...an ace that I could keep.

Here it is - the last of the last. It's the touchy-feely part. Everyone hold hands, and join me in singing Kum-Ba-Yah. I'll solo the "Someone's crying" verse.

Seriously though…it seems as the most commonly asked question is if I enjoyed the experience. The answer is "mostly, no". The poker part, I did not enjoy at all. It was frustrating and demoralizing. And since poker was the entire reason for the trip, it made things miserable for the most part. However, I wouldn't say I was in agony, despite some posts that would imply otherwise. Before I left for Vegas, I checked out some other poker blogs and found that the ones I enjoyed most were the ones that talked about other aspects of life in addition to poker. There was one in particular that many other bloggers were talking about, and this blogger was describing, over a series of posts, an agonizing divorce from his wife. Based on the reactions of other bloggers, and the comments on the divorcee's blog, I saw that other people felt the same way as I did - that real, honest, and heartfelt reporting was interesting. So I decided to do my best to put it all out there, good or bad. Since it's unusual for a guy to be open about doubt, frustration, and similar feelings, it may have seemed like things were worse than they were. But I don't think I felt much differently than most guys would have in my position - it just wasn't filtered by machismo.

Perhaps a better question is, “Are you glad you did it?” The answer to that is definitely “yes”. My main goal was to see what it felt like to be a poker pro. To me, that existence would encompass a spectrum of two general states – running good, and running bad. Unfortunately, I did not go through the “running good” version, so I may never know what it feels like to “have to” play poker every day, while you are being successful. But I did get a feeling for the other part. And I can say with some authority, "Yuck." It was very difficult for me on a personal level, and it was difficult to get online and write about it for most of my friends, family, and even a few strangers. Still, I cannot imagine what it would feel like if the audience was comprised of your wife and children, and your winnings were needed to provide for their food and shelter. Talk about immense and relentless pressure.

As for all of the non-poker related aspects of the trip, I can’t imagine them being more enjoyable than they were. I was fortunate enough to have a long list (for me, anyway) of visitors, and people to visit with. Also, I will never forget the support, encouragement, emails, phone calls, care packages etc. sent my way by so many of you – that was incredible, it meant a lot, and it really, really helped.

Also, the whole experience of blogging has been remarkable. As you may have guessed, I like to write. It’s been gratifying to read your positive responses and hear that the work I’ve put into this has been appreciated. The posts and the comments were a major aspect of my “social life” and helped me feel connected to the real world. I have little doubt that I will be blogging again someday. In fact, one idea I’ve been tossing around is making a movie…camcorder quality, with ambitions of kitschy humor. I’m thinking along the lines of a zombie-based musical love story, but who knows? Anyway, the process of making a movie would surely make for an interesting blog, and the online community might also make some contributions. If you would be interested in following along with such an endeavor and I don’t already have your email address, send it to me.

------------------------------------------

So my dad called the other night and wanted to get a summary of the trip. I told him what I thought. And then, I got to hear what he thought.

Now, you should understand that my family is, by today’s standards, rather firmly on the conservative side. I suppose I should clarify; my parents have certainly had their progressive streaks, but these forays into the “wild side” were always more along the lines of vegetarian diets, geodesic domes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_dome) and the like. That is to say, their adventuresome endeavors were related to the methods by which someone might live their life, but not the morality. The latter was always dictated by their devout belief in the Catholic faith.

That morality, combined with my father’s intellect, makes him an interesting person to talk with. He has the ability to arrive at his own conclusions, and not just select one from those that are presented to him. He also prefers to guide his opinions and actions with his strict principles and religious beliefs, neither of which change based on the circumstance or the audience. I admire his convictions and value his opinion, and over the last few years he’s given me several things to think about that I doubt I could have gotten anywhere else.



Up until a couple of nights ago, he’d never really said anything against poker. He’d listened to me talk about it on more than a few occasions, but had remained neutral. Of course, neutrality would have been the most favorable stance I could have expected him to take on such a subject. Yet I suspected there was always some amount of distaste; it just hadn’t been brought up.

