Epic Fail

Okay, this post will probably be all over the place, not as structured as usual, I just have a bunch of thoughts bouncing around in my head right now.

Sigh, I delayed updating this blog till things straightened out a bit. I had a truly terrible month. Lost 1.2k. First month I've ever lost $$ as a grinder. I over-tweaked some stuff in my game and suffered the consequences. I'm not completely to blame, don't think it was greed, I just wanted to get better and have a better ROI (like jabracada, who is arguably the best 180's player in the world), but I wasn't doing it right, lol. Not really sure if I'm running good or I'm playing better, but things have gotten better this month.

About my July goals: The only word that really comes to mind is "Sigh". There's a mexican saying that goes "El que mucho abarca, poco aprieta". The literal translation would be "He who covers too much, can't squeeze". It's obviously metaphorical, but, like, if you over extend your arms, you can't really squeeze too hard. So that's what happened. I crashed and burned really hard. Couldn't accomplish shit, even when I put in many 10+ hour days. Oh well, live and learn. I did read 1 entire book, 1k pages long (A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin, sequel to A Game of Thrones). It's fucking awesome. It's HBO's Rome meets Lord of the Rings. And there's dragons and shit. One thing that affected me was that I broke up with my girlfriend. If your brain's not in the game, it's pretty hard to own souls.

Stable: Really glad that I teamed up with Gavin555. We complement each other pretty well (no homo, lol). We've made some mistakes, as was to be expected, but I think the business is coming along pretty well. Very happy with it. At the start, I was thinking that if we ever reached 100 students, I'd quit poker to manage the stable + coach, but not anymore. I just love the grind too much. I may well play all my life, hahahaa. I'm throwing a huge party when I reach 1 million (with my future kids and their wives and shit).  EVEN with a truly ghastly month (July), and me busting my ass off to lose money, I still loved my life for the most part. Absolutely no one I know irl loves his job as much as I do. I gladly not go out on a friday, in order to be healthy to play on saturdays. A professional player in a recreational atmosphere. Can't beat that. If I could be earning a living by playing Nintendo, I'd probably do it, hahaha.

Poker skills in real life: mrpaintball asked in a recent group conversation "what are some positive skills acquired by professional poker players". My snap response was "Work Ethic, Increased Pattern Recognition, Mathematical Reasoning". I did underestimate the most important thing tho, which is Problem Solving. Poker is a constantly changing endeavor. Like life, it's full of challenging things that you need to overcome along the way. Poker has taught me not to give up EVER. I'm not talking about a chip and a chair here. I'm talking about having the confidence to pull through whatever it is that's holding you back. Here's a good story. I was 8 years old, playing my first tennis tournament. I reached the finals versus a kid much better than me. I was down 6-1, 3-1 (so 3 games from losing), and it started raining and it was postponed 2 hours. I was practically bawling on the ride back, since I'd never lost and really hate losing at anything. My dad was really helpful. He told me that I wasn't adjusting to the bounce correctly (top spin). We practiced about half an hour in my house, and I started to anticipate the bounce better. After our session, he showed me a picture. It was a stork with a frog in its mouth. BUT, the frog somehow had its hands out and was choking the stork. The stork had eyes as if it was dying. The caption read "NEVER EVER GIVE UP". It was such an awesome picture. Long story short, I ended up winning the match 3-6, 6-4, 6-0. Such a sick lesson I learned then, and I never forgot it. Dad = hero obv.

Well, that's it for now. Will probably update today again, but need to socialize a bit for now. All work and no play makes Chavarov a dull boy, hahaha.