I like this style of emotional description of an experience. It’s VERY different from the time I got really into poker, which lasted about 20 years, but I felt some of the same dissociation and mental wandering.
I probably played about 50,000 hands in casino cash games and tournaments between 1991 and 2012 or so, and read and discussed (on Usenet rec.gambling and then rec.gambling.poker, pre- and early-internet). I made close friends at the table and electronically (meeting in Las Vegas annually for part of it), many of whom went pro, some of whom created online sites at the start of the boom times. It was my primary hobby and obsession for probably 10 of those years, and a side-gig and area of study for all of them.
I definitely reached the “mindless poker” stage, and had similar days (and nights; after work until ~1am was my normal play time) of daydreaming/hallucinating/drifting that I simply don’t remember any specifics about. One thing about live poker compared to computer simulations—it’s SLOW. If you can get 25 hands an hour, you’re in a good game (well, a fast game—a good game is one with incompetent opponents, who are often the slow ones).
It’s similar to the zone I get into while coding some non-complicated-but-still-necessary parts of a program—my consciousness checks in every few minutes, I suppose, but it feels like irrelevant daydreaming, at the end of which I need to figure out why my unit tests don’t work.
Mostly the rise of online poker—I live in a US State that makes it very risky to play online, and I didn’t enjoy it much when I played while traveling. But it made me realize that I didn’t enjoy the live games much anymore either—they’re generally filled with dumb people talking about sports and politics. The interesting game-theory, math, and psychology gets pretty well learned in the first decade of serious play and study, and in reality don’t matter much—the best games to play are filled with idiots, and you just have to avoid egregious errors.
I like this style of emotional description of an experience. It’s VERY different from the time I got really into poker, which lasted about 20 years, but I felt some of the same dissociation and mental wandering.
I probably played about 50,000 hands in casino cash games and tournaments between 1991 and 2012 or so, and read and discussed (on Usenet rec.gambling and then rec.gambling.poker, pre- and early-internet). I made close friends at the table and electronically (meeting in Las Vegas annually for part of it), many of whom went pro, some of whom created online sites at the start of the boom times. It was my primary hobby and obsession for probably 10 of those years, and a side-gig and area of study for all of them.
I definitely reached the “mindless poker” stage, and had similar days (and nights; after work until ~1am was my normal play time) of daydreaming/hallucinating/drifting that I simply don’t remember any specifics about. One thing about live poker compared to computer simulations—it’s SLOW. If you can get 25 hands an hour, you’re in a good game (well, a fast game—a good game is one with incompetent opponents, who are often the slow ones).
It’s similar to the zone I get into while coding some non-complicated-but-still-necessary parts of a program—my consciousness checks in every few minutes, I suppose, but it feels like irrelevant daydreaming, at the end of which I need to figure out why my unit tests don’t work.
What made you stop in the end?
Mostly the rise of online poker—I live in a US State that makes it very risky to play online, and I didn’t enjoy it much when I played while traveling. But it made me realize that I didn’t enjoy the live games much anymore either—they’re generally filled with dumb people talking about sports and politics. The interesting game-theory, math, and psychology gets pretty well learned in the first decade of serious play and study, and in reality don’t matter much—the best games to play are filled with idiots, and you just have to avoid egregious errors.