Well, it's been officially five weeks since my last blog entry, which means I owe five people an hour of coaching each (you suck Benji2813, RoughPokers, RodeoBlue, WC18, and Effneasy). PM me to redeem your coaching.

This blog post is both important and very unique, because in it I complain about losing and also convey resentment toward poker. Also, it is unnecessarily long. Nothing like it has ever been done before, so please prepare your brain for high impact novelty.

Well, since I last updated, a lot of shit has gone down - mostly me gaining back momentum, getting on a run, and then getting bludgeoned over and over. I finally was back on a roll until yesterday I played Isildur1 at 50/100 NL and 100/200 PLO, losing about 500k to him. I ran 400k under EV. I ran really, really bad. This is by far the worst losing day I've ever had in my life, and I've never felt as much shock in my body as I felt during that match. It felt like I had just gone through a car crash. It bore down on me like an enormous mental weight, my body felt weak and tired, and my mind was too cloudy to couldn't think of anything beyond the hands I was playing. I've never reacted that way to poker before. These last few months have been unfriendly, but yesterday the poker gods stretched my mouth wide open and took a huge and inglorious shit straight down my gullet.

So, since I'm a wannabe pseudo-intellectual, of course I have to rationalize this series of events. Poker sucks. I can't run good. Randomness, variance simulations, survivorship bias, the people who tell the stories about poker are the people who've run good enough to seem to be worth listening to, blah blah blah. I want to write about that shit but who cares. Fuck that, fuck me. This is what I signed up for. Of all the hundreds of thousands of grinders who have tried to climb the mountain of poker, most of them have felt this moment before. Not everybody wins at poker, and for some the mountain is insurmountable.

I feel like it's unfair. I look at the people around me who run good, who are rewarded for their efforts, for whom the good run and bad run come in equal shares, for whom their luck gives them room to breathe and remember the direction in which they're climbing. I resent poker for pushing upon me this bad luck, even though I know the randomness must exist. I've seen the simulations, I've read the posts, I've even meditated on the idea countless times to myself. I've always known that if poker wanted to bury me, it could bury me so deep that I could never get out. I acknowledged the God of poker, and I've feared it, I have loved it. But I still put in my time. I still put in the hours playing, the hours studying, the hours coaching, the hours getting coached. I've done my share. I have been faithful, I have loved, and I have feared. I feel like it's unfair.

This is what I feel.

But nevertheless, here I am. Buried. Buried so deep that I'd have to be the son of fucking God himself to get unburied. So since I am here in my grave, the only true way to unbury myself is to realize that there is no such thing as a grave unless one chooses to call it a grave. Where I am now is not a grave, nor is it above ground or anything in between. Where I am is where I am, it is my moment. From here, I begin to rebuild and reformulate. This is all there is. It's time to start over. As much as I would like to think I am buried - as much as clinging to that idea makes me feel like what I have done in my past life defines me - I am not buried. I am here, I am alive; my hands and feet are alive. So I will climb.

That's all I'm going to write in regards to that. Writing only does so much. I need to reset my mindset and reconstruct my narrative, and although writing can make it sound definite, it doesn't make it a part of my psyche. I guess what it'll take is time and work. Since this is a pretty emotionally shitty time for me, I'm going to mention a few things in regards to my blog and some other stuff I've put out. For one, I think it's about time that I acknowledge that I'm not really that committed to this blog as far as updating it every week, and as such it doesn't make that much sense for me to keep up with this silly contest. Right now I have a lot of other concerns in my life, poker included, that maintaining this blog or thinking up novel material for it is not really a priority for me. I'm going to, at least for now, rescind this free coaching deal. It's really always been more of a mental gadfly than a genuine motivator, so I think I need to stop pretending that this sort of thing works.

Also, the deal that I offered here and on 2p2 about shipping $200 to every person who catches me complaining is also rescinded. It was kind of the same way. It didn't really work as a motivator, if anything it just made me more tilted from all of the people PMing me all the time in regards to it, trying to catch every little thing I said in chat.

Anyway, that's all for now. I'm not sure when the next time I update will be, but I'll try to make it pretty soon. But obviously right now I need to spend some time regrouping and picking up the pieces.


Until next time,
Haseeb

P.S. This post is not a busto declaration, just means no nosebleeds for a while. For a long while, probably.

P.S.S. Oh, and fuck anyone who says poker isn't a tough job.

P.S.S.S. lolbusto