In ‘Zen and the Art of Poker” there’s a line that goes, “You need to think of folding as a club you are using to pummel your opponents with.” The line prior to this says, “Very few events, games, or sports work this way, with the winner being the one who withdraws himself from competition [...]

One of the keys of poker is losing.
It’s a fact that we all lose, and often. Even the best players lose hands, lose pots, lose sessions and lose tournaments because of the degree that chance plays in poker. But that losing keeps the bad players playing with us, so we have to lose, and we [...]

Are you free? Or maybe the question should be, how free are you? To what degree can you say that you chose to work every day, at the job that you work at? Or school, or family situation?
Sometimes I wonder about people who commit crimes or commit suicide or suffer mental breakdowns or stress implosions. [...]

Try this. Stop, and listen. Listen to every sound that comes to your ears. It might be hard to listen attentively to more than one sound at a time, so at first try switching from one sound to another. Then try to listen to two at a time. Then add more. Does that change your [...]

I can’t remember the last time I did this, so it’s probably time to do so again. I want to list what I feel are my weaknesses, the things that I would most like to remedy or that I think the elimination of which would improve my game the most.
I’ll try to put them in [...]

I’m a volunteer with the local Fringe Festival. The Fringe is an annual festival that began in Edinburgh but now takes place in numerous cities around the world. It is dedicated to offering opportunities for anyone to put together a theater performance and to perform it. Originally the Fringe operated on a first come-first served [...]

Lately the blog has shifted to more specifics of playing poker. Partly this is due to the fact that I’ve been grinding and playing more hands more regularly. So let’s shift it back to non-specifics a bit again.
One of the things that happens when you focus on learning and improving something is that you can [...]

In my quest to improve my “meditative” or “Zen” state of mind while playing poker I’ve run across various things that happen to me, and a few ways of dealing with them.
One of the things that I notice is when my breathing gets tight. Often this is connected with tension in my body, particularly the [...]