The problems and interruptions just keep coming

Well, when it rains (or in this case, snows) it pours.  As far as doing any serious poker playing, the last two weeks have been pretty much a lost cause.  I'm tired of having excuses for why things don't happen, but it's hard to fight an act of God.

The problems mentioned in my last blog entry never did get solved.  My request to PokerStars was kicked up to a higher level of support, and they never got back to me.  PokerStars is legendary for their great support, something like that has NEVER happened to me.  It's not usual to write to support and get a response in less than an hour.

While I was trying to get a resolution of my file downloading issue from PokerStars, I was also writing to the Computer Technical Help forum on twoplustwo.com.  The problem there was that no one could seem to grasp the simplicity of the problem.  All I wanted to know from them was how to use a specific aspect of the Open Office program, that is, I wanted to know how to write an IF statement do to a simple boolean function, and put a amount in the Net Win column of a spreadsheet only if the results was  > 0.  There would also be a function in the Net Loss column to enter the number only if it was < 0.  That was it.  A simple problem, but I couldn't seem to get the syntax of the statement right.

Well, I got all kinds of ridiculous responses from smart people who couldn't seem to grasp the simplicity of the problem.  I said in my post that I didn't need to use something like the example IF statement that had three paramaters, and someone actually wrote a nested statement (statements inside of statements, or to put it another way, an IF statement with several branches) that he somehow thought would do the job.  All I wanted to was tohave the statement check IF the amount was above or below zero, and take the appropriate action.  This isn't rocket science, and it isn't a new kind of problem--I was writing code that used IF statements in computer science classes in the 1980s--which was before my college even had a modem!

Anyway, I didn't get any help with anything, so I had to set up my own spreadsheet from scratch.  I went through all of my paper records of anything I had done all year, from playing tournaments, to studying poker books, to deposits and withdrawls.  I sifted through all of that and typed  a spreadsheet entry for each of the approximatedly 1,400 touraments that I entered in 2010.

The spreadsheet calculated the net win or loss, then I manually moved all of the 920 net loss tournaments, one at a time, to one column, and all of the roughly (I don't remember the number offhand) 500 net win tournaments to a different column.  Then I could get my totals, and I had everything to do my taxes.

I prepared and E-filed the taxes a few days ago, and got an E-mail yesterday stated that the return was rejected because of one item that they said I had wrong.  I think I had it right, and in fact changing it will show $500 less income (so it's not like I was cheating on my taxes), and I decided not to fight it, and just change the number and get it done so that we can get that refund back.

But that's not all.  Since my previous blog entry we got a 16-inch snow dump from the biggest blizzard of the season.  Dealing with that took a lot of time.  It's not like I had to go anywhere, but my wife works outside the home, and I had to get her clear (she works at a hospital, and many of her more rural coworkers had no chance of making it in that morning).  I finally got her out, with the help of 4 guys in a pick-up truck who happened to come buy and help push when she got stuck in the intersection.

So with the spreasheet and related issues, and the snowstorm, I didn't play a hand of poker for 4 days, and I still haven't posted some of my January 2011 results.  I'm starting to dig out from under everything, both literally and figuratively.

My next few posts will include several about the previous month and year.  Not just dollars and cents, but what I learned, what worked and what didn't, and things that I did well and not so well.  Also, this year I will start posting more about how the poker playing actually went on certain days.

I have avoided writing about individual days, because I've been training myself not to worry about that.  As I've said in other posts, playing poker tournaments is like commissioned sales.  There are very good days, days where nothing happens, and days when I actually lose money (just as a salesman might have a losing day when you consider travel and other expenses).

Poker players take this long-term view so seriously that one of the favorite poker sayings is, "You can't have results-oriented thinking".  What they mean is that all the player can do is make the best possible decisions, and even when he does, he can make all the right plays and still lose.  Unlike other complex games like chess, poker has many more variables.

Those variables could be of a bad run of cards, most of the good players sitting at his tournament table, or a host of other things, perhaps even a slow dealer than doesn't deal as many hands per hour as dealers at other tables.  But over time, those variables even out (you get your share of good cards, good dealers, and weak opponents) and with continued good decisions, you will be a winning player.  To state the issue mathematically, variance has less effect as you approach a statistically significant sample size.

So, when my wife would ask how I did that day, even if I won I really didn't like answering that question, which was no doubt frustrating for her.  I was like the kid who, when asked what happened at school that day, responds with, "nothing."

Now my wife and I are trained to realize that daily results don't matter much, so I don't have to be paranoid about either of us slipping into the dreaded "results-oriented thinking".  I can relax a little and actually talk about how my day went.