Apathy or unquenched desire?

[shaniac]

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i dont see anything wrong with pursuing an impractical and romantic concept if the result is working on your game. obv you need balance to succeed, i would argue that is part of being "the best". And I don't think its useless...wanting to be one of the best is a lofty and noble goal imo.

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From your other post:

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why do you think i talk so much [censored]? why do i berate every other "good" player? Why do i spend like 8 hours a day on 2+2? Cuz i gotta prove to everybody including myself that i can be the best at this silly game.

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Your "lofty and noble goal" seems to involve a lot of levels of human interaction that are unpleasant in my view, and I personally wouldn't direct much of my energy that way. Obviously, you can do what you want with your life and career, but it's not my style.

[Todd Terry]

I wrote this a while back in a thread about life on the tourney trail:

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Be prepared to be losing most of the time. I busted in the first two events I played as a pro, which were fairly deep stacked events, in under 30 minutes. I'm currently on a 16 tournament streak without a cash. You have to walk a fine line between being brutally honest with yourself and not simply chalking up bad results as bad luck while at the same time recognizing when you are playing well but not winning and not make changes solely because you are not winning. You will frequently have doubts about whether you can make a living playing tournament poker, which might go away after you cross $5 million in gross career earnings, but I doubt it.

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IMO, succeeding in MTTs takes unquenched desire to succeed along with enough apathy to emotionally handle the swings, but not so much that you don't do everything you can to improve your results.

[Bakes]

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Your "lofty and noble goal" seems to involve a lot of levels of human interaction that are unpleasant in my view, and I personally wouldn't direct much of my energy that way. Obviously, you can do what you want with your life and career, but it's not my style.

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I don't direct a ton of my energy into being vocal, but it certainly provides a good release. Poker makes me incredibly pissed at times, it makes me incredibly happy at times. I don't consider it an unpleasant level of human interaction when its banter between rivals that doesn't result in any damage.

prob just a difference in personality/age/environment/what have u just like every other difference between humans

[Jurollo]

god i [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] you shane. awesome posts here. also sorry about my headphone volume at foxwoods, haha.

[freehat]

I think having an apathetic mindset towards your results in MTT's is essential for long-term success in this form of poker and in your long-term mental health. MTT's are addictive in nature due to their payout stucture which is on a variable ratio similar to a slot machine. Pulling a slot lever and the short-term results are out of the user's control. Results in tournaments will largely be weighted to who wins those coinflips when the blinds rise and the short-term results are not really up to the player's control. I tend to think of tournaments as playing cash games with the stakes keep increasing or a form of martingale blackjack system with slight edges that will take a long time to manifest itself.

For those who make big scores early in their career it will be hard to continue when they start regressing to the mean. It is much more psychologically damaging to go from 500,000 to 100,000 than from -300,000 to 100,000.