Peaks and Troughs but where is the Profit? – Looking back @ 2013
WARNING! ‘Ere be words.
So, the blog has lain dormant for an entire orbit of the sun – a year older but am I a year wiser?
What have I learnt? What life affirming experiences have I had that I can use to drive me from staring down the barrel of mediocrity … what indeed?
At the close of 2012 I was burning out. Either drinking, drunk, or working hung-over on little or no sleep – top it all off with a (surprisingly healthy) relationship with an engaged woman and I was headed for a crash. Thankfully my alcohol addled self-awareness surfaced just long enough for me to spot it coming and take evasive action.
With the little self-preservation left to me wagging a disapproving finger and screaming, ‘get your shit together,’ I temporarily took on a second role at work to keep myself busy and quit drinking for the first three months of 2013.
I had also been rethinking what I hoped to get from poker. I had been attempting to develop my 6max game at NL20 on WillHill – however, already spending my hours at work starring at a screen I wasn’t overjoyed at doing more of the same in my spare time and generally wasn’t enjoying it greatly. My lack lustre attitude was certainly not improved by my spectacular lack of progress. I instead returned my attention to the form of poker I had initially been so taken by – LIVE! So I was grinding 1/1 & 1/2 of a weekend where I am more experienced and comfortable despite playing for considerably more money and was consistently exceeding my modest monthly salary.
Whilst there is a fair amount of truth in the online communities exclamations that ‘live is for fish!’ there is certainly a lot of value to be made playing even these low limits presuming you can keep your cool while you’re only dealt 25-30 hands an hour and stomach the repetitive banter and cliché comments. There is evidently a lot more to say about live play than this but that is a separate post in itself. The upshot was that I had more disposable income than ever before and was headed to a reasonably sized dedicated bankroll for 1/2 Hold’em.
I had been growing more and more dissatisfied with the company I worked for and less and less stimulated by the challenges it offered so that when they offered me the two job roles I had temporary been filling on a permanent basis for 5k less that it was worth, I barely hesitated in turning down the ‘promotion.’ I also realised in that moment that I had made a larger decision in that I was tired of working a repetitive, mind numbing job that slowly robbed me of all optimism and ambition – confident that I could at least make money off poker in the short term - my notice was in shortly afterwards.
So, no job and a finite amount of funds to see me through until … and this is the problem, I didn’t really have a game plan, a goal, a direction or any of the things one should probably have when they quit their job during a recession. Rash very rash. I think I justified it to myself by insisting that having the courage to ‘risk it all’ and ‘follow your heart’ was an admirable character trait – and while I do believe this, doing so without thorough consideration is just foolish. As it happens I had been growing increasingly more unhappy and dissatisfied and didn’t have anything that couldn’t be replaced by filling in a few job applications if need be.
I didn’t really know what I hoped to achieve through the extra hours playing live poker, sure there is the fantasy at the back of the mind where you make a mint, track down Liv Boree and it all ends balla ever after – realistically however, I knew I was working with a very tight bankroll and had to have a solid run if I was to sustain a life off poker for any length of time. Inevitably (and in hindsight I would almost say thankfully) this didn’t happen. A month in and all the wildcards conspired against me – I had to bail a relative out for a handy sum of money, move house at very short notice and hit a nasty run of cards that was exasperated by some tilt and poor expense management … and I was flat broke.
I knew that going broke was the most likely outcome of my little adventure but I was guilty of letting my imagination run away with me and I had no contingency plan in place. By no means an expert after my short lived ‘shot’ but infinitely more knowledgeable then I had been, I had reflected a great deal on the pros and cons of potentially playing live poker fulltime. Although such a life is far from a bed of roses; I had tasted the freedom, dynamism and reward of doing something that by its very nature requires one to make self-improvement a priority. One could argue that this attitude could be adapted to any project but I sure as fuck couldn’t see me doing so in another god awful admin job.
And so I got lost in an existential black hole as only the fortunate of this post-modernist first world know how. You know the questions –where was I going? What was I achieving in life? I have so much to offer but not the expression - yada yada yada. My rational mind knew perfectly well that I needed a job asap and had to set myself some short-term targets to get myself on track … in my arrogance and fear of returning to that oh so mundane ‘real world’ however, I decided I would take out a credit card, max it out on booze in a matter of months and rage at the world some more. FTW!
It was at this time that it became apparent that my brother would soon be homeless. Both at rock bottom; my brother came to kip on the floor of the single room I rent. Although my brother is 25 and a grown man, I think it was the sense that I should be setting a better example that finally made me pull my shit together. So for the next three months we both worked 12 hour day’s manual labour six days a week to scrape by on £40 a week between us after we met the monthly minimum payments of the debt we had both managed to get ourselves in. We bitched and moaned to each other about it but no longer allowed ourselves the luxury of denying that we knew perfectly well who was responsible for getting us in this state of affairs … no one but ourselves.
Three months later my brother nailed a trial week with BMW and now looks forward to a secure job with considerable prospects and great financial promise starting in the New Year. For myself I think I finally ‘manned up’ long enough to admit accountability for the dissatisfactions in my life and also recognise how detrimental denying responsibility can be. Our lives are not dictated by a long list of things that happen to us so much as our response to them. I have been so fixated on the idea of escaping the shackles of the typical western career orientated lifestyle that I have allowed myself to become distracted from cultivating the necessary character to make such an ambition a success. They say that acceptance is the first road to recovery and I am finding there is some truth to that.
So, where’s the profit?
Getting things back on track on the work front through a temp position for one of the most highly regarded educational institutions in the world and it looks hopeful that this will lead to a solid full-time position in the New Year. More importantly, I have reawakened my ambition and motivation to (although I hate the phrasing) ‘self-improve.’ Our futures are what we make them but no one is going to place it in our laps – they must be forged.
The view that our lives are made of ‘peaks and troughs’ or ‘highs and lows’ is only due to our level of magnification to the thing in question, in this instance our lives. If we were to view the time line of our lives from further away or much faster you would only see a line. A line who’s direction is dictated by our ambitions and the discipline and strength of character not to lose sight of our goals and to persevere. Contrary to the title then, I do not see my past year in terms of highs and lows but as a general trend in the right direction – UP!
(the next post will be about trying to get my graph to do the same 
If anyone made it this far and actually read my short essay, my thanks.
MD
The Beautiful Game 
What Has Gone Before 
Current Pos 
ON and UP 
This FISH needs ArmBands 
I am excited to start learning this game from scratch.
