Procrastination

I'm so awful at updating this blog. It's not that I have nothing to write about because I do. Lots of things have happened since my last blog. So much that it'll probably take 3 blogs to write about it all. So why do I never write in this blog. Well it's obviously because I'm such a huge procrastinator. Why do today what we can put off until tomorrow.

Maybe it's because I have several things to write about and I can't decide where to start. Maybe there is so much in my head that I can't sort it out enough to get it written down. Maybe I'm ridiculously unorganized. Maybe other things are more fun to do than writing a blog. I mean really, had you rather write a blog or get sucked out on a minimum of three hundred and fiddy times in under two hours. Now that's just too fun to miss. If that's not good enough I can rail the assclowns who got it in horribly bad when they make the final table of the tournament they busted me out of. I mean nothing is more fun than watching a completely incompetent moron win lots of money with the chips he won off you when he called your 21BB reshove with 67o and hit trips, right?

No seriously, I've just been on a pretty brutal downswing and haven't really been motivated to write. Especially since I vowed not to write whinny blogs. Tonight however, I was pretty down and disgusted after another particularly brutal Sunday grind. I was on Skype talking to a friend and said I was beginning to wonder if I was even capable of beating these games. He's coached me a good bit and knows my game better than anyone and we had a session the other day. That session was really enlightening because I saw so many things I had reverted back to doing. I had basically gone back to many of my old nitty ways. I ask him if he thought I was capable of being a winning player. His response was if you'll get back to way you were playing a few months ago and not the way you're playing now, yes you are. That's when it dawned me...

I'm a huge fan of Jared Tendler's The Poker Mindset, in the book he talks a lot about conscious and unconscious competence. Being that unconscious competence are things we know so well they are second nature like folding 72o and things like that. We don't really have to think about a lot of plays we make because they are very basic and we've made them so often we just do them without thinking. Conscious competence are skills we've learned but we have to think to utilize these skills. When our emotions reach a certain level it becomes really hard to make our brain function properly and we tend to revert to the things we do without much thought. This is what happens when we tilt really bad, our brains go on some kind of overload and all we can manage are the things we just do but don't have to think through. What I think is going on with me is while I'm not tilted in the obvious sense of the word, the emotions from a prolonged downswing have accumulated and cause me to have trouble doing the things that I've learned but haven't mastered and I've reverted back to the those things I don't have to think about. So I'm going to have a couple of poker free days and get my head straightened out and come back and do some reviewing and studying for a day or so and then get back to poker with a clear head and better attitude.

...and in my next blog update, which I promise will be soon, I will talk about my first WSOP circuit event and my first tracked live cash. Until then remember "You will eventually run worse than you ever thought possible, but the difference in winner and a loser is the loser thinks he doesn't deserve it". No idea who said this but it's all too true.