Earlier this week, it finally did come out. The first part had to do with the nature of poker’s competition. He likened it to a bunch of little boys playing king of the hill, where the only way to be the victor is to step on everyone else on your way to the top. He brings up a good point. Most of the time, I don’t feel badly about this. But there have been occasions on which I was not sure about the ease with which my opponents could part with the money they were losing. And I can think of several players at the Hustler who I am sure are losing thousands of dollars a year, and they don’t look particularly well-to-do. The one that immediately comes to mind plays poorly and also loses his temper regularly (Mat, you will remember him as the gentleman who bizarrely refused to push his chips into the pot, after an all-in where I had aces full of twos, because he hadn’t heard me say “Call”). Anyway, if there were a true or false test with “That guy is a gambling addict” as one of the questions, I’d have to mark down a T. So yeah, there are times, when I’m winning, that I feel like I might be taking money from someone that needs it a lot more than I, and/or someone that can’t control themselves. And even if that’s not the case, it is always a game where in order for me to succeed, someone else must fail. That is why comraderie at a poker table, if it’s even real, is probably the shallowest of all. Everyone there is against you, and you’re against everyone else. For this reason, I don’t like playing for real money against my friends. Lose or win, I don’t feel good about it. Well, OK…lose, I don’t feel good about it. Ha!

That sort of feeds into my dad's subsequent suggestion. He talked briefly about a man who organized a softball team for some kids (or something like that) and said that I’d likely get more enjoyment, and be more fulfilled, doing something philanthropic – something that was good for people other than just myself. Again, I must agree. After so many evenings spent at a poker table, I can’t say I’ve ever walked away feeling fulfilled in a spiritual sense. In fact, it is really difficult for me to pinpoint exactly why I play. I do love competition, especially that which requires strategy, ingenuity, and mental toughness. I am sure that is a major reason why I go – to exercise these skills, and to test them against like-minded people. The other primary motivator is, without a doubt, money. It was really a strange thing last year, to discover that I could walk into a casino on any given evening and expect to walk out a few hours later with several hundred dollars more in my pocket. I wasn’t dating anyone then, and I had a lot of free time, so I went quite often…often enough, in fact, to make people allude to addiction.

But I digress. The point my father was trying to make is that there are certainly better ways to spend my time. When I told Amy about this, she initially thought of it as possible criticism, but I am sure that’s not what it was. My dad was trying to get me to think about other things, because he believed it would be better for me, and better for the people around me. And I go back to one of my first posts again – the one where my plan was being questioned, before I even left. I appreciate when people tell me what they really feel, if they are doing it in the spirit of guiding me towards what they believe is a better path.

Well, I’m not giving up poker. In fact, among my other silly ideas is a quest to some day get into the World Series of Poker main event, via one of these online satellite tournaments. I figure I would allocate a maximum of $1000 annually towards such a goal, and I’ll probably try at least a few this year. However, in regards to more wholesome activities, I was able to tell my father that Amy and I have settled on a goal of 72 hours (apiece) of charity work for this year. We’d set this goal in mid-January, and done one or two activities before I left for Vegas. Now that I’ve returned to Los Angeles, we will be picking up where we left off. The obvious joke here is that I should volunteer to help out the Gamblers Anonymous organization…etc. etc. Too easy! Anyway, hopefully the good deeds will balance out any negatives from poker, so I won't slide into the karmic abyss. Purgatory, here I come!

Oooh - I just had a scary thought. I bet all they play in Purgatory is $2-$4 limit. Aaaaauuuuggghhhh!!! That would drive me crazy!

Well folks, what do you say? One more Hand of the Day, for old times’ sake? Why not?

HAND OF THE DAY:
------------------

(I'm going to ignore the hand in today's lunchtime tourney, in which I had Mary Kate dominated and all-in pre-flop (AK vs. KQ) and she sucked out a straight to cripple me. She'd told me she was going to do this on Wednesday. You've heard it all before...I made the mistake of going in with the best hand).

So let's go back in time, about 6 months. The reason this hand of the day is so interesting is that it supports my contention that, no matter how well you play, someone with no clue can come along and bust you. Since that is my excuse for the last five weeks, let me give you an extreme example. Due to the length of time, and especially the fact that I was not in the hand, I am fuzzy on the cards and details, but the essence of the hand is as written.

I was back in Virginia over the Thanksgiving holiday and staying with my sister (Kristy) and her husband (Babak). Babak is an enthusiastic and skilled card player (poker and other games), and he knew I’d been hitting the Hustler and winning. I’m pretty sure he’d been dying for a shot at the title, a la the fight scene at the end of Lethal Weapon (me being Mel Gibson, the titleholder, of course). Kristy wanted in on the action too, just to see what the fuss was all about with this poker thing. So we agreed to hold a three-person, no-limit Texas hold ‘em tourney in the kitchen.

The difficult part was determining the stakes. My conscience prevented me from making it monetary, but as I well knew, playing poker without meaningful stakes is like driving to North Dakota; it takes a lot of time, and there's really no point to it. So we had to come up with a strong, non-monetary incentive. Finally, I suggested that whoever lost the tournament would be required to sing Kenny Rogers’ tune “The Gambler” the next day, in front of the whole family, at Thanksgiving dinner. Babak and Kristy agreed, and it was on. Was it ever on!!

It soon became apparent that Kristy was the player to avoid. She played without remorse, without thought, and completely without fear. In retrospect, the tourney buy-in for Babak and me was a heck of a lot higher than it was for her. First of all, she’s a decent singer, and used to being a center of attention during musical performances. Second, her losing a tournament against the Twin Towers of Poker Ego would not be humiliating in the least; she would be expected to lose. For Babak and me, however, the prospect of losing to a sister, wife, or in-law is only slightly preferred to death, and death itself is slightly preferred to the prospect of singing "The Gambler" to a Thanksgiving dinner audience.

So we battled for a while, and Kristy had taken a decent chip lead. I was hanging in there with roughly the same amount I started with, and Babak was feeling the pressure with the short stack. So he fires out with a significant pre-flop raise. I forget the exact amount, but I’m going to put it at about 1/5 of his stack. This was a significant amount, and Kristy called. I folded, glad to be out of the hand.

Flop, I believe, was AKx, or something like that. Babak bets heavily again, and Kristy calls.

Turn – another A. Babak now goes all in, and Kristy calls.

Now Kristy turns over her hand and shows that she has absolutely nothing – no pair, no realistic draw, nothing. It was something like Q high or J high. Surely, there is no way she is going to win the hand…until Babak flips over his cards to show something like 6-2, with no pair either. Ha! I was dying laughing. He was bluffing like crazy against someone that didn’t know they were supposed to lay down their hand. It was even funnier when Kristy revealed that she had called because when she saw the pair of aces on the board on the turn, she had somehow interpreted that as meaning she alone was the beneficiary of that pair. To this day I am confused as to what her exact thought process was, but the end result (me not singing at Thanksgiving dinner) was pretty sweet. Just like that, I had yet another thing to be thankful for! For the record, Babak lived up to his end of the bargain.

Thanks also to all of you who have been with me throughout this journey. It’s been fun playing and writing, with you and for you. Hopefully, there’s an ace you can keep in here somewhere.

Play well, everyone!

...I found...

No self-respecting Grand Finale would be complete without at least a few compilation lists - Best Of, Worst Of, etc. So here we go.

---------------------------------------------

Vegas visitors/guests:
Mike Chang and two buddies
Chris, Kerry, Kerry’s mom
Amy
Joe and Eileen K.
Heather, Nikki, Sara
Frank P.
Cecile and Bryant
Scott and Aimee
Dave, Mat, Jeff

I hope I didn't forget anyone!

---------------------------------------------

Song guessers:

Chuy (7):
Heartache Tonight (Eagles)
Voodoo (Godsmack)
Dream On (Aerosmith)
Death in Vegas (Dead Elvis)
Like Suicide (Soundgarden)
Coming Undone (Korn)
Train of Consequences (Megadeth)

Rob M. (4)
Patience (Guns & Roses)
Piranha (Lord Tracy)
I’ll Be There For You (Rembrandts)
King Of Pain (The Police)

Lan Whu (4):
Question of Balance (Moody Blues) *
Domination (Pantera) *
It Makes Me Ill (N’Sync) *
Rapper’s Delight (Sugarhill Gang) *

Jeff L. (3):
Ace of Spades (Motorhead)
All Apologies (Nirvana)
Mark Snow (X-Files music director)

