I can outplay them

Brian Townsend said something that's interesting Or at least I find it interesting.

I generally play alittle to impatiently with a smaller stack in tourneys. I can get away with it in cash games because I as well as my opponents are much deeper and I cna out play them postflop. But its very hard to outplay someone who has 30BB and has flopped top pair since all there money is going in.

What exactly does that mean?

It sounds like he's saying that he doesn't play tournaments very well but he plays cash games better because his main leak is short stack play and that just doesn't occur in cash games.

But then when he talks about outplaying people it sounds like he's talking about just being sufficiently indifferent to money to make frequent big bluffs that work.

That's fine, that is a valuable personality trait to have in big bet poker, but I'm not so sure I'd call that "outplaying" them.

Am I misunderstanding what he's saying here?

Everybody gets a medal

I guess it's really not hard to be competitive when there's no objective criteria to judge your performance against.

Brian Townsend has a blog entry about his recent performance in a triathlon. He says

I am very proud of my results

He thinks of himself as a competitive kind of guy, right? So that must mean he did pretty well, right? Not so much.

I finished in 4 hours and 6 minutes which is very good for me.

He doesn't say very good. But, "very good for me". What does that mean? does that mean close to the top? No, not that.

Also the top finishers came in under 3 hours

Is it personal best? He doesn't say that, he just says "good for me", which implies he's probably done better. His explanation is

I am very proud of my results as I hadn't really trained for this at all.

But then right after he says that he points out that it's not really true that he didn't train at all.

I run a decent amount and swim occasionally but I really hadn't done any biking in 3-4 months.

So he did train some, just not enough.

But he's proud of his results.

I guess that's what it takes in todays world to define a winner. Everybody gets to be a winner. The whole world is the Special Olympics.

This guy provides material as good as my previous favorite sources of material, Danny and David.

Sometimes a weakness is more than just a weakness

In a recent blog post, Brian Townsend identifies what he thinks is a major weakness in his game.

I have been thinking a lot about my downswing. I have always followed up great months/times with bad downswings. I attribute this mainly to getting overconfident and lazy about my play. I get bored with poker when I have sucess. I actaully really enjoyed last spring when I moved down to 5k plo because it offered me a new challenge. I wanted to prove to myself that I was a top PLO player. I have had amazing results in PLO since then.

Challenge? No, I don't think so. I don't think it's about challenge. I think it's about the thrill of risk-taking. That's not the same thing as a challenge. A challenge is an intellectual thrill, the thrill of risk-taking is a physical thrill.

I have talked to some of the best young players, who are up to 10 years my senior, and they say they dont play as well anymore because it doesnt hurt to lose. I have noticed this about myself as well. I play amazing poker when the money I lose really hurts if I didn't have it.

Let's just ignore te part where he thinks it's better to learn from the best inexperienced players than to learn from the best. We can write that off to his own inexperience, he'll learn better when he gets some maturity.

But the part about it hurting is important. He needs help and he needs it now.

Have you ever known anyone who engaged in self-mutilation? Cutting themselves, burning themselves with cigarettes?

It's about intentionally creating pain. Not that far removed from making it "hurt to lose". Like every other kind of human behavior, there's a couple of different types of cause for the behavior.

As some of y'all know I have some severe depression in my background. I've had periods of intense internal pain. Just hurting, really, really hurting. Not from some physical cause, but from depression itself. It's a mental pain, but it's a mental pain that's felt physically without a physical pain. Sometimes depression does that to you. Other times depression is about no feeling at all. A nothingness. Numbness. No pain, no nothing.

Either of those kinds of feelings can be alleviated by self-mutilation. I've never engaged in self-mutilation but I can understand the kinds of situations that might make someone think it's a good idea.

That's what I think of when I see someone talking about a need to gamble high enough so that it "hurts when I lose". I think of the need to create a sense of pain to either mask some internal pain that really, really hurts or of the need to create a pain that gives you some kind of re-assurance that you're actually alive.

In either case it's not a good thing for a gambler. Brian needs to think about his risk-taking needs with a much broader personal scope than just his poker game.

Maybe I'm over-reacting. But I don't think so.

When the thrill is gone

In the first post I made about Brian Townsend's blog I said it was a window into a different world. As I read more and more of it I think that the world he's living in isn't the same world I originally thought it was.

When I wrote that first post I didn't know who the guy was. Since then I've read some of his background

He is 25 and recently completed his degree in electrical engineering from University of California-Santa Barbara.

Okay, he's some young guy. But that doesn't really explain his money or why he's playing poker. The next part of his bio does though.

Brian has been playing poker professionally since September 2006. He began playing poker in August 2005. Initially playing .25/.50 limit holdem, Brian quickly moved up the limit ranks to the larger limit games before switching to no limit in the beginning of 2006. From there, he moved up from the smallest no limit games to the largest no limit games in the world in under a year.

He's a craps player who keeps letting it ride. That explains a lot.

Brain Townsend's Blog

Brian Townsend is some sort of high-rolling player on Full-Tilt who's been playing the "Big Game" at the Bellagio during the WSOP.

I don't know much about the guy, and just started reading his blog a few weeks ago. It's certainly interesting.

Million dollar swings (recently 3 million), having $150,000 in your online account is "playing short money". It's a window into a different world.

If you read his blog regularly I think it's also a peak into how a gambler with a lot of money is a very different kind of person than the typical rich person.

I don't think Warren Buffet would react to losing a few hundred thousand dollars in the same way Brian Townsend does. I think that's because he looks at money from a totally different perspective.

If Brian Townsend left a million dollars on the table he'd shrug it off, saying, I've got a 100 million, I've got plenty more where that came from. He thinks in terms of how meaningful that money is to his bankroll, how meaningful it is to him personally.

A really rich person, like Warren Buffet, tends to think of money in terms of what it can do. Not in terms of whether or not he needs it. That's a very different viewpoint and it causes very different types of money-related behaviors.

When you see gamblers talk about how competitive they are I don't think they think of competitiveness in terms of accomplishments. Not in terms of actually doing something, but more in terms of what it gets them. The difference might be subtle, but I don't think it's a small difference. I think it's pretty big.

Here's an RSS feed for the last 10 blog entries at Brian Townsend's Blog