Poker Legends
I'm at
Starbucks o
n a T-mobile hot spot, watching on Youtube, Season Four of High Stakes Poker. It's the nuts! By far, the best cash game ever recorded.
ESPN’s WSOP (World Series of Poker) Celebrity Poker on Bravo and the Travel Channel’s WPT (World Poker Tour) have done for poker what Jamba smoothies did for high fiber diets---it reinvented the often indigestible into an energizing and delicious experience that can no longer be ignored. This game has juice! Unfortunately our national poker id has A.D.D. With final cut, the monotony is edited out.
Calling poker a sport is like calling bald a hair color. Yet
our male pattern madness--- an
800 lb gorilla known as Texas No Limit Hold em (a.k.a. NLH) has replaced baseball not only as the national pastime, but also
America’s bellybutton. It’s not a sport, it’s a concussion!
GSN's-High Stakes Poker Looney-tuned tension gets its storyline from the Cartoon Network. In a New York minute, an ACME anvil pancakes you, and then a split second later, you’re expanded - accordion-style - back to normal, like some tempurpedic mattress. It’s a formula of ins and outs, need and speed, aggravation and acceleration.
Makes me think on: The Sweet Spot--- where your passion meets your purpose. Everyone's got one, but not everyone has a relationship to it. It is the doorway to your most authentic voice, and everyone's is different. Mine is NLH.
The casino is the ultimate playground of Free Agency. The plug-and-play low entry point is one that anyone from waitress moms to NASCAR dads can move into and put together a poker life.
Poker is for the ages--the ages of 18 to 99!The assumption that gambling is bad has outlived its usefulness.Now anyone can do it with complete ease, because it means nothing at all, thanks to the CNN effect of dealing with everywhere and everything at once, including GSN's High Stakes Poker. When you start to read about the evils of NLH, you have to give up only one thing--- reading.
NLH is a game of domination. It rewards (selective) aggression. Infinite patience, however, brings immediate results to your game. The game has gotten faster, yet the faster you go, the longer it takes to beat the game. You spell success in NLH, T_I._M_.E_. Tournamnet play is about trapping with the best hand; cash games, putting your opponents on Tilt by sucking out. Here is an unlikely outdraw- two miracle cards---From worst to first:
This experience- A Poker Mini-Satori- really opened up my game to the big shrug and OMG WTF: Making the "right" mistake!
The number #1 thing I hate about the game I love--The surest way to win a huge pot in NLH is to spot 'em the nuts and suck out! When this happens: Hate the
win, not the
winner. The winner has crazy delicious
poker courage-heart, if he only had a brain...
Last month I was heads up--all in-- at the Bellagio! Getting my money in bad with Anna Kournikova-AK against Pocket Rockets AA-Getting a miracle runner runner King King on the turn and river for trips - I even called it, saying I was
the favorite. Sure , NLH is a game of high cards. but sometimes you can put the sin back in sincere-
“Let there be flop"
It was a dramatic and startling experience that completely altered my understanding of the game, making me into new playah It was so overwhelming, it is as if I had shifted into a new dimension, as if my mind had expanded by a Power of 10.
The power of new, something always new and surprising in the game. Poker is too random to be left up to chance. It's better to be skillful than lucky; Yet, I sent that guy home broke, getting lucky with trip KKK's-the three wise men.
They had to put the cross on me and got the Floor Man over to calm me down while I did my Texas Chainsaw NLH shock and awe Dracula stichk.... Hate the Win, not the Winner!
"Don't leave, Get Your Balls Out of Your Purse! And start wearing them like a man." trying to keep him on tilt for a re-buy.
"Jihad is fun" I felt like some suicide bomber , a cool cat kamakazi with nine lives "When I get old" I said in my best So Damn Insane accent, " I wanna blow up just like daddy!" No dice, lift ticket checked out--no more positive expectation for the game or this playah.
When you think of it--Pocket Aces, winning---getting what you expect is boring.The TABLE is the green felt jungle-- and it loves home runs, slam dunks, touchdowns and holes-in-one and putting a bad beat on someone. opening up a can of whoop ass, raining down on Charlie. Preflop, a pocket pair only has 2 outs to improve, overcards have 6 to draw to the nuts.This is not even taking into account straight and flush draws! That means over cards are at least a 3:1 favorite to improve and win the hand.
