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.

My friend Seth lived in Philly his whole life and recently moved down to Montgomery, Alabama. His blog is a contrast to mine in that he puts up lots of pictures and doesn’t rant much about his complaints. Check it out here

I’m all for freedom of all sorts, but I’m really beginning to question freedom of religion, nutty people should not have a godly excuse for their nuttiness. This from a CNN article:

At a news conference in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage said, “We are very happy with the Somali national who attacked the house of the Danish cartoonist who previously insulted our prophet Mohammed. This is an honor for the Somali people. We are telling that we are glad that anyone who insults Islam should be attacked wherever they are.”

Full Article here

I was walking home from Chipotle when I decided to swing by the grocery store on my corner to get some Mint Milanos (note to Mcdonalds and pepperidge farm, i take payment for blog product placement). The cashiers at this store are particularly incompetent so I wasn’t thrilled when I saw the woman in the only open lane struggling with a debit card. The customer was this little Asian woman that barely spoke English who was buying about 20 dollars worth of groceries.

She swiped her card, entered her pin and picked up the bags to go when the cashier stopped her and was like, ma’am there was only 3.14 on there, you have to pay the rest. The Asian woman said, 3.14, ok i pay 3.14. Cashier was like, nooo, you need to pay 16.73, there was only 3.14 on the card. At this point I noted that the card was unlike anything I had ever seen before, I have no idea what sort of debit card it was, but it wasn’t a usual one issued by a bank. The Asian woman responds (in a way that indicates no surprise or sadness), “i need this (pointing to like 14 dollars in her wallet) for taxi, I just take this one (and grabs one of her 3 bags)”. The cashier says “ma’am it doesnt work that way, you can’t just take a random bag of groceries for 3 dollars”. The Asian woman looked confused as the cashier called over 2 other workers to try to figure out how to deal with the dilemma.

At this point a couple options were running through my head:

1) watch the debacle, assume I’m going to be wasting the next 30 minutes of my life, and hope to come away with an interesting story
2) leave my mint milanos there and just go home. There was no movement by another clerk to open another register so I would certainly be waiting awhile if I wanted to buy them.
3) Be kind (but also kind of selfish to save time) and buy the woman her groceries so that the cashiers would not have to accomplish the impossible (for them) task of figuring out how to back her groceries out of the register.

What would you do?

I went with option 3. The oddest part of the story is, after I offered to pay, the clerks were visibly happy that they wouldn’t have to figure out how to remedy the situation. The Asian woman on the other hand collected her groceries without even looking back and walked out as if she expected someone would eventually take care of her. I suppose since my act was partially selfish, I shouldn’t expect any expression of thanks, but nonetheless another experience that I doubt will be repeated.