Perspective on the Beach
As has become customary for me in Mexico on Sunday evenings following a grueling 10-12 hour poker grind, I take my dog, Scout, for a long walk on the beach. It’s a nice chance to reflect and to reward him for tolerating a full day on cooped up inside an apartment. The loud, crashing waves are meditative. Tonight, an accident of unawareness on my part helped give me some perspective.
Today was my last day grinding online poker before I leave for a 12-night stay in the U.S. on Friday. There have been a lot of really great positives for me in Playa, but financial success has not been one of them. I have about half of the liquid net worth that I did when I arrived here over two months ago. I’ve been running decently badly, or to put it a better way, I haven’t been running really hot. Unfortunately, the approach I have to online poker requires that I run really hot in order to show any type of short-term success. It’s not like I’m dutifully grinding cash games 12 hours a day a la Kristen Bickell. I’m playing multi-table tournaments with an average field-size of 4,500 just two days a week. I estimate I’ve played around 400 tournaments in the time that I’ve been here. That might seem like a lot, but as any multi-table tournament player can tell you, it’s nothing. It’s perfectly within the range of expected outcomes that I could have failed to show a profit playing online thus far in Mexico. And unfortunately, that’s been the case.
So as I’m walking Scout on the beach feeling dejected from another disappointing Sunday grind (and it was perhaps the most disappointing one since I’ve been here), I start feeling a little tension in my chest. It wasn’t like a heart attack or anything, more like a sensation of resistance. I take a few more steps, and the feeling gets even stronger. It’s was like someone was pulling on my shirt from behind. But everywhere I looked, there was nothing to see. A couple more steps and I figured it out: I had walked into a fisherman’s line. About twenty feet behind me and positioned further away from the shoreline was a guy fishing. I was so caught up in breaking down the day of poker in my mind that I hadn’t noticed him.
I reversed course to untangle myself from the line and apologize to the man for not seeing him. As seems typical of the Mexican people, he was perfectly polite about it and smiled to let me know it was all good.
As I walked away, I noticed his fishing apparatus was a bit out of the ordinary. He was using just an empty plastic bottle with fishing line wrapped around it. To reel in the line, he was just repeatedly wrapping it around the bottle with his hand. No turn crank. No heavy action spinning reel. Just a plastic bottle and a piece of string.
It’s funny how life will sometimes whack you upside the head with a sense of perspective. Here I am walking along feeling sorry for myself because I lost more money playing a game on my computer from the comfort of my furnished beach condo and this guy is out at midnight with a bottle and a piece of string just hoping to catch some food.
Outside of feeling bad about having disrupted his fishing session, I’m glad I walked into his line. It was just what I needed at that moment. I spent the rest of the walk thinking about how good my life is and how absurdly lucky I am. My biggest problem in life is a dwindling bankroll for an online game I play that has enabled me to live on a tropical beach. Please don’t spare any tears for me.
I’ll be heading back to the U.S. in a few days with quite a bit less money than I had when I got into this country. And yet, the ten-week stint here feels basically like a success. The absence of good fortune in the online poker games can’t take away from the refreshing focus and balance I have cultivated in this beach village.
Summary of Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness, Socrates on Self-Confidence (Part 1)
I recently watched a very thought-provoking film titled Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness. The film sheds light on the philosophies of six of the great thinkers ever to have lived: Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Nietzche. It’s neat to explore the thoughts of these individuals through a nice video presentation rather than being tasked with actually having to read a philosophy book. I would recommend anyone, man or woman, child or adult, watch this film, especially if you’re anything like me who knows very little about philosophy.
Part of why I think this film fascinated me so much is that I was pretty estranged with a lot of the ideas presented within. In this fast-paced, technological culture, I’m guilty of never having sat down to read the thoughts of any great philosophers. It’s a shame too because while many of these men lived several centuries ago, their ideas about how we should approach life are timeless and often strikingly simple. I know for myself, and for probably a lot of other people too, there’s sometimes a tendency to shy away from philosophy thinking it will be too complicated and intellectually intimidating. What I’m learning is that the opposite is moreso the case. Philosophy is about cutting through the crap and providing some real answers to the challenges we face as people.
I’m going to dedicate a six-part blog series to breaking down some of the ideas presented by each philosopher in the film, if for no other reason than for my own benefit that I might actually remember some of the lessons I took from this film.
First up is Socrates and his wisdom on self-confidence.
Socrates believed that thinking logically about our lives might help us to be more self-certain and less affected by what other people think. People have a tendency to follow others, especially others that they perceive to be important. We tend to accept that these people must be right. This is precisely the assumption that Socrates encouraged people to question. His viewpoint was that it is more important to think logically about what persons of importance are saying than to accept what they are saying just because we perceive them to be important.
