There is no Spoon

Remember the Matrix?  I love that film.  There's a great Zen teaching in it about being mindful of the beliefs we hold, assume are true and lead us into trouble.  Poker is littered with these pitfalls.  I was playing a few months ago with a young fellow who told me he never plays pocket queens.  He said he had been beaten too many times and now he just mucks them.  No matter how hard I tried to convince him that QQ is an excellent hand and wins far more times than it's share and he should press his equity by not only playing but raising this hand, it was no use.  To him the spoon was real, it couldn't be bent and there was no point in trying to convince him otherwise.

Tommy Angelo talks about the grey area in betting decisions.  He says that most of the controversy happens with decisions that are very close in terms of expectation.  In other words the things that generate the most heated debate are often the decisions that matter the least!  Whenever, I obsess over wanting to know if I "got it right" I need to stop and realize the truth.  There is no spoon.  Analysis of hands, talking with other players about handling situations, blogging and studying are all not what I'm talking about.  I'm talking about the perfectionistic pursuit the "right" answer and ascribing meaning to it.  My buddy who wouldn't play QQ in some vague way understood the mathematical strength of that hand but for him, personally, he felt cursed by it.  He had been beat with that holding enough to ascribe meaning to it, that "I, personally, am destined to fail with this hand and therefore I won't play it."

I get annoyed with a stretch of card death, feel like a loser after a getting stuck and berate myself as an idiot when I make mistakes.  But, these things have nothing to do with reality.  When I try to realize the truth, that there is no card death, that I'm not a loser or an idiot I can see there are no patterns and know that it is only my self.