Today is Sunday, but I won’t be playing the Sunday Million, because I’m currently in the United States.
For as long as I’ve had this blog, I’ve started every year with a series of posts about my poker-related goals and resolutions, and I’ve ended every year by assessing the progress I made towards them. I set goals for 2011– my most ambitious ever, actually- but now it seems pointless to even look at them, as Black Fridayrendered them more or less irrelevant. The best laid plans of mice and men, eh?
I’m not really in a place to start setting poker goals for this year, either, since I have no idea what the year will look like for me, poker-wise or otherwise. Not since my final semester of college have I felt this level of anxiety and uncertainty about my future. Those Big Questions are back: Where will I live? What will I do? Who will the people around me be?
I’ve spent the last week and and a half fending off questions, some idle and some concerned, at various gatherings of friends and family. My recent life as a nomadic poker professional was strange enough to them that they’ve learned to accept without alarm the fact that I don’t know where I’m going to be two weeks from now.
Online poker made enough mainstream headlines that random aunts and uncles knew something had happened. Explaining everything that’s happened to online poker and to me in the last eight months is a mouthful that hasn’t gotten much shorter despite the amount of practice I’ve had spelling it all out.
I want to be clear that I’m “anxious” rather than “worried” or “depressed”. There really aren’t bad outcomes, which is very reassuring. Making big decisions is stressful regardless, but it is considerable consolation to feel confident that everything will work out in the end.
The two big advantages that I have over my 21-year-old self are money and experience. I graduated from college with $10,000 in the bank, $50,000 in student loans, no job, and no plan. OK, I had a bit of a plan, but it was a stupid one.
I never would have predicted it, but poker proved to be the missing ingredient that salvaged that plan. It enabled me to live with my girlfriend in Boston, start a non-profit organization, and travel extensively. What began as a way to make ends meet while searched for a job has blossomed into a full-on career, a phenomenon that was highlighted when I joined PokerStars Team Online. Knowing that I was able to muddle my way through a period of anxiety and make a very satisfying life for myself once before gives me a lot more confidence for this go-round.
The funny thing is that after two years, the whole nomad thing was wearing a bit thin, for me anyway. I wanted a little more stability and to feel at home somewhere. This didn’t make its way on to the blog, but one of my goals for the year was to get more settled somewhere.
Fail. The girlfriend and I returned to Boston intending to settle in place there and work out some big decisions about where to go and what to do in the longer term. Those conversations were taking place in late February and March. You know what happened next.
Suddenly I was driving to Montreal on Easter Sunday to open a Canadian bank account in the hopes that it would facilitate withdrawal of the money I had online. Of course that was before PokerStars painlessly returned US players’ funds and before that other site did the things that it did (or before we realized what was going on there, anyway). There was a last-minute trip to Madrid, and although I didn’t cash in the European Poker Tour main event, my third top-100 finish in the WSOP main event certainly took the edge off of Black Friday. Then two months in the Canadian Rockies, a European road trip, two months in Vancouver (featuring another deep run in a live tournament), camping in Death Valley (do you know anyone else who flies to Las Vegas to take a break from gambling?), then my mother’s house in Maryland for the holidays and some undefined period thereafter. You can imagine how quickly family members’ initial concern for my professional well-being melts away when they hear that list of “hardships”.
The only advantage that 21-year-old Andrew possessed over the man I am now was having his twenties ahead of him. Before all the 30-, 40-, and 50-somethings start rolling their eyes, let me clarify that I don’t feel old in the sense that my best years are behind me or that I’ll never have the chance to do all those things I wanted to or anything like that. As usual, David Foster Wallace captures the feeling far better than I could:
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.
OK, it gets a little too dark there at the end. My own feeling is that, “It’s not too late but it soon will be”. I’ve managed to make remarkably few major decisions or long-term commitments in the last eight years, but that’s starting to feel less tenable.
As a poker player, my instinct is always to gather more information, and there’s still so much we don’t know about the Whos, Whats, Whens, Wheres, and Hows of online poker in the US. Whether not I’ll be able to supplement my income by playing online poker has huge implications for what I do and where and how I live.
Poker has also taught me to play the hand I’m dealt and accept that the eventual outcome may not be under my control. At the moment, I’m looking no more than a few weeks into the future. I’ve got a few more days in Maryland, then I’ll be in the Bahamas for the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, then it’s a little vaguer but possibly visiting friends and family in some combination of Maryland, New York, and Florida, then in Boston for a Boston Debate League tournament, and then… well, that’s still a work in progress.
Skimming a year’s worth of posts actually turned up a quote that should conclude this little rant nicely. It’s from one of Jared Tendler’s post-Black Friday blog posts, and I originally quoted it in my own post-Black Friday post:
Right now you’re looking for answers. The problem is that some of you are so desperate for answers you’ll listen to almost anything or anyone. That desperation is very similar to feeling desperate to win. You’ll do almost anything to shake this feeling because the uncertainty is almost too much to handle.
The reality is that there aren’t many answers out there right now. If you try to force an answer too soon, you’ll be making the same mistake if you were forcing the action because you need to win money right now. You have to stick to a sound and logical strategy.
Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s make it a good one.
I think because your are so analytical about poker/life, you probably feel at times like an “old soul”. I know I get that feeling from time to time when reading your stuff, but then have to remind myself that I am older than you. That’s cool, because you have a look at everything from all sides. I always get a little creeped out/sad when I read Wallace’s stuff because he’s gone. So much foreshadowing.
Yes it’s difficult to read DFW now. His suicide hangs like a shadow over every word.
10k in the bank? #baller
More seriously I think it is less likely today that doors close as time passes in this economy. If you can keep broadly well read and sharp mentally and physically, the retraining necessary to shift “career paths” should take little time. Especially if they involve training in the humanities. If you want to do something like maintain servers or solve P v NP then sure, time is going to shut some doors. There are always the consolations of philosophy.
And about things eventually being “drowned by time,” and us enjoying a state of affairs not unlike those of Boethius… I’d avoid worrying about that as well. Problems without solutions should be put aside in favour of wine and a woman’s company.
Well said. Re: the 10K thing that was actually the result of an absurd delay of in payment by the Chicago Public Schools. I was working as an independent contractor for the Chicago Debate League, and CPS took more than a year to pay me my $10,000 stipend. I had to pay rent, buy groceries, etc. without it, so when it finally did arrive it was money that wasn’t budgeted for anything, so it did provide a nice little buffer during my period of unemployment.