everything is vanilla, people are too afraid to say what they are really thinking.
I don’t have to emulate James Joyce. I don’t even like James Joyce. I can just have something to say. Having something to say doesn’t mean you have to use words like somnambulist. I don’t have to write like Henry Miller. In fact, reading it again, I wouldn’t want to. Anti-Semitism is not cool.

I haven’t written a short story in years. I’ve been looking at it all wrong. I don’t have to have the biggest vocabulary or be the best writer. I just need to write well with my own purpose. I don’t need to find my own voice—I already have that. I just need to say what I have to say.