Scary philosophical experienceby fira, November 23
It all started about two months ago. I was alone at my house in San Diego. It was 2 AM, but I wasn't tired or sleepy. So I decided to watch a movie, and what better way to enhance movie watching than a vaporizer and weed? I took a few hits, then took a few more. Very soon I was completely baked and dousing myself in a world of interesting and trippy thoughts. It was very enjoyable. And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, it hit me. By the way, I'd just like to add that this rather long blog post won't be poker related.
The image of a circle appeared in front of me. It was the scariest thing I had ever seen in my life. It was immediately followed by a feeling of certain understanding of the workings of the universe. It was disgusting. Within the circle I saw the true meaning of time, eternity, and the horrifying, cyclical nature of the universe. My jaw dropped, my eyes were filled with terror, and I was completely motionless. I contemplated suicide.
A period of time passes (I'm not exactly sure how long, I had lost track of time) and I had calmed down slightly, but still had the horrifying ideas (which I will go into in a bit) in my head. I looked back at the movie that was playing, which by the way was Knocked Up, a pretty good comedy that I later enjoyed without such distractions. I simply could not appreciate the film whatsoever; every time I focused on the movie, I would notice how fake everything is, and that societal values are illusions constructed from evolution. I tried to force myself to sleep, in desperate hopes that I would forget everything. I did...
...Until 2 weeks ago. Myself and a friend of mine decided to take half a dose of LSD one evening. Neither of us hallucinated or anything, but probably because we didn't take a full dose and LSD requires a certain thresh hold to actually work. Anyhow, it was a fun experience that lasted until ~3 AM. He went to bed, and I decided to take out my vape and smoke some more. I went back into my room and took out my laptop, in preparation to read about Plato (I had been very interested in Greek philosophy). After maybe 5 minutes or so, the haunted thoughts I had experienced 2 months ago mysteriously returned to me. It was traumatizing.
I imagined that the human race, like all previous organisms, would destroy itself eventually. Culture constantly pressures competition, and the desires for greed and uniqueness would eventually cause world wide depression, and then insanity. The worst part of it all is, such a fate would recur over and over, from an eternity, to an eternity. I understood why I was so terrified of the circle. It represented the universe, and the idea of eternal recurrence. If you are not familiar with eternal recurrence, it is the idea that the universe is stuck in an endless loop, has always been, and will always be. It was originally popularized by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Basically, eternal recurrence logically makes sense, because, given a finite amount of constantly rearranging matter, and an endless amount of time, the matter would eventually be arranged in every possible configuration, an infinite number of times. Imagine an infinite number of hands of poker played. Every single possible hand and outcome would be played out an infinite number of times. Eternal recurrence implies that humans have existed countless times before in the past, and will exist countless times again in the future, once it inevitably destroys itself.
Imagine a sphere, and a line that travels around the sphere randomly, and infinitely. Would it not cross every path, make every turn, and arrive at every point an infinite number of times?
As I mentioned earlier, Friedrich Nietzsche was the original "father" of this theory. He wrote several books on eternal recurrence, but simply reading a lengthened summary of Thus Spoke Zarathustra made me rather nervous. I won't go into detail but basically, Nietzsche believes that humanity is only a step in a pre-designed evolutionary chain. He thinks that once humans truly grasp the undeniable concept of eternal return, the vast majority of them will shrivel away in depression and insanity. True understanding of eternal return will become the evolutionary factor deciding the next step of where life goes. Nietzsche calls the next step the Overman, which is an advanced version of the modern man that is able to not only accept, but embrace the idea of eternal return, and embrace the fact that every hour, every minute, every second, every one-millionth of a second, in the long run, will last an eternity. Every possible outcome of a person's life, of humanity, and of the universe will last an eternity.
The following is a famous quote from Nietzsche describing his first encounter with the idea of eternal recurrence:
"What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?"
Reading this was a bit scary for me, because it seemed to happen in the same way for me. I was alone, and the visions that came to me seemed external; I had never really studied philosophy or the idea of eternal return. Nietzsche said to truly grasp eternal return would, to any human being, "horrifying and paralzying" and says that "its burden is the heaviest weight imaginable." I seemed to have felt the exact same way.
Anyways, back to my earlier story. After witnessing these ideas in my head, I began repeating to myself the phrase "Constantly forced to destroy themselves." By themselves, I meant life in every form--cells which gave rise to animals, which gave rise to humans, which will give rise to the Overman. Each one is destined to meet its maker and perish, and the cycle will repeat endlessly. I probably repeated this phrase over and over for an hour or so. By now it was probably 6 or 7 AM, and I still couldn't get myself to sleep. I tried watching TV shows to take my mind off of it, but to no avail. My brain was so traumatized by what it had seen, it simply refused to leave it alone. For a while, I thought maybe I would be stuck in that miserable state forever.
