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Remember That

Posted by Alex Fitzgerald on January 19, 2012 · Leave a Comment (Edit)

Yeah, that 14th in the PCA stung like hell, especially after I had the chip lead with 20 left or whatever. Yeah, the PCA was awesome.

Sometimes I feel like there’s so much to say, and I have all these expectations of what I should write down when I get to the keyboard. Then all the thoughts come at once, which means none come out at all. I don’t want to write that much. Sleeping is much easier. Staying in my thoughts seems natural. To admit what’s going on in your head to an audience means you’ll have to take responsibility for the more senseless spirals.

Sometimes you just gotta take advantage of your delirium while you have it.

I woke up at 5:00 AM today to clean my house. When I’m frustrated about what I can’t control in poker I find something I can control. The PCA took a bite out of me. Close calls make you demand rhyme or reason, when there’s frequently neither. The questions crept up in my head. “Why couldn’t it have been me?” Why couldn’t I win the flip? Why did I do that? Could I have limped in? I wanted to limp/call. Nobody’s telling me I made a mistake, but is that enough for me? Why out of the five times I’ve made the final two tables of a Pokerstars live Main Event have I only made one final table, and a seventh at that? What am I doing wrong?

I didn’t feel the pain like I did with other close calls. A part of me has matured (miraculously). A part of me concedes, “I gave it my all, leave it at that.”

But it was so unfinished. Watching another guy hold the trophy again. Not even taking that final table photo. When I had the chip lead early in the day. Six figures couldn’t have hurt.

70k though? For 5 days work? Looking at the Caribbean from your comped honeymoon suite? Kid, get over this competitive bullshit. You’re a lottery winner.

I wouldn’t be a player though if it didn’t bug me. So I started managing what I could manage, punishing what I could punish, completing what I could complete. First day back in Costa Rica I put in 10+ miles of road work, putting in 25 push-ups every mile or so. I’d ordered a lot of big meals in the Bahamas, and it felt good to move my body again, work off a little of that good living.

Coming home I took a hard look at my mountain dwelling. My peaceful abode had turned into a dust up cluster fuck. Leaving the windows open all year while I grinded was great for smelling the mountain air, bad for keeping out bugs that would die and drift behind boxes, bad for keeping out dust and spores. I’d taken care of everything on the surface but pockets of the crap were hiding somewhere, probably in my storage. My storage and files still looked like I planned to be in Costa Rica for a summer while I was watching over my horses, not like I’d been here for two and a half years. My storage, to the left of where I grinded, just had boxes and receipts laying everywhere, piles of cords, broken electronics, Casterboards with burnt wheels, so much crap I’d taken to leaving a refrigerator box to cover the door so I didn’t have to look at it. On the shelves behind my desk were just layers and layers of documents, not categorized at all. My book cases had stacks and stacks of magazines and random books, some without covers. My DVDs were in a pile underneath my TV. All my cleaning supplies were falling out of a closet. My Christmas tree was still up. The floor underneath my bed had gotten stained somehow. My clothes had fallen over in the closet and made a pile. Stray socks dotted the loafs like sprinkles.

This wasn’t where I wanted to grind. It didn’t look like the peaceful respite it once was. How could I be calm and organized mentally with this developing catastrophe around me? If I wanted to move sometime soon how the hell was I going to hand this over to the owner? Nobody had complained about my place. My girlfriend’s aunt comes by once a week to clean, and it always looks decent. I could have waited for her help, she would’ve stacked everything again, cleaned the floors, it would have looked decent. It’s just all the messes had become too damn tidy for me. I was sick of covering over them, wondering why the hell I picked an arrangement that fell into chaos so often. The truth was I hadn’t picked any arrangement. I’m always lost in my thoughts, lost in the latest game, a book, a meeting, whatever. I’d produced from this desk, but I’d paid no attention to my environment. I hadn’t placed any pride in a home I’d lived in for years, because I was always moving four months later.

I wanted to feel like “this is my pad, this is my peace, this is where I get to work.” So I just took everything out. Everything off the tables and desks. Everything out of the storage. Everything out of the boxes. Everything out of the medicine cabinet. One room at a time. I filled up six trash bags. I labeled and filled five boxes for my storage. I dusted every surface, then swept the floor under it, then mopped it with disinfectant. I made that hard wood shine. I consciously thought about how I wanted to organize my clothes or my books in my little library. I thought about where I wanted my tooth brush to be in the morning.

When the place looked like a house my gay friends would want to live in I knew I’d done it. It took fourteen hours, but I enjoyed how exhausted it made me. Laying down on my couch, looking at an office I would love to work in, I just felt good. I felt pride in my surroundings. I loved my house. I was happy to be home.

In the process of cleaning the whole place my frustration left me pretty much entirely. My body felt spent from the run the day before. My mind felt clean through exhaustion. My surroundings made me calm.

I seemed to get some guidance from outside sources while I was cleaning. I put on my headphones at one point and put on the new Vakill. I sorted through things, mentally and in my house. I’d been thinking at one point, “you know I’m going to be 24 here in a few days. I thought I’d have a live win or a Sunday major win by now, and I don’t have either. I got the Second Chance, but the Million, the 1.5 Million, The FTOPs, the San Remo final table, the 750k…I couldn’t close out any of them. I don’t have the money from any of those finishes too because of my awful business decisions and drug addictions. Damn, I really messed up. I could’ve been really set by now.”

Then I swear to God, the second I thought that the lyric came on, “…none of my niggas lived to see 24.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivEBvq7uMgU

I listened to the album a little closer. Vakill doesn’t really glorify anything. Just talks about what he grew up around, how he went from moving drugs to music, and how both bent him over at different times. Even though he doesn’t make much it’s clear he’s just grateful to make music, to be alive.