The film offers an easy example of how just because someone important said it doesn’t mean that it’s true: Bill Clinton staring America in the face and proclaiming that he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.
An interesting edge that Socrates had over an average person today is ease of access to influential people in civilization. In 400 B.C. Athens, Socrates was able to mingle with these people at the market. He was known for spending most of his time mingling among shop-keepers in Athens and approaching important people to ask them questions about life. Socrates wanted to see what these people were made of. His discovery was that there were surprising inadequacies surrounding the way these “important” people were choosing to live their lives. Their aura of confidence was not earned on account of having it all figured out.
Socrates did not believe that Athenian society should do everything his way. He was simply motivated to find the truth. He did this by challenging lazy assumptions which sometimes made others perceive him as a trouble-maker. But making trouble was not his objective at all. Unfortunately, he was put to death for his allegiance to the search for truth; he was found guilty of corrupting minds of the youth in Athens and not believing in the gods of the state.
Socrates felt that it was a responsibility of all men (and women) to scrutinize what they believe. He thought that we should all reflect on our lives and that we are all capable of doing so. He encouraged us to overcome laziness and fear in order to figure out what we really believe and then stand by those beliefs. He viewed philosophy as an invitation to intelligent non-conformity.
Socrates devised a test which one can use to determine if their opinions are worth standing up for. He suggested that anyone wishing to come up with a good thought should follow five steps in order to do so:
- Look for statements that most people would describe as plain ol’ common sense. Like, “marriage is an important part of happiness.”
- Try to find an exception to this statement. Is it possible to be completely happy without being married? Is there anyone whose life fits as an exception to this?
- If you can find an exception to the statement, then you know the statement is false or imprecise.
- Respond to the original statement with an exception you’ve found. “You can be miserable in a marriage if you’ve married the wrong person.”
- Continue searching for exceptions to the original statement. The truth is found in a statement that seems impossible to disprove.
Socrates believed that through this process we could come to gain confidence in our beliefs. By being able to logically explain our opposition to a statement, we’re less likely to become overwhelmed or intimidated when others disagree with us. This confidence to examine our lives and our beliefs is Socrates’ greatest contribution to mankind. He viewed philosophy as something an ordinary person could participate in. “An unexamined life is not worth living,” he famously said. Socrates brought philosophy out from behind the walls of a university and showed that it can exist on the street corner. He inspired us to live with our minds turned on at all times.
Yet while Socrates believed each person is capable of living an examined life, he knew that not everyone did in practice. To him, this meant that he couldn’t accept that every opinion was equally worth listening to. As such, he was a critic of democracy. Socrates did not believe that just because the majority supported an opinion that it was therefore right. The film suggests that Socrates would find it ridiculous that people of power allow focus groups to determine their course of action. He thought that decisions should be made based on the merits of the arguments in favor of that decision, not solely because a majority of people favor it. Looking back in history, there are of course numerous examples of what were then majority viewpoints that today seem preposterous (i.e. “it’s acceptable to own slaves”).
The painting The Death of Socrates, shown above, is now a famous symbol of someone standing up intelligently against the will of the majority. Even when facing death, Socrates did not lose his nerve. He believed any true philosopher should not fear death. He accepted the death sentence given by his peers believing that the right time had come for him to die. The painting depicts Socrates pointing to the heavens while reaching for the hemlock, delivered by a distraught disciple, he was ordered to drink to stop his heart. Plato is shown grieving at the end of the bed as his friend Crito clutches his leg.
Socrates chose not to flee Athens despite having an opportunity to do so. He was willing to go as far as to die for his beliefs to show the world that people have a capacity to develop their own beliefs and stand behind them confidently.
Checkpoint in Playa
Although I feel like I basically just arrived in Playa del Carmen, I’ve already reached a checkpoint where I have to decide to stay here longer or move on to something else. The lease agreement I have was only through December 27th. Unfortunately, I can’t extend my stay in this particular unit; it was already booked in January to someone who lives here regularly for a few months out of the year. So looming in the weeks ahead is the reality that I need to decide where I want to live into the first part of 2012.
The nice thing about having very few possessions is that it’s really not a big deal at all for me to move to another furnished vacation rental here. It’s really just a matter of packing up a couple of suitcases, grabbing my dog, and getting in a taxi. I have decided I’ll be doing just that. Things have been going fairly well for me here. It’s kind of ironic that I had to come to a Mexican beach vacation destination to find some stability and discipline in life. But after two months in Playa, I feel that the move has basically been a successful one thus far.
There are ways in which it could be easy for me to say that things haven’t gone well here. Financially, I’m only barely staying afloat. I have had a couple of decent scores in MTTs in the past few weeks to keep my head above water a while longer. My goal here is not to “just” be getting by, I would very much like to have some real, legitimate monetary success here and establish a much greater amount of financial security than I currently have. But accumulating money can be a slow process. Given the relative turmoil I felt like my life was in when I moved here, I can accept that the first couple of months have been “just okay” and not “great” from a financial standpoint.