My insomnia lasted till the next day. I was so depressed the next day, I didn't talk to anyone. I just sat in my room contemplating eternity and the eternal apocalypse. My roommates tried to cheer me up with gaming, but I just didn't have the stomach for it. I also didn't have the stomach for food. I ended up not eating for over 30, and not sleeping for over 50 hours.
I'm currently still recovering from that trauma, although each day it seems to get better. I've been able to reconnect with friends and family, but I still feel a looming uncertainty in my head at all times, haunting me.
A lot of crazy things have been going on in my life lately. I had sort've a mental breakdown so to speak and my parents took me to a hospital where I was in a "rehab" for 10 days. It was a very good experience for me as there were tons of pretty fucked up people who really needed help and it made me realize how lucky I am for a lot of the things that have happened in my life.
While in "rehab" I did a ton of thinking. Playing poker exclusively for a living was fun but I think I need to go back school. I'm going to probably live with a friend and take around 12ish hours at MTSU. Also planning on putting in a lot more hours into poker.
Lately I've taken a little on again, off again break from poker and just been taking it easy on my mind. Now I'm ready to grind grind grind and hopefully I'll have decent results.
In self promotion news, I think I'm going to sell 50% of myself in the main for PCA. If you're interested in buying some, send me a PM. Also, one of my friends I met in some of the poker games in Knoxville has started his own poker site called www.neverfelted.com. It is a skin off of Cake Poker. I've never played on Cake but apparently the software is pretty similar to that and the games are all pretty soft since its a fairly new site. The site is pretty neat and has a lot of features that I think most players on LP would really like. I deposited 1k and will probably try and run it up to a 2/4 roll eventually. I'd appreciate it if you guys can make an account and refer me (knoxshane).
Also anyone wanna help me set up holdem manager through mikogo/skype/vent (ill ship $20)? I'm just really lazy and have failed setting it up the few times I tried because I'm pretty computer illiterate.
That's it for now, I'll probably post results if I can get HEM working at the end of the month.
11/16/05 Party Poker
01/02/06 Absolute Poker
02/09/06 Eurobet
02/12/06 Pacific Poker
03/06/06 CD Poker
03/23/06 Hollywood Poker
04/14/06 Titan Poker
06/01/06 Noble Poker
06/13/06 Bodog
09/08/06 Atomik Poker
11/17/06 Poker Stars
12/22/06 Full Tilt Poker
10/19/07 Duplicate Poker
04/15/08 Eurolinx
09/01/08 Poker Nordica
10/05/08 Cake Poker
03/28/09 Pitbull Poker
Can't find Doyles Room, Ultimatebet, or Mansion.
poker poker bleh
I hope I can do SNE next year on PS!
I've played 3 NL100 sessions and I'm doing quite well. I'm only 6 tabling and focusing on getting reads and finding unusual spots to get value from the regulars. So far so good. My first 2 sessions were killer as I completely pwned. Todays session was long, grueling, and full of coolers but I battled back to only lose a little bit.
I've been working on my mental game a ton. I'm not a tilty player at all but I do cuss a lot when I play. I'm working on being quiet. I'm going to look into some Buddhist practices as it seems those teach you self control and I think I can learn a lot. I also have Tommy Angelo's videos so I'll be checking those out soon. Another thing I want to work on is playing longer sessions when I'm running good. I need to destroy that "zomg protect my winningz!" mood and just keep playing and pwning even more.
All in all poker is going awesome currently and it looks like my goals are in sight and achievable on a much shorter time line. Here are my graphs:
Sundays are whack I ran like dog ass at 1/2 and 2/4, though I didn't play as well as I could of either.. Even so, deck wasn't as kind as I'd of liked!
I'm really proud I got in 2.4k hands and played for about 7 hours today though!
Unreal bullshit with my sister is really peaking lately (bunch of sister-spawned crap coinciding atm) and mom might actually kick her out permanently, as my sister is getting real nasty and some of the stuff she said tonight could of seriously deteriorated their relationship.. which is pretty serious because my mom is super super nice and also a pushover so if she finally is fed up with her own daughter, lol, well hopefully my sister learns a lesson and grows up someday. magnificent screaming match, and mom did something she's never done and just straight up charge my sister trying to hit her (obv she has a hard time actually hitting her cuz she's her daughter so she just kind of fell on her and was flailing about for a minute. It was pretty upsetting though because that's never happened before, so like I said things are coming to a head maybe. Yes it was also kind of funny to see lol.
bleh....
was doing good, then i started to lose like every hand and it was pretty ridic. didn't realize i put in 5k hands today which is a lot, probably because i was playing at 3AM - 6AM.
also played in a 16.50 PLO8 tourney, was bulldozing the tables until i literally fell asleep at the computer. time bank sound woke me up, then i was like man fuck this, i'm too tired to play, then started shoving every hand until i got out. i ended up getting 12th for like $45 or something
Not really a great session tbh. Seem to cant get past NL10 wtf. Just barely breakeven with some bonus and rakeback last few days.
