Through the Glass Darkly

Well, my ticket's dead. 3-1 doesn't pay the bills when you need to go 4-0. The Colts played like Dolts and made the Bolts look like gods. And I thought Indy was the one mortal lock for the weekend. At least Pauly should be happy with the result in the Giants game.

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Last week I stayed out late several times. I was out until 2am on Monday, Thursday and Friday, and until 5am last night, in each case hanging out with friends that I haven't seen in a while for whatever reason. Alcohol was involved on all occasions, and I found that the most interesting conversations tended to take place after midnight. I had a few thoughts come out of those conversations.

Introspection is the name of the game in poker, as in many things in life. If you're not always seeking to improve, and to better yourself, to add new skills or remove bad habits or flaws, then you're letting yourself fall far short of your personal poker potential. That improvement comes about by (1) removing your limiting views ("I can't become a better stud player because the game is too complex for me"), (2) stating goals and reaching them (reading a few books on stud and getting some practice in), and (3) critically reviewing the results.

The review part is where introspection is absolutely necessary. Sure, sometimes the input of others is useful ("What do you think of my line in this hand?"), but most of the time you have to hold the mirror up in front of your face and take a really hard look at the whys and wherefores of the thought processes going through your head.

Public writing, on a poker message board or a poker blog, is helpful for organizing your thoughts and attaining the first two parts of the improvement process, but I wonder how useful it is for the last one. Introspection requires a completely unflawed self-assessment, without outside bias. The knowledge that others are watching, others are listening, others are reading can often cause us to either be (1) untrue to ourselves ("Clearly, I'm the best tournament player alive and if luck had no role, I'd win every time"), or (2) present our own introspective analysis in a manner that is most favorable to us - to "gloss" over or downplay some of the downsides (insert your favorite poker blogger's name here). It's a form of the observer paradox at work. The writer has stopped writing for himself and being truly introspective, and as a result both the reader and the writer lose something, although obviously the writer, by losing his critical, unbiased opinion, has lost the most.

At the end, it comes down to a question of insecurities. All of us have them, and few of us deal with them very well. Efforts to make our play look better, or to show that we think about the game deeper than we may actually think about it, or just generally to impress those around us, are efforts at masking those insecurities with overconfidence. "If luck weren't involved, I'd win every time." Introspection definitely has a place in the poker universe -- in any universe, really -- but I truly believe you can only reach it by walking the road alone.