Carlos Was Here

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

That’s something my girlfriend repeats often; a quick googling attributes it to Jim Rohn, a “motivational speaker and self help guru”.  Human beings are social creatures, and we take a lot of our cues from the people around us. They affect our mood, the way we think, and even our beliefs, as much as we’d like to pretend that we make deliberate and reasoned decisions about what we hold to be right or true.

One of my biggest concerns about playing poker professionally, especially live poker, was that I would end up surrounding myself with deadbeats, degenerates, scammers, angle-shooters, hucksters, liars, thieves, and shallow, one-dimensional, money-obsessed automatons. That concern is not unfounded; there’s no shortage of such folks in the poker world. Of course there are plenty of them in other walks of life, as well, which makes it all the more important to be mindful about the company you keep.

For the first few years of my poker career, the Boston Debate League was a valuable counterbalance. Whereas the average online poker player seemed to me lazy, entitled, and self-absorbed, the average urban debate league student was eager, motivated, and hard-working. Most of them hadn’t had a lot of things come easily to them in life, but they had good attitudes anyway and were working to make their lives better.

Needless to say, their teachers were quite inspiring as well. Not everyone who teaches in troubled public schools is a saint, but by and large, the folks who go the extra mile to coach extra-curricular activities and otherwise enhance their students’ lives are. In my experience even school administrators, who tend to get a bad rap, were largely hard-working and well-intentioned people doing thankless, unglamorous work despite being essentially set up for failure. Easily nine out of every ten people I met through the BDL and other Urban Debate Leagues were uplifting and inspiring and people I was glad to have in my life.

When I left Boston in 2009, I left a lot of those influences behind, and although I had a lot of great experiences, it was a bit isolating at times.

Enter Nate Meyvis and the Thinking Poker Podcast. Even before I met him in person, I was drawn to Nate simply because of his posts on 2+2. I recognized a kindred spirit, and as it turned out, we did in fact have a lot in common. The podcast was a chance to connect not just with him but with lots of interesting and inspirational people in the poker world. I think we’ve proved that they’re out there, even if they don’t always get as much attention as the scumbags.

Nate and I are fond of saying that we started the podcast so that we’d have an excuse to talk to Tommy Angelo, a goal that we accomplished on our second episode, though we keep finding excuses to bring him back.

I think it’s also correct to say that we started the podcast in order to meet Carlos Welch, even though we didn’t know he existed at the time. I can’t think of any better example of how choosing to associate with the right people helps to keep you focused on the right things. If you don’t know who Carlos is, do yourself a favor and listen to the linked episode as well as our other interviews with him. You’ll be better for it for a lot of reasons, but you also might not be able to make too much sense of the rest of this post if you don’t.

He was never a debater, but Carlos embodies a lot of what I found admirable about the BDL students and teachers I worked with. And even though he ultimately left his teaching job to pursue poker full-time, that wasn’t about abandoning his ideals as much as about recognizing that the system simply wasn’t set up in a way that made realizing those ideals possible.

I talk a big game about the “nitcast” and all that, but the truth is that having a bit of money in the bank has made me soft. I still think I’m more careful with money than a lot of poker players or other people in my tax bracket, but I routinely spend money on stuff that I would have rolled my eyes at ten years ago. I also know that I’m lazy, in a lot of ways, about doing what’s easy in life rather than thinking rigorously about my priorities, and that I’m too influenced by social norms and what other people will think.

Carlos forces me to confront all of these things. It’s not that he’s pushy or outspoken about his life philosophy; in fact, part of his charm is that he’s not invested in changing anyone else. He’ll dispense opinions and advice if they’re solicited, but he never proselytizes. Just by living his very unique life, he worms his way into your brain and serves as a constant reminder and example.

It was with great pleasure that I got to bring Tommy Angelo and Carlos together on Monday. The result was electric, for me at least, but I think for all three of us.

We met for lunch near Tommy’s home in Oakland, and almost immediately Tommy began finding similarities to Carlos. It’s not just that they’ve both done more than their share of deep thinking and decided to prioritize happiness over money or “normality”. As he pointed out, they began their careers at the same time in life, and in some of the same ways (they both left a house, a more traditional job, and a woman behind). After lunch, Tommy drove us to Temescal Regional Park, where our conversation continued as we walked around a small lake.

Whenever I’m with either of those two, I find myself wishing I had a recorder running, because they’re both  so quotable. With the two of them spitting wisdom, I was torn between trying to remember gems to share later versus sitting back and enjoying the experience. I can’t do it justice now with half-remembered anecdotes, so you’ll just have to take my word that it was transcendent. It helped that the weather was perfect, roughly 70 degrees and sunny.

At some point, Carlos paused, grinned from ear to ear, and said, “Man, I just realized today is Monday. I used to hate Mondays.”

That sums it up better than I can. In some sense, it was nothing remarkable, just lunch and a short walk with some friends. But that’s the magic of surrounding yourself with the right people: they make you appreciate those simple moments.

A pile of blankets on the floor is the only sign that Carlos spent the last few days at my apartment. Of course he’s far too classy to carve anything into the wall or the hardwood floors, but scrawled across my brain, I can clearly read, “Carlos was here.”