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what I meant to say is..

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just that I am so happy to be winning money at poker and blackjack. I can't tell you how great it is. My money problems have literally been solved. I worked so hard at it because I knew the reward was so worth it, and I should put everything into its pursuit.

I came to the realization, if you prepare for it - perhaps, anything - as going to be difficult, then you will find it easy. But if you prepare for it to be easy, then it will be exceedingly difficult. As they say, the more you sweat in preparation, the less you bleed in battle.

And I did that, out and out. I studied poker seriously for 1.5 years because I had had some success when I was younger, 15, after reading a chapter of Super System, and I sort of felt called to the game. So I looked up to see what the good books were, and I read Sklanky's books, and a few others on poker, and then I discovered Mike Caro and read nearly all of his articles he has online.. and etc., etc., Obviously I studied more than this. But I studied poker on a whim, for the hell of it, because I loved it, the same way I'd studied chess. I also studied blackjack in the same way, as I had been absolutely fascinated upon seeing it and playing a few hands.

But then I played. and yet I lost. I had been preparing for a no-limit tournament, but for some reason I could only get into a cash limit game. And this is funny, if you don't know how to play limit and get caught unaware in it, having never even thought about it, you're going to lose all your money, almost certainly.

I only lost 50 that time. I've always been good at keeping my losses to a minimum. Now I've mastered the basics, and enough of the advanced concepts, to be able to basically slaughter that game. I mean it is basically the easiest game I could create. In any case, I can play and.. a high degree of the time, win 100-150, and sometimes more.

When I add blackjack, that creates more dollars won but slightly more volatility. In any case, I know it is not a fortune. It's relatively small, but two things, I spend very little, and I've begun to understand the importance of managing money. And if I am always betting my money on positive expectations, like, let's say 3% or 10%, then it will simply grow and grow.

The most interesting thing about blackjack is studying a subject, or game, and then when playing it for the first time, able to bet and win at it, a fair amount of money. And as you begin to understand the game more. . . that is the beauty of poker and blackjack, and gambling. You are rewarded almost instantly, almost immediately, for your decisions. Your reward is commensurate with you skill. There is "luck" in the short term, but in the long term, mathematical expectation is what writes the chart. In a day job you can not experience much salary increase, unless you are some special kind of go-getter; or, again, very "lucky".

I write lucky in "s because there is no such thing as lucky, really. There isn't good or bad, or even winning or losing, only "up" and "down". If you make decisions that have positive expectations, then you will always be going up; if you make decisions with negative consequences, everything will be going down. Treat anything that occurs as irrelevant, because it is only temporary. Everything has to be experienced only as it can be experienced "Now". It does me no good to focus on what happened before, or what may happen in the future, as much as it helps me to focus on what's here in front of me.

In gambling there is also not "good luck" or "bad luck." There are only mathematical expectation, and statistical variation, which might otherwise be thought of as luck. It is due to these two factors entirely that events occur. Good luck and bad luck have no independent reality, they are only our ascription to perceived events.

Events happen at the result of randomness. That is, every event, however normal, has a degree of randomness, and is indeed shaped by it. Randomness shapes everything in some way; from the shape of the s, to the election of a president, to the birth of a child. The world is nearly too complex to understand mathematically, certainly more than we do now, but it can be seen more simply in the abstract universe of gambling. In gambling events are clearly seen as caused by randomness, and the rules pertaining to its function on them.

The rules pertaining to randomness acting on events are mathematical expectation, and statistical deviation. Every bet has a positive or negative expectation. The cumulation of all of the bets will near the average increase of what the expectation says it should be. In other words, statistical deviation becomes vanishingly small, as the number of trials becomes extremely high. And for continuously making a bet with an expectation, there is a possibility you will always be down. Or in reverse, always be up.

The events of the world are also caused by randomness, although the real language of Reality we are not really aware of - that is, as common wisdom. We use language but we don't know what Reality is. Reality is Love. We are not aware of that in our day to day language. We don't say that to each other.

We should all wake up, in the morning, and say to every person we meet, "Reality is Love," and go our separate ways.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIY7A...endscreen&NR=1

Updated 12-11-2011 at 10:33 AM by NikolaiI

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Comments

  1. Edward Alick's Avatar
    what's your main opinion?
  2. NikolaiI's Avatar
    "Everything is infinite," and "internal and external are one," but those don't really apply to the topic at hand, so that answer might not satisfy you.