I feel really good about some adjustments I’ve made to my poker game here and am confident that with a little luck and more work, there are financial breakthroughs that lie ahead for me. Then again, there is also the very real possibility of finding myself stuck in Mexico completely broke. Strangely enough, this daunting possibility does not keep me up at night as much as one might think it would. I almost have a zen-like peace with my situation here and a sense of faith that it will just work itself out somehow. Maybe that disposition is warranted, or maybe it’s just a defense mechanism to shield me from the terrifying prospect of being a broke, late-20s guy isolated in Mexico with no great answers about what to do with his life next.
I attribute my stable disposition amid the unstable nature of my life right now to a couple of things. First, I am doing a really good job of controlling the things I can actually control. I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of our lives are completely out of our control. As a poker player, this is hard to ignore. I can’t control Michael Carroll hitting a 3-outter against me for $500,000 in equity or any other of a number of brutal financial swings delivered by the turn of a playing card. All you can do as a poker player is to make the best decisions possible and accept that the outcome might not always be favorable.
There is so much about everyone’s lives, not just poker players, that are completely out of our control. You can’t control for natural disasters, freak accidents, the economy, or a great number of other things that determine the quality of your life. People don’t even really think about the fact that every single day you and your loved ones go to sleep in one piece is a tiny miracle. Every day, there are hundreds of people around the world who wake up thinking it will be just another day but never live to see the end of it. I’m not trying to be gratuitously morbid or dramatic here, I’m just pointing out the importance of realizing that so much of our highs and lows in life can be attributed to things outside of our abilities to control. The human life span is absurdly high-variance. I think it’s important to feel a sense of humility and gratitude for however good we have things and not fall into the trap of crediting oneself too much from an egotistical standpoint. So much of who we are was determined by random things we had very little control over.
There are really only a couple of things in life that we have more or less complete control over. One is our bodies. Assuming you are an able-bodied person to begin with, you basically have complete control over your weight and fitness level. I have been embracing this power of control and have been on a great diet and exercise routine in the two months since I’ve been here. It has really helped a lot with staying sane at a point in my life where it could be rather easy to “lose it”. I feel like no matter how chaotic or unsavory aspects of my life that are somewhat out of my control are, at the very least I should be able to manage looking good.
I’ve cut back on drinking immensely. I won’t lie, like basically anyone who has ever attended a four-year university, I like to drink. But outside of the temporary highs of imbibing are a lot of horrible downsides. Drinking is just downright terrible for mental and physical health. I think it should be viewed as something to do on a very rare occasion, like a treat to one’s self every once in a while as a reward for working hard and staying disciplined. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, myself included for several years, it gets used far more than this. It’s sort of amazing how much better one can feel when they stop putting bad things into their body and exercise rigorously on a daily basis. I feel like I’m just getting started and am both excited and curious to see how far I can push the machine that is my body. We all have one and it’s exciting to test its capabilities.
Another thing we have some degree of control over is the money we spend. I’ve been living somewhat like a pauper since arriving in Playa. Bad spending habits are almost a cornerstone to the poker player lifestyle. But I’m tired of splurging on an excessive lifestyle. It can be fun for a while, but at the end of the day I would like to eventually find my way to a place of financial stability and security before I get so old that my money-making potential has declined significantly. I think there’s a lot of truth to the saying, “youth is wasted on the young.” I feel like I’ve reached an important stage of my life where I am both old enough to understand that I’m not going to live forever and that energy is a finite resource yet young enough to still have plenty of energy and capability for seeking abundant wealth. I don’t feel like I need tens of millions to be satisfied. That just seems kind of extreme. But a few hundred thousand to take off the pressure of feeling like I must constantly be generating some type of a cash flow would be pretty awesome. Ironically, I think people are much more capable of generating great wealth when they are not burdened with the pressures of needing money.
In the interest of living more frugally, the rent for my next apartment will be about 30% less than my current dwelling. Thankfully, I’m not really giving up a whole lot to make this cut; I’m just getting ripped off a little in my current pad. Since moving here and learning a few things about Playa rent prices, I’ve realized that I’m being charged the premium, retail price for my current unit. I could probably be paying 15-20% less for living in this exact place, and even less when you factor in all of the money I lose on transactions and currency conversions to settle with my landlord. Getting nickel and dimed every time you want to move a dollar in one account to a peso in another is definitely one of the major lackluster aspects of the poker exile lifestyle, but this entry is getting long so I’ll save that whining for another day.
In conclusion, I’ve decided to stay in Playa a while longer, at least into the early part of 2012. I’m not certain what the future holds, but things are going well enough for me here at the present time that I want to stick around until no longer doing so makes more sense.
