Redirecting

Friday, March 03, 2006

Psychology

So I know I haven't posted much lately. Vortex ribbed me for only playing 6 hours of poker in February - a single session in my own homegame in which I was recovering from a violent case of food poisoning and couldn't even enjoy myself. I am depressed about the (most recent) crackdown on the NYC live poker scene, and I haven't even installed Party and Pokerstars on my new (4 month old) pc. I hope Party hasn't confiscated my account since I last logged in.

Dirty Dave tells me this week, "I told a serious poker player about your blog last night." Man. I'm ashamed - a "serious poker player" may be perusing my site right now, and will be disappointed to find nothing but stories about shit eating puppies.

Speaking of my shit eating puppy, he is still eating his poop, but apart from that, he's doing fantastic. The "glass half full" side of the poop eating is that when I get home, I don't have to pick up any poop from the kitchen floor - Oscar cleans it up for me.

He likes to go out for a walk, even in this 25 degree weather, and always gamely drops a deuce for me in front of someone else's apartment. Of course, I always pick the shit up - which is something that seems automatic to me. Yet, as Mrs. Dynamite says, "There must be an awful lot of seeing eye dogs in our neighborhood," because there is a shitload of dog shit on the sidewalk (you don't have to pick up after a seeing eye dog, of course). Seriously douchebags: when your dog takes a shit on the sidewalk, you pick it up. That is non-negotiable.

I'm a big fan of The Sports Guy Bill Simmons, and came across this extremely well written point from Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote this brilliantly succinct reply as part of a Q & A with the Sports Guy, with regards to why some athletes simply show up unprepared (emphasis added)

The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.

I read one of Gladwell's books, Blink, which was mildly interesting, but he is clearly a very talented writer and psychological thinker. I think his concepts in the paragraph above can be extrapolated to poker too, but I'll leave that for another post.

The Big Show comes to town tomorrow.

until next time,
KD

4 comments:

The Bracelet said...

So that makes two "name" poker players, me and this other guy.

Kid Dynamite said...

and W-Rock!!!!

Blonde said...

Ewwww...don't let your dog eat his own shit. He can get sick from that. I love that pic of him. I want him if you ever give him up :).

Kid Dynamite said...

blonde - it's not that i WANT him to eat his own shit, it's that i can't stop him when i'm not there... We tried the pills that are supposed make the poop taste "bad", but they didn't make a difference...