Shut Up and Take My Money!!

Well it's been about two months since I left my job, and I have to say that the time has been significantly less eventful than I envisioned it.  I literally spent an entire week cleaning my house and trying to "get my life organized" and shortly after that I found myself more bored than I could ever remember being, at a time when all of my friends were at work.  I tried picking up new shows on Netflix, but I guess I'm just not much of a TV guy because I haven't watched any in a little over a month.  I also joined the YMCA and started taking Pilates classes with the stay-at-home moms and retired women who frequent the Y in the middle of the day.  Let's just say my presence is a little bit of an anomaly.

So after a week or so of amazingly relaxing boredom, I finally decided to start thinking about the reason I left my job in the first place, and started to put in 20ish hours a week at Foxwooods on top of 20ish hours a week of at-home study.  The initial results have been a bit of a roller coaster but the details are rather boring so today I'm going to share a fun story instead.

I was getting toward the end of a 6-hour $1/$2 No Limit cash game session that had been relatively uneventful up to this point.  I think I had built up about a $75-$100 profit, and the other players at the table had been pretty quiet throughout the session.  I was planning on leaving in about 15-minutes when a new player was seated at the table.  He was a short, thin guy with a kind of ragged looking white t-shirt and a gold chain, and he sat down with $300.  Over the next 5-10 hands he quickly lost his entire stack by implementing a strategy of calling literally every single bet regardless of size and regardless of how weak his cards were.  He was determined to make this strategy work, however, as he wasted no time in pulling out another $300 to put down on the table.

So needless to say, I quickly changed my original plan of leaving in 15-minutes.  I was staying at the table until this new guy left or I went broke.  We were there for another 30-45 minutes, and during that time our new table friend lost his stack 2-3 more times and bought back in each time.  So far I hadn't had a chance to play a hand vs. him, but after waiting patiently I finally found my chance.  I won't go into the boring details of the hand, but long story short, I managed to take a $125 chunk out of his stack.

Now this is where things started to get interesting.  At the end of each hand, our new friend had a habit of picking up his cards to look at them in a way that exposed the cards to the players seated near him.  This was never a major issue, because he only ever did this when the players sitting near him were out of the hand, but it was still revealing a lot of information about his holdings to some players that the rest of the players at the table didn't have access to.  It didn't bother me too much, as it was pretty obvious that his cards were garbage the majority of the time, but the player to my left had had enough by the time this hand was over.

So after this particular hand between myself and our new friend, he picked up his cards to look at them, exposed them to his neighbors, and the player to my left demanded to see what they were.  Rather than show him, he threw the cards into the muck and insisted that it didn't matter.  This pissed off the player to my left, but he was mostly upset with the dealer for allowing this behavior to continue for as long as it had.  After a bit of an argument, the floor was eventually called over to settle the dispute.  For all of you non-poker readers, the "floor" is the term used for the poker room supervisors.  One of their responsibilities is to settle disputes whenever they come up, which is a pretty common thing in live poker games.

So they came over, and our new friend started to get visibly upset about the situation.  After a little more arguing he finally stood up and announced that he was leaving.  He had about $150 left on the table, and rather than take it he said "I don't fucking care about this, I'm rich, I don't need this".  He then took the $150 stack and pushed it in front of the woman seated beside him and told her to keep it.  The floor told him that he can't give money to another player at the table, so he responded by asking "where do you want me to leave it then?  I can leave it on the floor, I can leave it on this chair, but I'm not taking it with me."  They quickly realized that he was actually serious about this so they basically turned away and let him hand the money to his neighbor.  She was kind of in shock at this point and was afraid to touch the money, but I'm pretty sure she warmed up to it pretty quickly.

What Should I Do Next?

As many of you may know, I recently took the huge leap of leaving my full time engineering job to pursue my dream of true independence.  I honestly can't say that I know exactly what "true independence" means, but at this point I envision it involving the ability to set my own hours, and to "work" in a way that I can earn money doing the things that I already love to do.  Needless to say, my job as an engineer wasn't fulfilling those two requirements.

During my time leading up to this big move, I always knew that there was something a little different about the way I viewed the working world, but I could never quite put my finger on what it was.  I often found myself diving into new interests and hobbies, only to get decently good at them and then abandon them shortly after.  In the last 10-years I have attempted juggling, uni-cycling, lock picking, flying, shooting, starting a cookie business, brewing beer, scuba diving, fantasy sports, and of course poker.  I will fully admit that there were times where I worried that I had lost the ability to motivate myself and to stay committed to whatever I put my mind to, and I honestly think that one of the primary reasons that I finished my part time MBA was to prove to myself that I could finish something that I started.  Over time I was able to convince myself that this way of thinking was nothing to be worried about, and that there was actually plenty of value to be added by people who think this way, and choose broadening horizons over specialization.  It wasn't until I watched this TED talk by Emilie Wapnick that I realized that there was an appropriate word to describe my condition; that I am a Multipotentialite.  I'd go into more detail about what that word means, but I'm lazy and would rather send those of you who are curious to Emilie's TED talk which is far more detailed and eloquent than I could ever attempt to reproduce.

Enough about my past, let's get back to my most recent adventure.  Like I said at the start, I recently left my job in a somewhat surprising move to some.  While I was thoroughly enjoying the perks of free world travel, decent pay and benefits, free education, and the opportunity to see some genuinely cool things; I just couldn't see myself in the same 9 to 5 corporate office type role for much longer.  I craved independence, so naturally my best option was to suddenly quit my job and become a professional poker player.   There, I said it.  I know it sounds crazy to many, but it's surprisingly a much more calculated move than it sounds; I have been thoroughly preparing for it for the past 3ish years.

So where do I go from here?  I'll save the details of how my first couple of months of freedom have been for another post, but for now I'd like to finish up with a few thoughts on why I've decided to write this blog in the first place.  Let's just say that the poker scene isn't exactly the overly social environment that it may appear to be (or not appear to be) in the events you see on TV.  70% of the people I encounter on a daily basis are retired men, 10% are gambling degenerates, 10% are poker professionals, 6% are casino employees, and 4% are women.  Don't get me wrong, I love what every one of them has to offer, but for a mid-20's guy looking to expand his social and "professional" circle, the poker tables are probably not the best place to start.  So with a little bit of encouragement, I've finally decided to branch out, expand on my social networking skills, practice my "personal branding", and hopefully meet some awesome new people along the way.

At the very least, this blog will be a way for my friends and family to keep up with what I'm up to, which is a request that I'm flattered to say I've received way more times than I ever expected.  As with everything else in my life, this blog is a new hobby that could quickly fall off the priority list, so at this point I can't really make any promises as to how often I'll be posting or even what I'll be talking about.  But I do think that it could help benefit me in terms of keeping in touch with the real world, and keeping me accountable with my poker related goals.  I look forward to getting this thing started, and I hope you guys get some enjoyment in reading this going forward.