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If you’re stuck in the U.S. wishing you could still grind online, pay a visit to DraftDay, a daily fantasy sports website started by the CardRunners people. I might make a buck if you click that link and become a customer of their site, so if you don’t want that to happen, just enter DraftDay.com directly in your browser.
Poker Adjustments
I feel like I’ve made a few adjustments to my game since arriving in Mexico. Being that this is, after all, a poker blog, I thought it might be interesting to detail some of these adjustments.
1. Fewer tables
I started registering for fewer events on Sundays. Since I’m also trying to give a pittance of attention to what’s happening with NFL action on Sundays, I have to be careful about registering for too many events. I noticed that when I have 12+ tables running, I start to feel overwhelmed and frustrated. I feel like the action happens so quickly that I have to make really hasty decisions. So what happens is I start folding like a maniac and passing up on marginal +EV situations just so I don’t have to deal with making more complicated decisions while I have a bunch of tables running. Basically, I feel much better off overall just playing 8-10 tables and playing them well than trying to play every tournament under the sun. I stopped registering for the least interesting ~20% or so of tournaments that I had been registering for previously. The adjustment has made the experience of grinding a lot more pleasurable overall, and I don’t think I had to give up much EV to do it. If anything, I might have gained a little EV.
2. Less urgency with 15 bb stack
I used to treat a 15 big blind stack about like I’d treat a 10 big blind stack. In other words, if it would fold to me in the cut-off and I had Queen-Ten offsuit, it didn’t matter if I had 10 or 15 big blinds, I was just going to shove that hand. Now, I’m starting to treat the two stacks a bit differently. I have a greater willingness to raise-fold with a stack of 15 big blinds. Most of the structures in online tournaments are so good these days that you really don’t need the huge sense of urgency with a 15 big blind stack like you used to back in 2005 or whatever. Over the years, open-shoving a 15 big blind stack has gradually become less and less of a +EV move due to players understanding that they can call with more than just the top 5% of hands. I’m adjusting by being a little more patient with this stack and realizing that I don’t need to be jamming it in there with Ace-Six suited in middle position. I can just fold and hope for a better spot. Hopefully this increasing willingness to be patient will lead to more frequent deep runs.
3. Three-betting more
Three-betting is really awesome when the stacks are deep. I feel like I missed out on a lot of EV over the years by being too much of a nit when it comes to three-betting. I now three-bet all the time in the early stages of the tournament with hands where I have that, “uhh… what should I do?!” moment with. Now, my answer is just, “three-bet!” Of course, I’m three-betting the premium hands too for value. A good example would be during like 15/30 in an event where the stacks are 3,000. Say someone in middle position opens to 90 and I have King-Queen suited in the cut-off. Years ago, I would have just flat-called here almost always, but now I’d probably re-raise to something like 240. I’ve been three-betting just as frequently in the later stages of the tournament provided the stacks are like 40 big blinds or higher. I think you need to narrow your three-betting range a lot when the stacks are smaller than this.
4. More patience at final tables
I think I’ve spewed a lot of EV over the years by playing too impatiently at final tables. I used to get this mentality at the final table where I felt like there was some huge urgency to win and that I need to do it rightnow. This lead to trying to do too much and spewing off chips in certain spots. Now, I’m playing much more relaxed at final tables and picking spots more wisely. Again, the structure is so good in most online tournaments now that when you reach the final table you can expect the event to still be another couple of hours away from completion. There’s really no rush. I’ve found that if I just take my time and let the action unfold at its natural pace that I’ll be just fine. There’s no sense in trying to rush things.
5. Fewer cash games
When I moved to Mexico, I envisioned that I would grind cash games for ~20 hours or so per week. In the past three weeks, I think I’ve played a total of about 2 hours of cash games. Basically, I hate cash games. They’re boring and a total grind. I don’t like sitting down for a session without there being a possibility that I can win at least $5k on the day. I’m the first to admit that I’m an action junkie. I can’t handle the boredom of grinding cash games. They’re not for me. I get too impatient and try to force the action which leads to spewing EV. I think the only way I could really be a cash-game grinder is if I had some sick dual-monitor set-up where I could play 16 tables at once and just be a total rakeback whore folding mostly at every table. At least with that many tables going, there’s enough action at all times to cut down on the cash game boredom factor. Another issue here is that I’m just not that good at cash games (read: poker). I think I play as well as anyone on the 95% of decisions that are the easiest, but for those 5% of decisions that are the hardest, I think really strong, experienced players have a pretty big edge over me in a deep-stacked cash game setting. Most online cash games are stacked with experienced grinders nowadays. I guess between feeling like I don’t have a huge edge and generally being bored with them, I’d rather just do something else with my time.