Amy (2):
Back In Black (AC/DC)
Loser (Beck)

Limber Lips (2):
The True Man’s Poker Epic (“name that show” post)
The Gambler (Kenny Rogers)

Jim S. (2):
Cigarettes and Alcohol (Oasis)*
Superstitious (Stevie Wonder)

Scott M. (1)
Los Angeles (Frank Black)

Joe M. (1):
Enter Sandman (Metallica)

Jeff C. (1):
“that's a monster of a tell” (Godzilla caption contest)

No one:
Use Your Fist, Not Your Mouth (Marilyn Manson)
Take The Power Back (Rage Against the Machine)
“There is no other way” (quote from White Zombie movie)
All Or Nothing (Whitesnake)
Just Walk Away (??? This was Cecile’s song quote)
The Illusion of Power (Black Sabbath)
Self Destruction, Part 2 (Nine Inch Nails)
Rootin’ Tootin’ Cowboy (unknown)
Punish Me (Rammstein)

* Songs marked with an asterisk were found using illegal Internet searches - or at least, people who admitted they were using Internet searches at some point. They claimed to be unaware of the rule at the time, but frankly, I don't trust anyone who's involved in a poker blog in any way. Ha!

---------------------------------------------

Things I hope to never see and/or experience again:

1. Having blood come out every time I blow my nose for 5 weeks straight (the air in Vegas is really dry).
2. Losing with pocket aces.
3. The “My Sharona” house/techno mashup tune they played every half an hour or so at the bar next to the poker area at the MGM Grand.
4. Smelling smoke as I walk into the place I live every day.
5. Removable hand-held shower heads, heavy and with metal protrusions, perched upon the most precarious of supports, such that the slightest touch could very well send it crashing down upon the top of your foot, resulting in a bloody, painful mess.
6. The “Men: The Show” promo flyer so thoughtfully given to me by Sara (one of my cousin’s friends). **
7. Mat Lew’s voice in the morning.
8. The food at the “best Thai restaurant in the country”, Lotus of Siam in Las Vegas. I give it a D+.
9. The AC/DC – Guns& Roses mashup tune they played every other half hour or so at the bar next to the poker area at the MGM Grand.

** This flyer was responsible for a pretty embarrassing moment. A week before I left, my landlady brought by a potential new tenant to show him the place. I had cleaned things up rather nicely that morning, but had completely forgotten about that flyer. It proudly bore a brace of bare-chested beefcakes, and was prominently displayed on the refrigerator. Of course, it was only as they were walking in the door that I noticed it and hurriedly took it down. A few minutes later I found out the guy was coming to Las Vegas to be a vocalist/entertainer, so I put it back up (ha – just kidding).

---------------------------------------------

Worst misspelling of my name, which in full is “Jerald Eric DeMars”:
Erec Gckars, Jerac (Wynn hotel – on a food receipt)

---------------------------------------------

Best money-making opportunities in Vegas:

$2-$4 limit hold ‘em at Binion’s. I played for one round (approximately 20 minutes), with the intent of playing at the birthplace of the World Series of Poker, and also impressing the girlfriend. Pulled in $37 for an hourly rate of about $111.

Star Wars penny slots – a $1 investment was increased by 100% in about a minute, for a $60/hour expectation.

Bettting against whatever my former co-worker Mike Chang is betting on in basketball – approximately $150/hour rate. Meeting with Mike and his buddies after Day 1 of their March Madness trip, I found out that he was 1 for 9 on his wagers to that point. Never one to pass up a good deal, I offered to bet $5 against him on whatever his next wager was. I’d say the entire transaction required less than two minutes. Easiest money in Vegas, baby.

And in his final words...

This is more difficult than I would have guessed. I’ve got a whole bunch of things I want to address in this, the final post, but I lack a coherent thread with which to tie it all together. There’s just too much, and it’s too varied. Really, what I should do is separate the various ideas into separate posts, and I may end up doing that before this is all over.

(NOTE: I did break it up. This first part will be almost all analysis, so if you aren't particularly interested in the wherefores and whys of just the poker, wait for the next two installments.)

