The idea of tact comes in handy sometimes as a poker player. We might want to yell and scream at someone for their horrid play that won them a pot versus us, but most of the time doing so yields no positives and may possibly result in negative ramifications (such as the fish leaving the game). Conversely, against the right person, it may lead to them gunning for us and trying to bluff us constantly, or even a Heads-Up freeze out, so, there are positives as well to speaking what comes to our mind as it comes.


I wonder in life, if you had to choose between the two relative extremes of practicing tact and taking the high road almost always, maybe not always saying exactly what is on your mind but also never hurting someone over what you do say; versus being someone who always speaks without regard for the consequences and truly does say what's on their mind, exactly how they think it, which would you choose? Clearly, the ideal response is to fall somewhere in the middle, since there are situations where it's best to simply let it go and tactfully say nothing or sugar coat what you do say, but likewise, there are other situations in life where be it for yourself, or for others, speaking your mind exactly as it is will ultimately be the best even if it is sometimes going to be hurtful. If you can't fall somewhere in between, however, and had to choose more or less always being one or the other, which would it be?


I'm pretty sure in my life I've erred on the side of tact -- sometimes this helps me avoid drama and is a handy and convenient way around situations and keeping everyone happy, sometimes it leaves me sacrificing the bulk of my own feelings at he expense of sparing others' their feelings. I'm not sure of this is a better or worse alternative to being the person who always says it as it is -- which is at the least, less of a passive aggressive approach!


If you had to pick one of the extremes to be which is the better choice overall? I'm not yet sure which I'd choose if I was forced to pick one or the other.




Poker has been going so-so. I think the past week or so I've been a little bored by it, so I haven't been playing as much as I maybe should be. This'll change whenever I get out to LA, which by the way, is a funny/dumb little story:

By the end of Tuesday I thought I had maybe gotten enough real-estate related things done to where I could make a Wednesday-Sunday type trip to LA. So around 11pm Tues night, after talking to a friend to make sure they could come watch after Murray, I booked a flight to California at 8:00am Wednesday. Got myself ready to go, went to bed at 2:30am, set my alarm for 5:30am. So then 5:30 rolls around, the alarm goes off, and I wake up and just get this beyond terrible feeling inside of me like, "this is going to be a super terrible trip, awful idea, don't go, bad stuff is going to happen." Like, we're practically talking genuinely feeling like my plane is going to crash type bad feelings (I'm not at ALL scared of flying and never have been scared...especially after flying hundreds of flights). I laid in bed 5 more minutes debating if I should go or not, especially after having booked and paid for the flight, and then decide that ultimately it's a bad idea to head out there for 3-4 days of live high stakes poker if I'm going there expecting the worst. I'm already a generally intuition-based player when I play, I don't think my mind is going to be in the best place for relying on those intuitions if my intuition is already telling me to stay home. So I stayed in bed, and went back to sleep. I'll get out there soon enough and crush some clowns.