Playing Poorly

So, last night, I turned in a complete, thorough, sub-par performance. And we've all been there, so let's look at this unpopular situation. How do we accept it, learn from it, avoid repeating upgrade it? Well, first, let's look at the scorecard for the evening. For reasons that will be explained later, I am grading out of 125, not 100.

Let's look at the "scoring categories" for the evening:

1. Focus
   70/125
   I played multiple tables, and chatted with multiple people. I had 2 tables open, and instead of choosing to play those to the best of my abilities, I opened a 3rd table. I closed it soon after, for partial credit.
   


2. Intensity
   90/125
   One of the better qualities of my play last night. I was paying attention to most hands, and I was fully present for a majority of my (mostly bad) decisions.
   
   without focus, intensity can only be sporadic and isolated. So, at best, I was playing some isolated hands well.
   



3. Creativity
   80/125
   Again, marginal. I made weak calls, weak folds, calls when I knew I was crushed. My bluffs were often emotionally-timed, instead of situationally-timed. I dared to play a couple of hands differently, but didn't actually do this with any gameplan. I just went "Opposite George" for one bet/raise/call, and then waited to see what happened. I guess I assumed they would just ship me the pot after such an unexpected play.
   



4. Intuition
   40/125
   Blurgh. I trusted some reads, ignored others. Mostly I just pushed a button before I could actually get to the point where I had a read.
   
   In the past, my mind used to be in charge of making ALL choices for me. And, I find myself listening to my intuition more, speaking from my heart more, and acting from my center more. This has made three things apparent to me:
   
   Mind is:
   
   
   
   
   1. Self-emergent.
   
   
   2. Self-serving.
   
   
   3. Self-preserving.
   
   
   
   
   This is not a criticism. It's just a statement of some inherent qualities of Mind. So, now I notice it is making subtler attempts to regain control of my entire day-to-day life. It can seem devious, deceptive, almost like it's an enemy. But that's just Mind's nature. It's basically alive.
   
   A good metaphor for this is society. While not actually consisting of anything tangible, "society" is nevertheless involved in almost everything we do on a given day. It started as a self-emergent property of individuals, and has evolved into having a life of its own. It is very self-preserving. If you chose to wander off, to go have your own individual life, how many different forces would attempt to pull you back?
   
   Ok, so my Mind is here to stay, and very powerful, and the best thing I can do is teach it how intuition can help improve my poker playing. So, Mind...this is for you.
   
   Intuition is my friend. It helps me (us) make the best possible decisions.
   
   I recommit to listening to my intuition.
   



5. Positivity
   80/125
   Decent. I did tilt one time, based on a not-that-bad "beat", which felt worse at the time. In the next hand I proceeded to ruin my table image AND dump 1/3 of my stack. One huge lapse, some other minor ones.
   

Two nights ago, I watched How To Lose Your Lover (US Title). First, off-topic, I can easily say I probably never would see this movie if not for Netflix Instant-Play and my new XBox360. Ignoring everything else cool about the XBox360, I can now say, this alone justifies its purchase.

Back to the movie. A biographer decides to "break up with his life", and L.A. (his city) as well. He feels he's a New Englander at heart, and after seven years of a crappy life in L.A., he wakes up and realizes that he chooses so much more. He chooses to start telling the WHOLE TRUTH, about his opinions, his history, and everything else. Society, in the form of his friends and acquaintances, of course doesn't encourage/support/allow this. In fact, they hate him for telling them things they don't want to hear.

To get to the point without ruining the movie for you, he finds that his new commitment to honesty, combined with committing to his own actual highest choices, has changed much more than his own day-to-day humdrum life. He is reborn, in-place, in that exact moment. The only time his transformation takes is the time it takes him to realize it.

I invite you to upgrade your self-awareness, specifically self-honesty. If you can, and are willing to regularly evaluate your own play in this context, you have opened the door to your improvement.