In order to gauge the success of my experiment of living in Las Vegas as a professional poker player, let’s first re-visit the goals, as stated in the very first post:

1. To experience what life is like for a professional poker player
2. Improve my skill as a player
3. Make money
4. Document the experience on a daily basis via the blog

Goals 1-3 above are general, so I also had two more specific goals that I felt, if achieved, would imply that I had been successful in the others:

5. Play for 200 hours (40 hours/week for 5 weeks)
6. Make $10,000 ($50/hour for 200 hours)

OK, so let’s look first at the cold, hard truth of the numbers. Actual results are:

Total time played: 155.5 hours
Net gain/(loss): (-$1851)
Net hourly rate: -$11.90

As I look at these results vs. the stated goals, it occurs to me that the results are a teensy bit off of the goals. I can see where some people would say, “You know, I’m not sure, but I don’t think you got there.” These same people might follow that up with “I’ve got a home game coming up this Friday – would you like to come?”

The one that’s easy to explain away is the total time played; 155.5 hours vs. the goal of 200 hours. I would have been able to play more hours (and would have wanted to play more hours) if I was being successful. However, the losses prevented this in two ways, not counting the psychological impact. First, my frequent bust-outs would force me to leave the casinos before I wanted on many nights; my allotted bankroll for the evening would be gone. Second, the losses eventually caused me to reduce my allotted daily bankrolls, leading to situations where after busting out with a single buy-in, I would leave. Therefore, I do not feel as if the 155.5 hours played is a “failure” to meet a goal, exactly. I would have considered it a failure if things had been going well financially, and I had not made the 200-hour goal. I feel that reducing my daily bankrolls due to my poor results, dwindling “main” bankroll, and horrible state of mind, was in keeping with the overall goal to live as a pro – I believe a disciplined pro would do the same thing. This is somewhat at odds with previous statements I have made about a disciplined pro being able to ignore bad beats and continue to play at a high level, but that was meant more in terms of a single session, not a protracted losing streak.

As for the loss of $1851 and hourly rate of -$11.90, that is much tougher to analyze. In a game as complex and demanding as poker, there rarely is a single reason that you can point to as the cause of failure (or success, for that matter). My belief is that the discrepancy between my goals and my results was caused by a combination of the following, which I’ve ordered in my opinion of their importance:

- A disproportionately large number of bad beats (a.k.a. “running bad”)
- Competition that was tougher than anticipated
- Attempting to evolve my playing style (i.e. more aggressive, acting on reads)
- Poor state of mind
- Missing the majority of my monster drawing hands
- Not finding that little old lady with the pension fund to bail me out
- Erroneous Rockie horoscopes emailed to me by Amy

It seems impossible for me to say, with any certainty, how much my results were affected by each of the above. I’m probably too close to the situation to objectively assess it. And I know that one of the hallmarks of losing players is to blame their results on bad beats (conveniently ignoring their poor play, and the bad beats that they put on other people). So even as I believe deep in my heart that bad beats are the single biggest reasons for my losses, I am aware of how it could be perceived by the public, and aware that I also might be fooling myself. You never know.

However, I point to two things that lend credence to my belief. The first is my history as a poker player. The year prior to my Vegas trip, I had played for over 300 hours and made over $15,000. So I feel like I have a pretty decent idea about how the cards should fall. Sometimes they bite you, but overall they don’t if you play a tight game. Of course, I have read and heard many times about running bad for weeks and months, so I knew it could happen, and more importantly, I knew it could happen to anyone, regardless of their play. Given all of that, it is important to realize that a person can play very good poker and still hit a stretch where they get destroyed, and this stretch can last for an extended time.

The other thing that supports (or at least, does not discredit) my position is the data I’ve logged. Every time I played, I recorded the day of week, and how I did hour by hour, among other things. My goal was to see if some days of the week were better than others to play, and likewise with the time of day. I expected a sinusoidal flow to both – peaks around Friday and Saturday with troughs around Tuesday and Wednesday, and peaks/troughs in the time of day as well (although I had no solid ideas about when those would be).

