It's been a while since my last blog, and much has changed.

Life is good, spent a couple months in Vegas meeting people and doing various fun things: going out to eat, clubs, shows (saw blue man group!), etc. A couple blunders happened, unfortunate bellagio incident and managed to get 25 ppl kicked out of Surrender via pissing off the balcony (woops). Breaking new: Stupid decisions and alcohol correlate strongly! On the whole though I had lots of fun and expanded boundaries immensely.

Lately I've been focusing on adopting a specific frame of mind... We as humans have the potential to choose our response (to some extent) towards any stimuli, and some responses have higher expectation in life than others. Most people, including myself some times, have the inclination to focus on the aspects of the events in our lives that we don't like and can't change, for example: we resent the fact that we lost X money today and think about how much it sucks, we hate that dipshit just hit his 2 pair in a spot where he would have stacked off regardless, etc. Things like this, complaining and wallowing in self pity have very low life expectation, and are almost the worst response. A much more +EV response would be to think of the good things of the scenario, to think of a better future and of what one can do to learn from the unfortunate scenario such that that better future can become reality.

This example references just one of many areas in which realistic, positive thought can and should be applied over negative thought. It happens that thinking positive thoughts propagates more positive thoughts, and likewise the same goes for negative thought... If we continuously choose to think positively, not only will external world circumstances improve because the expectation of such thoughts are high, but out internal world will improve also. Good habits will form, and our outlook on life will be higher--we will become happier. Thinking realistic, positive thought is clearly the winning play.

I've been doing research on this, and it also has helped me answer the question: "Why am I so successful at poker?" The detailed answer to this is long, but in short because of an amalgamation of traits (I'll talk about in future blogs) and a decent amount of subtle luck. One such incident in luck was that I intuitively had the right mindset a long time ago regarding poker: Once upon a time I had no success, and I only seemed to ever lose when I played poker. I remember people thought I was stupid for playing, one person even implied to me that I was wasting my money playing this game (in almost those words). At some moments I even thought winning was hopeless... But from what I read in poker literature, all my current loses meant nothing in the grand scheme of things (realistic positive). And I was not interested in short term success--I truly believed that I could win (positive thought) if I applied logic and work (realistic thought) eventually my efforts would be availed. It took me nine fucking months of playing poker to even turn a profit, but could anyone say that I was wrong now? My realistic, positive attitude didn't pay off immediately, but now, a few years later, I have touched the sky.

Regarding the durrrr challenge, It's going down.