The Stomach

Don't tell me but my secret plan is to win enough money on a daily basis to bribe myself into this lifestyle.

If I could make a grand a day doing this, suddenly it wouldn't matter if I enjoyed playing poker. The opportunity would just be too good. Playing poker would become a necessary sacrifice to help me achieve other goals in life. I want to have a family, Making money supports that cause. Poker has become my way to come home every night with money.

(If I were an investigative news journalist this is the angle I would explore. That somehow someway I've managed to get myself to a point in life where the responsible thing for me to do everyday is to actually go and play poker. That's not easy to do but I did it. Most people have better career options. Like if someone was going to pay me 6 figures to write for them I'd probably go and do that. But since I haven't nurtured a career in writing, no one is calling. So here I am. I'm like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman. I can't quit. I've got nowhere else to go.)

The idea of having children certainly motivates me. A family provides a great reason to get out of the house and go to work everyday. I'm thinking that this family/money angle might be the best way to hook me in to a job like this. I'm pretty sure I don't love playing poker enough for a living that I would choose to live here and do it for low pay. I'd rather get a job and live someplace where the temperature isn't 115 degrees.

I appreciate all of you who sit there and waste time at work reading my poker anecdotes and hand histories but what this blog doesn't really provide for you is the virtual reality experience of being inside my stomach.

Poker gets real stressful when you need to win. It's a different game when you have to make money. Every time I enter a pot my results actually matter. This weekend at the Wynn I was the only guy at my table playing to eat. Everyone else was on vacation. Literally. And figuratively.

It's not everyday I get to write a sentence that's literal and figurative.

I'm not completely sure how I got to the point where I'm sitting at the Wynn playing for groceries.

Oh yeah I remember. I was an English major in college.

You see this is what happens to Liberal Arts majors. This is where we end up.

We play poker.

And of course since I majored in English you guys get the added bonus of my blog.

Someday if things get real bad for me I'll do a public service announcement warning college kids to get a degree in something that actually gets them a job.

But in the meantime us Liberal Arts majors just got to learn to stomach the big losses.

Before this July I wasn't a 4 digit a night guy. Yet my past 4 sessions I've experienced it 4 times. Obviously the good sessions are even better. The bad sessions much worse.

The good nights I try not to get too high. The bad nights I try to let go of as quickly as possible. But sometimes it takes a few days to get that feeling out of my body. Out of my stomach.

When I worked down at the Board of Trade my mentor said to me "Yeah we'll see how good you handle it the first time you lose 60 grand."

It's awful to think of losing that much. Yet playing that high could also mean winning that much. As I move up the poker food chain the game remains the same. There are bad players at every level. The only thing that changes is the color of the chips.

The next step in my poker education is to develop a color blind stomach.