Quest of a Closet Poker Player

I’m back in my pit, the comfortable confines of my home office with client work before me, administrivia to deal with, and new clients to find out of thin air. The question before me is can I significantly increase my productivity?

This place of rhetoric and introspection is peppered with the occasional hand history or bankroll demise, but really it serves two distinct purposes for me. One is a place for me to vent as well as explore things about myself, my own cathartic counseling session with, in essence, myself. The second purpose is to study poker in the context of real life, or at the least the lives of people like me or like I’ve been in the past. That includes those who are parents, spouses, involved in relationships, and children.

Online poker is often near me, a constant companion in the background of my daily life. Too often, my day is comprised of my fingers at the keyboard either working or faux-working on my business while a NLHE or PLO table pops up when the action is to me. The stakes mainly are minimal, saving any significant errors from driving me into bankroll ruin or emotional despair. There are words that come to mind, words like obsession or addiction, words that those foreign to the nuances of online poker might label me. I truly think the better term is habitual. I no longer have the constant thought of poker, of hands, of trying to get back to a table one more time. No, this is simply a defect in the machine one could term CC And His Laptop. Just as there are current problems with my laptop (e.g., sluggishness of the operating system, screen that has gone dark), there surely is a problem with the laptop when I’m in front of it. That problem is that I can’t have twenty-one Windows and six applications open without having a seventh program going, this one with some sort of symbol on it that looks like a spade.

Sweetie knows of this yet doesn’t speak of it, giving me a wide berth as I try to find my way. It is a wedge of separation between us, different than when poker was something that took me away from her or kept me up late at night. No, when she comes in and avoids looking at the monitor, it is more like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand to avoid hard questions and even more difficult answers.

This was my battle before our trip to London, and it is still here as I have returned. Can I change my daily life patterns, the series of simple decisions that direct what I do each minute and yield various life outcomes at the end of each day’s efforts. These outcomes touch all parts of one’s life: physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, professional, and intellectual. In each of these areas, we either take a step backwards, remain the same, or progress toward some goal, some bettement whether stated or not.

Each day, unfortunately, seems to bring steps backward for me in almost all of these areas. It would be great if poker was the cause, the hidden magnet whose discovery and removal would right the compass and navigation of one’s life. It is more than that, IMO.

This isn’t meant as a woe-is-me, I’m in a funk collection of words. On the contrary, I’m not depressed at all, in good spirits, sitting with the last remnants of coffee before me trying to convince myself to head upstairs for more. This is more matter-of-fact, actually. It is simply that I know that I know that I am not in a good place and want to find my way out of it for many reasons.

So before me is the question that I originally posed: Can I Change? I’ll work to spend some time laying out what that means and if I can indeed accomplish it. And as always, I’ll try to put it right out there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 10:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized.