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A pleasant dinner with messrs Young, Ward, O'Leary and Halverson last night. I cooked an Asian fusion chicken broth as starter (Ward is not a fish fan) and standard fare roast pork as a main dish, followed by Somerfield's vanilla cheesecake and chocolate brownies.
Hal came round, confident as IT people always are, that he could set up a WPA security system on my computer. Six hours later he'd got the MacAdress filtering in, but no WPA Or, indeed, WEP. The trouble is, machinery gets in the way of plans. "This is out of date, this is out of date, and this is out of date", said Hal, over several hours. One of the problems people who do jobs in professional environments encounter when they hit the retail market is that, well, stuff is often out of date. So the laptop couldn't do WPA, indeed, he couldn't even get it to do WEP, although it (the laptop) claimed that he should be able to. Fortunately (for me) I had expected all of this, so just getting the MacAddress filtering going was a victory (for me), but Hal left feeling deeply professionally dissatisfied that the IT problem had not been solved completely. Life's too short, Hal. I'd have written 12 stories in that time.
Anyway, after getting a parking ticket yesterday that was entirely my fault, so I shall pay it like a man, and after my cleaner failed to turn up, and after I woke this morning feeling deflated, annoyed, and generally out of sorts, I wanted to get the money back at cards.
Luckily, I resisted the temptation.
This would be the worst way to approach a poker session, but I suspect that it's the way a good proportion of younger players do approach them. They want to work out various frustrations that they have at real life. This leads to the scenario where a big bet goes in because you want to have the best hand, not because you think you have the best hand. By some form of twisted logic, you think that, because big bets represent big hands, putting in a big bet will somehow make your hand "bigger" (i.e., more likely to be best).
The whole online game is twisted in favour of players in their 20s, so we oldies need to do all we can to redress some of the balance. A less testosterone-fuelled "work out your frustrations" approach is one of those potential advantages that older players can deploy.
Another weapon in older players' armoury is a realization that poker is a game where you need to be physically as well as mentally sound. A hedonistic "work hard, play hard" style is easy in your early 20s, doable in your late 20s, and well-nigh impossible after that. Fortunately a number of those early 20s players who came in via Rounders are now coming up to their 30s. Either they will shape up or bust out. Exercise, diet, and, I was pleased to see from Mr Ward's blog, meditation/yoga/general mental preparation, become more important as you get older, and the older players who are surviving online are well aware of that.
Online poker is a dynamic world, which makes the non metagame books only useful in the short term. Plays have counter-plays. Non-thinking players cannot work out why a style that they thought "worked" suddenly isn't working (indeed many of them just attribute it to a bad run). Indeed, in theory the dynamism could reach a point where hardly any players are making mistakes. At this point only the House is the winner. Fortunately, there are "good" players without the metagame balance. These guys "blow up" every so often.
This leads me to believe that the important books on how to win at poker aren't about how to play cards at all. They are the fabulous "Zen" book (still a great one to turn back to when things are going bad), and other books on life and work in general that help you to maintain the right mental attitude. I see that Schoonmaker has a new book out, but I've not been that impressed by his earlier writings. The better books are on traders in the financial world and in almost completely unrelated areas such as eating a more balanced diet and living a more balanced life.
___________
Hal came round, confident as IT people always are, that he could set up a WPA security system on my computer. Six hours later he'd got the MacAdress filtering in, but no WPA Or, indeed, WEP. The trouble is, machinery gets in the way of plans. "This is out of date, this is out of date, and this is out of date", said Hal, over several hours. One of the problems people who do jobs in professional environments encounter when they hit the retail market is that, well, stuff is often out of date. So the laptop couldn't do WPA, indeed, he couldn't even get it to do WEP, although it (the laptop) claimed that he should be able to. Fortunately (for me) I had expected all of this, so just getting the MacAddress filtering going was a victory (for me), but Hal left feeling deeply professionally dissatisfied that the IT problem had not been solved completely. Life's too short, Hal. I'd have written 12 stories in that time.
Anyway, after getting a parking ticket yesterday that was entirely my fault, so I shall pay it like a man, and after my cleaner failed to turn up, and after I woke this morning feeling deflated, annoyed, and generally out of sorts, I wanted to get the money back at cards.
Luckily, I resisted the temptation.
This would be the worst way to approach a poker session, but I suspect that it's the way a good proportion of younger players do approach them. They want to work out various frustrations that they have at real life. This leads to the scenario where a big bet goes in because you want to have the best hand, not because you think you have the best hand. By some form of twisted logic, you think that, because big bets represent big hands, putting in a big bet will somehow make your hand "bigger" (i.e., more likely to be best).
The whole online game is twisted in favour of players in their 20s, so we oldies need to do all we can to redress some of the balance. A less testosterone-fuelled "work out your frustrations" approach is one of those potential advantages that older players can deploy.
Another weapon in older players' armoury is a realization that poker is a game where you need to be physically as well as mentally sound. A hedonistic "work hard, play hard" style is easy in your early 20s, doable in your late 20s, and well-nigh impossible after that. Fortunately a number of those early 20s players who came in via Rounders are now coming up to their 30s. Either they will shape up or bust out. Exercise, diet, and, I was pleased to see from Mr Ward's blog, meditation/yoga/general mental preparation, become more important as you get older, and the older players who are surviving online are well aware of that.
Online poker is a dynamic world, which makes the non metagame books only useful in the short term. Plays have counter-plays. Non-thinking players cannot work out why a style that they thought "worked" suddenly isn't working (indeed many of them just attribute it to a bad run). Indeed, in theory the dynamism could reach a point where hardly any players are making mistakes. At this point only the House is the winner. Fortunately, there are "good" players without the metagame balance. These guys "blow up" every so often.
This leads me to believe that the important books on how to win at poker aren't about how to play cards at all. They are the fabulous "Zen" book (still a great one to turn back to when things are going bad), and other books on life and work in general that help you to maintain the right mental attitude. I see that Schoonmaker has a new book out, but I've not been that impressed by his earlier writings. The better books are on traders in the financial world and in almost completely unrelated areas such as eating a more balanced diet and living a more balanced life.
___________