Please take a look at some screens taken from this sessions PT. If you notice anything weird about stats or need more details please let me know. Maybe I'm bleeding money somewhere but I can't really figure it out. EV graph gives me some relieve though.
Bleeeeh
Could post some hands as well but cba to search them right now. Can't really say I made huge mistakes and all stats seem pretty ok to me. Except for 3bet being a little high perhaps? Anyway, I'll just grind it out I still feel like having a pretty big edge but I would like some coaching to find any leaks/spews. Just need to get my br a little up and perhaps via myth's students which seems pretty affordable but surely very helpfull =)
So I took my first shot at NL50 about two weeks ago after finally grinding my bankroll up to $1200 at NL25. I moved from PS to FTP when I started NL50 and I have to say, it seems like the players on FTP are a lot worse than the players on PS. FTP players are constantly stacking off with midpair and draws against me, which never happened to me on PS. This could definitely just be short term variance and I'm just running into really bad fish, but NL50 on FTP has been considerably easier than NL25 on PS.
So I have to give mad props to edzwoo, who sweat me on many occasions and is the main reason for my success with poker. He turned me from a 10/6 nit to a 16/14 winner. I've actually only played 8 sessions at NL50, but that was enough to bring my roll to $2000. I know I'm on a sick heater, running at 10BB/100, but I feel like I'm ready to take a shot at NL100. I am a little worried though, because I actually only got 6800 hands at NL50 and I don't know if I'm moving up too fast.
Full Tilt Poker Game #16004226013: Table Repeat - $0.25/$0.50 - No Limit Hold'em - 19:42:45 ET - 2009/11/13
Seat 1: Malkhor ($49.25)
Seat 2: Hero ($50)
Seat 3: Akita155 ($14.10)
Seat 4: ox1216 ($46.90)
Seat 5: SunFrostFT ($19.25)
Seat 6: Headlock1 ($41.90)
Seat 7: Johnny Brunson ($45.75)
Seat 8: KingKoux ($10)
Seat 9: Ole4ka66 ($10)
Headlock1 posts the small blind of $0.25
Johnny Brunson posts the big blind of $0.50
The button is in seat #5
Holecards(Odds) Dealt to Hero
KingKoux folds
Ole4ka66 folds
Malkhor folds
Hero raises to $2
Akita155 folds
ox1216 folds
SunFrostFT folds
Headlock1 calls $1.75
Johnny Brunson folds
Headlock1 bets $5
Hero has 15 seconds left to act
Hero raises to $15
Headlock1 has 15 seconds left to act
Headlock1 raises to $36.90, and is all in
Hero calls $21.90
Headlock1 shows
Hero shows
River (Pot : $84.30)
Headlock1 shows a pair of Sixes
Hero shows a flush, Ace high
Hero wins the pot ($81.30) with a flush, Ace high
Headlock1 is sitting out
Summary Total pot $84.30 | Rake $3
Board:
Seat 1: Malkhor didn't bet (folded)
Seat 2: Hero showed and won ($81.30) with a flush, Ace high
Seat 3: Akita155 didn't bet (folded)
Seat 4: ox1216 didn't bet (folded)
Seat 5: SunFrostFT (button) didn't bet (folded)
Seat 6: Headlock1 (small blind) showed and lost with a pair of Sixes
Seat 7: Johnny Brunson (big blind) folded before the Flop
Seat 8: KingKoux didn't bet (folded)
Seat 9: Ole4ka66 didn't bet (folded)
Btw, has anyone seen that show, PokerStars.net - MILLION DOLLAR CHALLENGE, on FOX? It's definitely just a way for PokerStars to promote their site. They seem to announce a promo or tourney on pokerstars every two minutes or so, haha.
AA < AK pf
my TT-AA AQ+,AK+ pf allin range always runs vs AA shortstacks
my flopped sets dont hold vs draws being deep
when i bluff river villian had runnerd something
overall most stuff was just things where u can do nothing
still iam semi titled and wont play any more for today
Because I like to procrastinate and generally am an asshole in school, I have 4 papers, 2 projects, and miscellaneous homework for my other class to do today. Rant rant cry cry.
Poker-wise, I've been winning a lot of the micro HU matches I've been playing in the past few days. The winnings only account for about 16 dollars plus a 3 dollar SNG win for 13.50 on Friday, but I'm running a lot better than I had been previously with NLHE and I'm feeling pretty good about my roll getting bigger. I also took 2nd at a low-stakes live sng at my friend's house for 5 dollars and won maybe 3-4 dollars with PLO earlier this week.
I think I've created a pretty bad image of myself on here and that's not what I'm about at all, so I'm hoping that my straightforward, ego-free posts in the future will look better than the previously ugly posts. I can't wait to knock this homework out so I can get back on Stars...
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I ran like dog ass at 1/2 and 2/4, though I didn't play as well as I could of either.. 
(a straight, Eight high)
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