Hi all, thought about making a blog about this, but I'm not shure if I will blog after this so I will just pop it here for now. »There is a point in every race when a rider encounters his real opponent and understands that it's himself. In my most painful moments on the bike, I am at my most curious, and I wonder each and every time how I will respond. « A few words from a book I read recently, it's quite old but still made an impression on me. It’s not about the bike, my journey back to life, by Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins. It’s a great book and I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t gotten around reading it yet. I haven’t read a lot of books lately, actually in the last couple of years, I read three books. Two of them were about poker, Heads up no limit hold’em by Moshman and The poker mindset by Ian Taylor and Matthew Hilger. The non poker book was outliers by Malcom Gladwell. All of which I recommend. I am from Europe and English is not my first language, yet all of these books were in English, since I am quite fluent and believe that something is lost with translation, that magic that comes with a great writer. Ok, back to the original quotation. I read it and I think those words apply in poker just as much as they do in cycling. Maybe I think so because I have had a rough couple of days on Stars, dropped 10bi on regular speed 60 in 100 games, pretty standard, not making a big deal out of it. It’s the way that it went down that got to me. I’ve played, probably close to 10k regular speed husng tourneys through my poker carrier. Starting from 0.50c games on Everest poker, making it to the 20’s and 30’s in FTP, dropping down to 5$ games, you know how it goes. Had swings of more than 30-40bi, lost almost half my roll when playing 100$ husng in a nl200 hu cash game on ipoker in two hours…the list goes on and on like with any poker player. Life has up’s and down’s, so do poker winnings. So I lost a couple of buyins last few days, no big deal, but together with this book, I really feel like from time to time, when we get dealt a few bad hands, we forget that the fishy plays of villains are not the problem, that random generator is not the enemy and that the sometimes cruel nature of variation is a part of poker, just as it is going deep in a MTT, running like God. Because in times when things are not going as we hoped, when the RNG is testing our spirit, our dedication, it is up to us whether we succeed as poker players or fail. It is easy to study the game, make good decisions when you are running good, the challenge is to maintain that when the going gets tough. And it will, you might just come back from a swing, thinking…uhh..that was nasty, but I fought back, I am a winner. You just won a stage at the Tour de France in a way, it is Paris where it counts to be number one, the stages in between are just chapters in your poker career. Some stages are hard, getting sucked over and over again, hero called with 3rd pair and bluffed out of pots again and again…some are easy, when you are just coasting along with the variance, making money day after day. Surviving one tough stage does not mean it will be easier when things will go bad again. Every time you go on a bad run, you have to make a conscious effort of making a comeback, improving your game and basically, getting back up again when you get your ass kicked. I think that in a way, to be a poker player, a pro, or just a small stakes grinder taking the game seriously, you have to love the pain that comes with it. You have to love the challenge of a downswing, when your mind and spirit are put to the test, because otherwise it’s just too painful. Maybe that is just me since I am not putting in a tone of volume. I am playing no more than two hours per day, single tabling or two tabling regular speed games. Small volume means that a 20bi dowsing takes a lot of time to recover from, I guess for guys that are playing 6 times more than me, variance is more mathematical and less emotional. This is all quite long now and you probably don’t see the point of this post, there is no point. Just thought I summed up my thoughts and get them out of my head.If you've gotten to the end of this, congrats.