However, my data shows none of that, for either aspect. Now, I am not well-versed in statistical analysis, so I may be missing something. Still, it appears to me that my hourly rates have absolutely no correlation to either the day of week, or time of day. I invite anyone who cares to do so to analyze my results themselves and comment, after first promising not to laugh at my Excel spreadsheet. Here it is:

http://rapidshare.de/files/18535596/Track.xls.html

The rates based on day of week are as follows:
Saturday: -20.25
Sunday: -86.15
Monday: -6.15
Tuesday: -4.62
Wednesday: 43.91
Thursday: -44.10
Friday: 27.65

The hourly rates of the 7 hour-long periods during which I had the most accumulated time are as follows:
1800-1900 -60.69
1900-2000 37.29
2000-2100 -36.05
2100-2200 -6.71
2200-2300 23.65
2300-0000 -32.00
0000-0100 -11.35

To me, the random nature of both sets of data can mean one of two things:
1. There is no correlation between day-of-week/time-of-day and hourly rate
2. I don’t have enough data points, and/or an abnormal concentration of unusual results (read: bad beats) has skewed the results, and/or I played poorly and inconsistently.

Personally, I would not believe #1 without a lot more information. I strongly suspect that the hourly rate of any pro poker player in Las Vegas is going to correspond directly with the proportion of tourists in the games. I also believe that the concentration of tourists playing poker is going to change based on day of week and time of day. To be truly accurate about it, what you would really want to do is track hour-by-hour rates on each day; for instance, on Saturdays it is possible that the highest concentration of tourists occurs at 1400, while on Wednesdays it’s at 1900. However, I do not have enough data to even consider doing that.

Anyway, that leaves #2 as the most probable explanation. After Week 1, I posted a list of the major hands where I’d lost to inferior hands/suckouts, and it numbered 13. Anyone following along with the rest of the blog knows that there’s been a lot more since then. I haven’t counted, but I’d say it’s safe to assume that the number has at least doubled to 26. In contrast, the list of major hands where I was the beneficiary of the suckout is four entries long, if I remember correctly:

QT sucking out two pair on the river
76 suited vs KK (flopped two pair)
76 suited vs KK(flopped straight)
66 vs. JJ (board was K63 – don’t know why the guy called my all-in on the turn)

So there is a huge discrepancy there of 20 (or more) bad beats. At roughly $300 a pop, that’s $6000. You can throw in the 1 for 6 record of my drawing hands (where I am the favorite), and pretty soon things start to add up. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just searching for a reason here that doesn’t have anything to do with myself. I don’t think I am, but it’s possible.

Now about the competition. Without a doubt, the games were tougher than I expected. I expected a quality of play that I’ve experienced on previous trips to Vegas – universally poor. However, many nights I found myself at tables that were tough to beat. A frequent question posed to me was if I considered the games to be tougher than the ones in Los Angeles. I don’t believe they are, but I really can only compare to the $2-$5 no limit game at the Hustler, which is where I’ve spent 95% of my L.A. poker life. My opinion is that overall, the games are comparable. I know that when people compare my Vegas results with my L.A. results, many will conclude that the games are tougher in Vegas. In my mind, this would be a classic case of using results alone as the input for the decision-making. In analysis of poker, you must take into account how the results were achieved. For example, a player might play a J3 offsuit, flop JJ3, and make $1000 against someone playing AJ. They will then conclude that playing J3 off, and similar hands, is a wise choice because you might get paid huge. They will then proceed to slowly lose $2000 over the next month in playing similar hands and getting in trouble with them. The point is, just because I lost a lot of money in Vegas and made a lot of money in L.A. does not mean the games are tougher in Vegas. In fact, I have sat at several $2-$5 NL tables in Vegas that were populated by 3 or more abysmal players at the same time – and that is something you rarely see in L.A. However, the overall skill level in Vegas is without question higher than I expected.

In regards to my attempts to improve my game, I started out with good intentions, but could not follow through as I had hoped. I was well aware that playing looser, more aggressively, and actually making decisions based on reads would likely be detrimental to my bankroll. I anticipated making mistakes, because A) I have not played that way in the past, and B) It’s the most difficult aspect of poker, in my opinion. Two major hands come to mind, and I blogged both as HOTDs (I had ace-deuce in one, 77 in the other). I lost both. I am fairly certain, though, that the optimum way to play poker is to play fast, loose and aggressive, and making decisions based on your opponents’ behavior. The players that come to a table and miraculously triple their stack in about 45 minutes almost always do so by playing that style. At the very least, a good player should be able to play that way at times, in order to mix up their game. The thing is, it’s much easier said than done. It’s something I plan to work on more, in the future.

