stevesbets

People are always ragging on me to blog more about poker. Just recently in the chat at Pokerstars chat someone informed me that they could care less what happened to me at the store, they want poker! So here is a New Year’s blog that is highly poker related. This blog is to explain the idea of one long session to my non-poker readers.

New Years is surely an arbitrary holiday. This does not make me scoff at the idea of celebrating it, after all, any occasion is somewhat arbitrary and any reason for loved ones to spend time together really can’t be that bad. The idea of New Year’s resolutions however has always seemed utterly absurd to me. This is not an original idea, I always hear people saying things like “improve yourself all the time! Don’t wait for New Years”. I make new declarations for myself pretty much daily and stick to about 1/50 which means I get something very productive done about 7 times a year. If I only made resolutions on New Years then, at that completion rate, it would take me a virtual lifetime to complete one simple resolution. Since I can’t sleep now for some reason, I’m going to spend this blog trying to figure out why people are obsessed with the notion of compartmentalization.

Every poker player in the world has been asked the question at some point. Most are asked by just about everyone they know at some point. “How much did you win/lose today? To most people this is by far the most logical question to ask a poker player that spent the day gambling. If you always answer the question in a technically correct manner, you may say you won $500 and receive congratulations when the night before you lost $5000. This ambiguity leads to frustration with the question for most poker players. The omnipresence of the “how did you fare during X unit of time” question has made me think long and hard about this human trait I call sessionizing.

Sessionizing: the compulsive need of humans to reduce their lives into quantifiable chunks for easy analysis

With every New Years resolution I hear, I am more and more convinced that the reason we sessionize is because otherwise the “downswings” would be unbearable for most people. People want to be able to say (and have it be reasonable), “So what if I hate my job, never exercise, and am growing more sedentary, boring and predictable. That was all me during X time, now it’s Y time.” Sessionizing can wipe the slate clean.

Most poker players know that any given day playing one’s normal games is irrelevant. What matters is the long run, and the long run is very long. This academic knowledge cannot even stop reflective and mathematical poker players from sessionizing. Everyone just seems to need it.

I wonder if it’s even possible to see life as just one continuous line as opposed to a series of definable chunks. Maybe life is too long and our memories are too short to allow for such a broad overview. I’m only 26 and I already have trouble remembering the specifics of many things that happened when I was 16. The only way to take a mental trip back is to sessionize, remember the grade I was in and what teachers I had. Remember my classmates in each class, what I did each day, where I went aside from school, the list goes on…Only by sessionizing can we remember living, so despite the fact that it’s massively illogical, it’s a basic human need, like food and sleep.

At least this is what I have decided at 4 am when I can’t sleep for the life of me.