The meaning of a poker life, is not Get One! The Meaning of a poker life is simple--Don't die. The Wages Of Wins--of "sucking out" is poker death. When your third eye and your turd eye become one, and you start believing your own bull S$%T. Shift happens--- and you can get reckless thinking you are bullet proof, splashing the pot, playing too many starting hands.
Card Lust-Making the right mistake:That's the sex of poker. Rooted in pleasure, you become a victim of your own magical orgasms, giving you an exaggerated opinion of your luck. You feel like some black market wheeler dealer getting somehting for nothing-what's so ethical about the poker ethic---Doesn't money cost too much, isn't all work the result of struggle?---No.
God may play dice with the universe,, but this ain’t no metaphysical crapshoot, it’s NLH. If you want to have “fun” then spin the wheel of fortune, phone a friend, buy a vowel, and get voted off the island. If you want an “experience”, play NLH.
Poker is a game of situations. Winning poker is about making good decisions Feeling lucky and going to a casino is like feeling athletic and going to a sports bar. It’s a bad decision. It is the in to your sane, a kind of voluntary madness. The surest way of getting nothing from something. The road less traveled-the psycho path! Therefore hate the win, not the winner---Suckouts. That kind of reality check will surely bounce.
Good NLH poker is not a "A-ha" experience, it is more of a "holy-shit" experience. Most playahs are experience rich and technique poor. Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again. Someday, this post will start to read like one long typographical error, and you come away thinking, “From now on, I'll connect the dots my own way”. It was a beautiful day for a night time of poker.
It's nice to see the the full power of paradoxical thinking in no limit holdem ---NLH on the Game Show Network. Eating what you kill is so money. You can't spell mans
laughter , without
laughter: so when these pros eat what they kill, they make sure the starngerhood- neighbors are having a good time. It’s not some felony conviction; more of a firm belief in magic, the process of putting the con back in confidence and creating community.
You are not keeping up with the Joneses. You’re dragging them down to your level on the green felt jungle. It’s not how good you are. It’s how bad you want it. The quest is in the question of not, “ Who is going to let me?” Rather, “Who is going to stop me?” Power is never given. Power is taken.
If you want to perform optimally at NLH, then you have to be paradoxical . In NLH you have to have your cake and eat it too. This is not either or duals and duality. Welcome to the world of “and”. Doing two things at the same time that apparently negate each other.
NLH is 100% skill and 100% luck. The language of "and" is the language of NLH. The language of "and" is the language of passive and active, optimystical and materialistic, hard and soft. There’s a yang for every yin. It’s Fuzzy logic, and everything is a matter of degree and the player is fuzzy wuzzy to the nth degree. Get a clear, sharp view of the fuzzy.
The best way to protect yourself in a high stakes game is to be as fluid and formless as water. High Stakes poker is mostly not about cards, it’s about people. and people who need people, well here are three of the luckiest:
Leading off, the greatest playah on the planet, a legend in his own mind--Helmuth. I like the way Phil ---Controls The Options: Get Others To Play With The Cards You Menally Deal Them. I like to call his style of play, "Boiling the frog" His infinite patience brings immediate results. He's Mr. Science. He puts the odds back into God--- a Megalomaniac who not only must confuse his thoughts with gods, but gets you to believe in his thoughts. His reality check bounced a few times but he played well.
A close second is "Raisy Daisey"Sammy Farha. He is Generation Terrorist- Keep Others In Suspended Terror: Cultivate An Air Of Unpredictability. 7 deuce etc. I love his card lust. He's driving the bus, and throwing the three C's-guys with cars, cash and condo's(the tourists) under it: Like Seat 6, Brandon Adams, who teaches "Behavioral Finance at Harvard. He suffers from a kind of yuppie version of bulimia-- He wants to leave a mark on GSN, but he'll probably leave a stain. ! He wrote a poker novel called
Broke---need I say anything more.
