My PokerStars Team Online short film has been released, and I've been warmed by the positive reaction. That's a credit to the director Ryan Firpo (who also directed the forthcoming documentary about the poker room, Bet Raise Fold, which looks excellent). I was really impressed by how he captured a large chunk of the arc of my life and created a film that incorporates some of the past, the present and the future, as all good art does.
I wrote a little about the making of the film recently on the PokersStars Blog, and now I want to compare some of the themes from the video to my current relationship with poker.
The truth is, despite the fact that I am proud of the end result of the project, the video is hard for me to watch. Not just because hearing my own voice will always make me cringe, nor that the camera adds 10 lbs. in addition to the fact that I was 10 lbs. heavier when the filming took place last year. The main reason the video is tough to process is because right now I am closer to the feeling of bottomed-out despair from 2010 than I am to the triumphant feeling of having a proper identity within the game, sorta where the video ends.
Plenty of people watched the video and assumed that because it ends on a high note that I am in a good place, spiritually and emotionally, with poker, but what the video really depicts is my ongoing cyclical struggle with poker, and I have to report I am not in the "up" part of the cycle right now.
Most poker-related media focuses on the sexier aspects of the game, the extravagant sums of money in play, the exotic locations poker players travel to and the joyful spirit of being able to "play a game for a living."
That's actually a fine representation of reality for a lot of players I know: The best, most elite players definitely live a life that's thoroughly comfortable and relatively glamorous. They understood and practiced the single most important aspect of the game--bankroll management--and created a comfortable, steady living, year after year, largely immune to risk of ruin and the short term swings that plague less disciplined players like me.
But for many other players, poker is a struggle in too many ways to mention. It is for me still after more than eight years in the game, anyway. So when it comes time to represent my poker experience, I guess my writing instincts take over, and I find catharsis in telling the story as clearly and honestly as possible. It's somehow easier for me to face failure and disappointment than try to embrace the smoke-and-mirrors that the poker life affords. Not that there's anything wrong with the smoke-and-mirrors, I think poker as escapism is one of its finer qualities. I just usually lean towards my familiar approach, what I've been doing since my teen years--trying to create a narrative that expresses as much of a complete picture as possible, putting the past, present and future in the same picture.
***
It's also not exactly accurate to compare my current state of affairs with the anxiety I was feeling in 2010, because I'm experiencing a new manifestation of the pain of this poker life, and it revolves around a concept that even the most elite pros encounter: the struggle to balance poker with regular everyday life. How to be all-consumed by a game of small edges while still being present for people and things that exist in the non-poker world.
It also eventually relates back to the fact that the DOJ fucked us hard with Black Friday and has made the already difficult balancing act of being a poker pro much harder for those who felt compelled to leave the country in order to continue playing online.
For a while last year, I was in a good zone that allowed me to focus a lot of energy on poker and also spend time back in California. At first it felt really disheartening to drive through Southern California on the way to Mexico and see all the houses filled with people whose jobs didn't involved driving three hours south to a foreign country in order to generate income. Then I got over that and accepted the joyful mess and embraced the weirdness.
At times, I felt stretched a little thin by the need to drive to Mexico to play and my desire to drive back to Los Angeles to see my girlfriend and enjoy what I considered my "real life," but after a while that too went away. I had established what I thought was a good balance. I was at peace with the events of Black Friday and had gotten over the overwhelmed feeling of being displaced. Maybe I even felt lucky that I could keep one foot in each of my worlds while others had to give up their home life completely. I also acknowledged that it had been good to get out of my comfort zone.
And then, sometime towards the end of last year, my whole perception changed: I suddenly felt that I wasn't living a good balanced life at all, and that perhaps instead of getting the best of both worlds, I was getting nothing in either world. I decided to refine the balance, spend an extra day each week in California, be more present and available for my girlfriend in the hopes of creating a life that wasn't defined by long isolated stretches of playing online poker in a Mexican ghost town.
Again, a poker player needs to be fully dedicated to the game to perform at his best. Balance is the enemy of dedication, and my recent attempts at balance seem to have failed.
I still have the discipline and drive to try and get it right, and in order to do that I have had to embrace more contradictions. When you're on a downswing or not loving the game, many people advise you to take a break, take a step back and player lower stakes, fewer tables, study more. That conflicts with the instinct to just keep grinding and try to simply end the downswing and re-find the game. Like I said in the video, sometimes you have to give something up in order to get it back, and I'm learning that again.
So I'm working through it. Consciously taking steps to reform and reinvent myself. Seeing a shrink about my anxiety. I still feel blessed to be able to spend any amount time in California with the love of my life (I consider both my girlfriend and California itself to be the loves of my life), and to be able to play online poker just three hours away in Mexico, but it has become increasingly difficult to feel completely engaged wherever I am.
See, I still love grinding a Sunday on PokerStars, but it's just not the same without my girlfriend sleeping in the next room, getting up after I'd been working for a few hours to make me bacon and eggs. It's not the same without being able to walk outside on a sync break for a smoke and see random people walking, jogging, panhandling, living life. That balancing act was hard enough in itself--spending 8-12 hours every day, clicking buttons and maintaining a relationship--but now, with a bowl of hastily prepared cereal in the place of bacon and eggs, separated from my friends and loved ones by hundreds of miles and an international border--it also feels bleak.
In other words, not longer after I overcame the anxiety of compartmentalizing my life, a
new anxiety replaced it, arising from the fact that I was longer living
an integrated life. I am once again envious as I drive by the homes of
Southern California residents with their Southern California jobs.
***
A lot of people commented on how nice my apartment looked in the film and how cool the pool looks, but that's sort of another example of smoke and mirrors: You could think of it just as easily as high-end solitary confinement. It's a modern, beautifully assembled condo building, 18 stories high and packed with amenities, but on any given night when you look up from my deck at the large mass of apartments, you will almost never see more than three other lights on. It's largely vacant. This conforms to the general vibe of Rosarito: A sprawled out coastal landscape with a lot of rough, unfinished edges, a stretched out ghost-town, a cartoon-ish underworld compared to its neighbor in the north.
On the same grounds, right next to my building, is a condo building that remains incomplete, a vertical concrete slab of darkness that will likely never be built. They were planning to build four identical building in total and couldn't even complete the second one. That is why the pool is so cool-looking: If you are planning to accommodate four-buildings' worth of people, an Olympic-sized pool (in addition to the outdoor infinity pool) is a good idea. Then when the economy collapses and the media starts to depict Mexico as a land of random drug-related beheadings, and everyone leaves--now you don't have enough people to fill a pool, nor even the ability to keep the hot-tub going seven days a week (it's only heated on the weekends).
Really, it has nothing to with amenities or square footage or the state of tourism in Baja Norte, and everything to do with the problems of living in an isolated environment in order to work an isolating profession.
So, I want to be back in Santa Monica again, watching sailboats out my window while I play the Sunday Warmup, waiting for my woman to wake up and make bacon and eggs. Or lox and bagels. In the meantime I have to find a way to reconcile the struggle and find a new balance in order to live either (let alone both) parts of my life correctly. Maybe with the perspective of the video, I can also carry the awareness that this is just one short, painful chapter in a long story that's been filled with a lot of funnier and more glorious chapters.
Stay tuned for the sequel I suppose!