This guy, this poet…I mean I’ve listened to him for a while, and he’s just so talented and intelligent. He deserves to travel the world to spread his message. His tracks can be soulful or just a blur, just an exhibition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N04x0LGqgSQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33DPR0Si24Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGeoi9gFXhM&feature=related

Yet a guy like this doesn’t make anything anymore. No one makes anything off of music anymore. He seems happy to just get by, but you don’t hear him bragging about exotic vacations or having stacks. He’s just grateful to be doing what he does, even if he doesn’t get to leave Chicago too much. What kind of spoiled brat am I to travel the world and be frustrated I got reeeeaaaalll close to 2 million, but instead got 70k for 5 days work. I don’t think these guys make 70k a year between album sales and ruthless touring. They make like 20-30k, or not even that. They all have other jobs back home when they’re not on tour. They put their heart and soul into their work, and they know they’re most likely never going to get shit from it.

Feeling grateful now that I realized how ungrateful I was, I decided to catch up on the Adam Carolla podcasts I’d been missing on the road. The first episode I tune into he goes into a rant about his lowest moment, when they announce its the Northridge Earthquake anniversary.

http://www.adamcarolla.com/ian-edwards/

He goes on to say when that happened he was living with two guys in a shithole apartment, he’d quit his improv troop because after years his acting was going no where, his face had broken out into a herpes, and he was getting into screaming matches with his girlfriend and her mother who were squatting at his apartment. He was making fifteen bucks an hour as a construction worker, had no insurance, and wasn’t going anywhere. He’d turned 30 right then, and that seemed to produce the charge, the “wtf” moment, because he assumed at 30 he would have a good idea where his life was headed.

He said three months later he met Jimmy Kimmel. His whole career got started.

I got done with cleaning the house and went to eat with my girlfriend. Just slabs of fresh fish, vegetables, rice, beans, and plantains. All for less than $4.50 a plate. Just another luxury I take for granted. We went to a friends house and beat up on Mortal Kombat arcade mode for a while. Think I’m gonna buy one of these modded PS2s here pretty soon.

I come home and my girlfriend’s uploaded all these pics from Bahamas. Us hanging out at this old Nassau harbor, me playing the main event, pics of our suite and the view. We didn’t even get pics of the night we celebrated Jaka’s 3rd place finish at Aura, or when we went to the fish fry and just drank Sands and ate conch. I mean, it trips me out man. I say it a lot, but this whole life still dumbfounds me . I feel dumb for ever getting mad at the close calls, when we get to go to Asia, Latin America, Europe, and all over the states. We get to compete for a living, like the athletes we watched growing up.

Just getting to compete each day to me seems like such a blessing. Every day I can change my life. Through hard work and study I can change my future. That’s not true for so many people. They’re born into a bad situation or they put themselves in an unchanging role they’re not satisfied with.

I want to put in the study too. That 70k helped out. I got the money I’m used to being able to use online, expenses paid for a while, and whatnot…but there’s still a long way between where I’m at and where I want to be financially.

I opened up the WPT and EPT pages, but honestly I don’t see me going to many of them. It’s just so much time and money for one donkament. You have to run so well to win any individual tournament. Live tournaments should be the crown jewel, the reward for a long grind, for getting in that six figure profit online. Over and over again, live has just bled me. I think it’s taught me a lot about the game, and yeah…if a few of these close calls had gone a little differently maybe I’d have A LOT of money right now…but that’s not what happened and I can’t think about what could have happened. What I do know right now is that I am in a spot where I could finally use the money I make from poker wisely. I’m not fucked up all the time anymore, I thankfully still have no dependents, I’m able to work for much longer periods of time than before, I have a lot of money to play with…it seems like its time to put in that real grind, that pure grind. Keep the buy-ins low and the volume high, put in the hours.

I plan on getting the biggest monitor I can find in Costa Rica, and getting money on every site with a worthwhile tournament. That’ll require me going through the weird verification process that comes with my pseudo Costa Rican residency, which admittedly I’ve been pretty lazy on when my online roll and grind weren’t going so great, but…this close call got me hungry. It’s time to charge. I have the whole network set up and I have the support I need. I have the peaceful grind pad. I have financial security. I have physical and mental health. I just need to do it.

I’d also like to see me actually go for a P5s ranking for once. I’ve never put in the volume to make a run for it. I should try, at least once.

Working from home more would also help me do other things besides poker. Doing a mental inventory I realized two of my major frustrations from last year were that I wasn’t devoting time to much else besides poker…and I still felt like an infant speaking Spanish around here. Right now I’ve been in touch with one of the better institutes. My girlfriend’s grandmother provides housing for Spanish students from around the world, going to myriad schools in the area. She says this institute gets people speaking Spanish the fastest. I am awful with languages, but if I plan to live here as long as I want to its a necessity I start speaking Spanish. If I’m gone all the time for live events I’ll miss a ton of classes…and I’ll be putting 10-15k up a month on one tournament shot…so again, live looks less and less attractive.

Of course if I wanted my best shot at just making a mil I’d take every 10k I could play, but I want to grind out what I always make online and piss away live, and invest in myself. I want to build some security before I take the big shots again. I want live events to be fun, and not what my life hinges on.

You know that 14th frustrated me but it was the kick in the ass I needed. Also just reading how many people were nice enough to write something on my Facebook…I didn’t even really check it out till the other day. It was crazy how many people were nice enough to write me a positive comment on my run. Makes you feel real lucky, real loved. Thank you so much if you took the time to write a positive note. It’s really nice to have that kind of support.

My Plugs: Check out my vids at Pocketfives Training, hit me up for lessons at assassinatocoaching@gmail.com, see other stuff I write with my friends at www.pokerheadrush.com, and follow my Twitter at TheAssassinato