I take it back

A day off was what I needed I guess. Back in the saddle, I won $800 in my first 150 hands, or less than an hour of play. A few statistics, representing the greatest rush I've ever seen, let alone experienced: 80BB in 150 hands, 35% flops seen, 68% flops won if seen, 28% of hands won, 100% showdowns won. Yikes. And I only had one big pair. Just a loose aggressive table paying off my multitude of top pair decent kicker hands, or folding to my bluffs having not seen me showdown a losing hand once. Another session following had me on top of yesterday's loss.

This just manifests more clearly why most decent players aren't making much money in these shorthanded games; they just can't handle the swings. While I've experienced the extremes in two days, much smaller swings happen on a session to session basis (according to your standard deviation, mine being about 20BB/100 right now). A lot of my winnings are coming from good players who are caught in a downswing, and pay me off with losing hands more than they ever would when in control of their game. I experience this too, but to a much lesser degree. Once a player can make the transition to just seeing chips for what they are, they don't mind losing 50-100BB in a day or two as long as they know they played their best. It'll come back in spades. In the end, you're not playing to score a big rush, or dig out of a losing streak. You're playing for the far off in the distance average hourly rate. The more hands you play, the closer your true winnings will reflect that number. You simply have to keep your head, pay attention to every hand and every players betting tendancies, and make the best play you can in every situtation. Pretty easy really. Meh.

And with the many truly horrible players playing right now, that far off number keeps getting higher and higher. I have about fifty players in my buddy list at the moment, and every day I see fewer and fewer of them coming back. But new ones keep coming in :) Make your easy money now though, because it's not going to last much longer. I'm so tempted to put my bankroll at risk and start playing mid/high limit ring games, because if you want to make a decent amount at poker in the future, you're going to need to be playing higher limits. Low limit players will get better, and the maniacs will bust, and the current 2-3BB/100 winners will be nearly non-existant. Which means .5-1BB/100 at $50/100 and up will be the best most good players will be able to make. Maybe things won't get that dry, but I'd like to always have Poker open as an option for a little extra spending money (but certainly not a living).

Darren has been taking care of my Mustang while I'm gone, and he and Ryan Hoff have figured out my previously mentioned idling problem. Apparently my carbureatour is a tad too overkill for my little 302, so I need to downgrade. They put Ryan's carb from his '69 'Stang with a similar (though far inferior, haha) engine onto mine, and it ran perfectly. Hopefully this means I'm done troubleshooting the bitch, which I say with nothing but love and affection. This summers earnings are going to cover a few modifications for the poor baby, as well as living expenses until I can find a job, and a new laptop. I quickly realized I couldn't keep paying my brother 10% of my winnings (I should have learned this from my experiences with Keeler :p) for using his laptop. So, a hot new Dell Inspiron 9300 is in the mail and hopefully will get here soon.

So, you've read this far... maybe you're as bored as I am! Well then, keep on my friend, I'm riding a wave of mental diarrhea.

Catherine asked me to post some poetry. I enjoy writing, and have a few short stories I could share, but I don't enjoy reading or writing poetry. Most folks from TAC enjoy both, which is odd. Darren wrote his thesis on the importance of poetry in education (or maybe more generally, in the intellectual life). I should probably read it thorougly, but from what I gathered, his argument went something like this: The imagination presents ideas to the intellect gathered from sense perceptions. Poetry has the greatest effect on the imagination. Therefore our ideas or the ability to think are greatly affected by poetry.

Now that I've started writing this, I'm actually very curious about what he wrote, so maybe I'll make another post after I read it. But for the moment, suffice to say that the only poetry which I've ever read that had any influence on my imagination, was Milton's Paradise Lost. And he was a freaking Puritan. It had the same effect on my imagination that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progess did when I was a child. Now Bunyan was a Puritan, and Pilgrim's Progress a work of prose, not poetry, but the fanciful allegory it employed is not far from the style employed in some poetry. Which brings me to the briding concept here, in that I hate allegory. So, two Puritans have written two separate works that are my single favorite works of their respective genres, both dealing with a religious subtext.

So, daring to generalize from these observations, I therefore dislike allegory or poetry not dealing with a religious theme, and not written through a puritanical viewpoint. We therefore have the very roots of a deep personal and religious self-loathing! Let me explain.

I have a very active imagination, and love works of fiction, mainly for their ability to depict rich and engaging imagery. I can remember entire stories from my childhood as collections of images and feelings. Re-reading these books, or ones similar, bring back the same moods and images brought about in my childhood. Which is probably the greatest joy most elderly people experience (but that's another topic), and one I too enjoy greatly. Music and movies I enjoyed when I was younger have the same effect. Weather as well. All of these things bring about a certain familiar emotion or frame of mind, I suppose you could say an imposition of the imagination on some present experience. But most novels, music or movies that I read/listen/watch these days fail to impact me at all in this way. Which isn't to say I don't enjoy them, but only in a different way, without much effect on my imagination.

Poetry and allegory are supposed to directly engage the imagination. The previous paragraph is simply to say that I dislike these mediums for that reason. As I've said, they simply don't do anything for me on that level. Most poetry is an attempt of the author to reveal an emotion or experience to the reader through some linguistic form or rhythmical quality. Unless a poet is writing about something that I've experienced myself, I can't really imagine it. And if I can, I find the form of poetry to be too artificial and cumbersome to present such ideas. Why not just come out and say what you're thinking, or if you're trying to depict some type of imagery, use prose? Whatever poetry tries to convey, can be done better through prose is my generaly feeling. So I generally find myself annoyed at any poetry I can relate to. The only exception to this, is Paradise Lost. This is the only example of poetry that I've ever come across that utilized a beautiful and powerful rythm and form. The imagery produced is amazing as well, but simply reading the verse aloud in my head lends a quality that I've never experienced before. The same thing goes for allegory. The Faerie Queen, Gulliver's Travels, The Divine Comedy.. I can only enjoy these stories as stories, and get annoyed whenever the allegorical intention of the author imposes itself. On the other hand, the very story of Pilgrim's Progress is allegory. There is no imposition, no hamfisted attempt at political or religious satire.

To conclude, why are these two works written by Puritans? Does anti-Popery, a hatred of tradition and symbolism, lend itself to these genres? Clearly! Now my life is based on tradition and symbolism, and Popery. Clearly, my experience with poetry and allegory reveals my own puritanical leanings, and hatred of my childhood, hidden to myself until now. My life is a sham, and I can but move to New England, and join myself with my Calvanist brethren. Farewell.