However, I feel I still made headway in my game. I did finally pick up on a few physical tells. I also feel like I made excellent, excellent progress in not letting tilt take me over, and in learning to call it quits when I am tired. I have had several sessions in L.A. where I have paid dearly for ignoring my physical and/or mental state, and before this trip I questioned whether I was even able to do so.

On to “State of Mind”. I don’t really have to talk about this much, as anyone reading the blog has been pretty well informed. I don’t think it was that big of a deal in the overall scheme of things, in terms of affecting my results. It sure did affect how I felt about poker, as the weeks wore on.

As for the little old lady and pension…when I moved into my apartment, my landlady did mention to me that there was an elderly lady living right next door to me! She also mentioned this lady had a tendency to start up conversations from which it was difficult to extricate yourself. She meant this as a warning of sorts, but I was like “Hey, she sounds lonely”. I don’t know what her name was, but I started thinking of her as “Plan B”. Well, in 5 weeks I never saw her once. My suspicion is that my landlady, after hearing about my results for the first week or so, warned her about me.

Finally, the Rockie horoscope as provided by Amy. I suggest you look up the Rockie archives for Capricorns, March 11 – April 15, 2006, and then compare the predictions with the day-after reports on my blog. Hoo boy! That would tell you everything you ever needed to know about astrology.

Bottom line: of my six goals, I succeeded in the top two, and came close in #4 (daily blogging...not quite, but close enough, for crying out loud!). The ones related to time and money were not met. We either call it a moral or immoral victory, depending on what you think about the institution of poker. More on that in the final-final post, which will come after the middle-final post. Ha! You can already see the effects of me working on a government contract, after just a few short days! A simple little final post turns into a three-part eruption of documentation and hypenated half-truths.

Until tomorrow, then. Play well, everyone.

As for me, I hocked my brains, packed my bags, and headed west

Hello everyone -

I'm now back in Los Angeles and re-joining all you working stiffs out there with legitimate jobs. For those of you that don't know me, in real life I am a software engineer for an aerospace/defense contractor. Today was my first day on my new project and it was accompanied, as usual, by an avalanche of information - of which I absorbed maybe 2%. In the past, this has been accompanied by a semi-panicky feeling of "Man, I will never get all this" but I've been through it enough times now to know that I'll eventually retain enough to get by, or at least, convince my superiors that I am getting by. It would help if I cared in the least about the convergence of technology and the military. But I don't. The enjoyment I get from the job has nothing to do with the subject matter.

Anyway, by the end of this week I hope to put together a summary post that will conclude this blog. It will take a while mainly because I am trying to get a normal life put back together. Plus, I need to get the rest of my Vegas data entered and see if I can draw any meaningful conclusions from it, other than the obvious "Dude, you suck at poker". Among my many fields of expertise is not knowing how to manipulate Excel very well, so I will be bludgeoning the numbers to death in a most ham-handed way. Finally, I have a sneaking suspiction that my last post is going to be rather lengthy (who, me?).

In the meantime, there will be no posting. However, to keep things interesting, and because I am really curious, I would like to invite and encourage all readers to comment on this post with a little bit about themselves and their thoughts on poker, the blog, life in general, or whatever you feel like. I've been told a few times that the blog has sort of become a daily part of some people's lives. One of my sisters in Virginia said she had told a lot of people out there about it. And then there have been several readers that seemingly materialized out of nowhere - Lan Whu, Limber Lips, and Chuy, among others. Father Time wrote in with an interesting chronological situation, and someone else wrote in with a slew of sentences that contained words that were spelled the same but pronounced differently (I loved both of those comments...so weird and random). Finally, there are also several people who would send me emails because they were a little shy about public posting. Well, now I welcome anyone and everyone to introduce themselves to everyone else, via the comment section. It's your turn to share what's on your mind. Hopefully in this way we can have some new material to read until I get the last post up.

Play well, everyone!