Sammy plays a one-handed game of "Good Cop, Bad Cop" with different people. Stirring the pot, triangulating and pitting one against another. Gossip may be false intimacy but Torture is the ultimate act of his perverted intimacy. A kind of Traumatic bonding", akin to the Stockholm Syndrome, takes place. Farha's in too many pots, however, and I can see him getting stuck with KJ veses AK etc. Yet with so much money behind each player, the implied odds of winning another players stack for say a $1,200 call with 7 Deuce unsuited--the price is right. Sammy, however, will be his own Judge Judy and executioner this season. Wake up and smell the opportunity Sammy ---this isn't brain surgery, it's rocket science.
You are Sammy's “Supply” he is your change agent—He find you; gets you,to love him; make you eventually hate him. That’s fine with him---He love to be hated and he hate to be loved The Playah uses use up other people like candy bars, and when he’s finished eating , he throw away the wrappers. Disposable relationships. No deposit. No return.
Finally, Jamie Gold. A placebo is ---Latin for "I shall please" Jamie is a master of the Placebo's Evil Twin--The Nocebo response---making you feel worse. Gold's information presented with a counterfeit of openness, trust and candor can be disinformation. It helps him to be at two with the NLH universe, going postal, going plural. He sees both sides because he is both sides.
Gold's Wal-Mart table presence-- huge (chip stack plus 20006WSOP war chest), hard to avoid, superficially friendly---he's a money faucet! Last season, I thought he was drinking the koolaid fromt he cult of the amateur. His Money couldn't buy happiness, but it could buy more chips, which for Jamie, was kinda the same thing.
In poker, "the nuts" refers to not only an unbeatable hand, It is also an unbeatable style of Gold's play, a raisey-crazy one -man asylum., whose default mode of betting suffers from Jim Carey’s “advanced delusionary schizophrenia with involuntary narcissistic rage." Eli Elezra thinks he's crazy. The crime and punishment for playing with Jamie is a malignant optimism. You think you got his number. You'll get him next time.
Makes me think paradoxically --- the seven habits of highly effective poker players.
1.Desperation leads to your deepest capacity for loving.
2.Goofing off leads to inspiration, creativity and genius.
3.Dread and fear will heal you from leading a life of trivial pursuits.
4.Healthy shame will signal when you are at the razor’s edge of your life’s destiny.
5.Fragility and brittleness leads to fluidity and magnetic attraction of others.
6.Confusion leads to an experience of the mysterious.
7.Feelings of power will help you plow through fears and obstacles to fulfilling your life’s destiny
The Oracle: Professor Charles Kingsfield's mashed up Poker Chase--- Get your BS in Holdem-"Pimp My Harvard"
Harvard Law School, the West Point of capitalism, has a little creative destruction going on at Roscoe Pound 's new student-led Poker Strategic Thinking Society (
GPSTS), led by the mad hatter-- Professor
Chuckles Nesson . They have scheduled a series of lectures and conferences to examine the role of poker in the law and educamacation (sic) . WPT's host Mike Sexton and Full Tilt's Professor Howard Lederer held court.
The devil's advocates advocating for the devil---online poker! Yea baby.
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High Stakes Poker GSN No Limit Hodem Poker Phil Helmuth Sammy Farha Jamie Gold Cobert Report
GPSTS Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society Charles Nesson Harvard Law School Online Poker
1. Poker is a great teacher
2. Poker improves your study habits.
3. Poker develops your math skills.
4. Poker develops your logical thinking.
5. Poker develops your concentration.
6. Poker develops your patience.
7. Poker develops your discipline.
8. Poker teaches you to focus on the long term.
9. Poker teaches you that forgoing a profit equals taking a loss (and vice versa).
10. Poker develops your realism.
11. Poker teaches you to adjust to changing situations.
12. Poker teaches you to adjust to diverse people.
13. Poker teaches you to avoid racial, sexual and other prejudices.
14. Poker teaches you how to handle losses.
15. Poker teaches you to depersonalize conflict.
16. Poker teaches you how to plan.
17. Poker teaches you how to handle deceptive people.
18. Poker teaches you how to choose the best “game.”
19. Poker teaches you the benefits of acting last.
20. Poker teaches you to focus on the important subjects.
21. Poker teaches you how to apply probability theory.
22. Poker teaches you how to conduct risk-reward analyses.
23. Poker teaches you to put things in context and evaluate all variables.
24. Poker teaches you how to “get into people’s heads.”
