It was two years ago now that my life changed while staring into a vodka soda in Las Vegas. I was sitting at the bar with a buddy of mine after we both busted a $500 poker tournament at the Venetian, and neither of us was taking it well.
My buddy was lamenting how he always becomes a nit around the bubble, even when both the buy-in and the min-cash are relatively insignificant to him.
Knowing a little about his upbringing and being in a philosophical (read: emo) mood after my nonsensical triple-barrel-bluff-into-quads exit, I went deep into the hole.
“Maybe,” I said to him, “the poverty you experienced as a child wired into you an aversion to financial loss that is being triggered by the increased emotional intensity of the bubble.” I turned my gaze into my drink as some deep invisible wheels started to turn, “Show me your traumas and I’ll show you your leaks sort of thing…”
“Yeah, maybe,” I could hear him say from what suddenly seemed like a great distance. His voice made it obvious he wasn’t going to give it much thought. I felt him turn his attention back to the football game on the big screen, already moved on to the next bet he was going to lose.
But not me. I was still staring deep into my drink, eyes open wide in that way they do when something really connects.
If that was true for him, what did it mean for me? What woundings were my own leaks hiding?
I started running through my game, looking for patterns I recognized but never tried to explain. The way I’d punt my stack in unexplainably creative ways when running deep. The times I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I should fold, and hero-called anyway. What traumas were these impulses masking? Beneath the suckouts and bad beats I’d been blaming for years, what pains were actually responsible for my losses? Most importantly to my survival as a poker player, how much EV was I unconsciously torching?
In the two years since seeing the bottomless abyss in that drink, I’m proud to say I put the work in—even when every impulse in my body was screaming for me to do exactly what my friend did that day and zone out into a screen.
I won’t claim that I don’t still punt stacks unnecessarily or that I don’t still hero-call in spots that I shouldn’t. I definitely do. Much less frequently, thankfully, but still more than none. However, the bright side is that those moments no longer pull me away from my goals, but toward them. I’ve started seeing them for what they’ve always been: messages from my system that something inside me is out of balance. The punts and hero-calls aren’t the problem. I’ve since realized they’re the manifestation of the problem. Once I recognized that my bad habits at the table were simply signposts from my highest self of places inside myself I still needed to go, all my most painful losses were instantly transformed into wins.
Look at your traumas and you’ll find your leaks.
The question is, are you willing to look at yours, or will you keep losing yourself in a screen?
