Blackheath meditative break

April 14th - 25th saw me toodling off to the Blackheath Vipassana center to serve on a 10 day course. In exchange for service in the kitchen from 05:30 am through to 09:00 pm preparing meals for the 90 odd students and 15 odd servers the center offers:

• food
• board - in my case a small single room in a cottage shared with 5 other male servers
• the opportunity to meditate for at least three groups meditation sits per day for a minimum three hours meditation per day

Admittedly, if there are excess servers and the work is well organized then most, if not all of the work can be completed by 07:00 pm.

After a long commute from Melbourne, in part due to a flight delay by Jetstar, I turned up late afternoon and found that the team had more male members than female.   After the day 0 / registration day evening soup had been served, the long term server who had been organizing the kitchen took the kitchen servers into a room and asked us all to tell everyone a little about ourselves, as well as stating what everyone's goals for what they wanted to get out of the course was. Up to this point in time I've been telling pretty much everyone that I'm a recreational player / break even player as I have truly never thought of myself as a professional poker player. But I thought "stuff it. It's time to have some public accountability" and when it was my turn stated that my main reason for attending was to get some meditation in to help me plug my main poker leak. That is, being unfocused at the table and missing information with respect to both hands I'm in and more particularly hands I'm not it. Nobody drilled into my statement on the night but pretty much everyone gently probed my statement over the coming days to see whether I had been telling them the truth about my desire to improve my concentration at poker.

Everytime I toodle off to Vipassana I'm grateful that I can utulize such a facility so cheaply.  And the group of servers I worked with were a pretty good group who deserve a separate post which will come in a day or so.

One of the side benefits for me is that, due to the very full day each and every day of the course, there was no electronic device usage / internet usage for the entire time I was at Blackheath. Maybe if i go again I can write a journal at the end of every day for 10  minutes before retiring to bed.  Yeah....right! No chance

So here it is Sunday afternoon, May 1st and I find myself in Melbourne Central Library with a recoreded webinar by Alex "assassinato" Fitzgerald going on in the background.  About 40 mins in at the moment and he has been a little long winded so far. With the total length of the webinar being around 3 hours 30 minutes. My goal for today is to get through this Webinar and to read a little from Zach Elwood's book "Reading Poker Tells".

Poker wise since I've returned from Vipassana I've had four live sessions with a net of around $220 in front over those four sessions. At this time I believe the meditative break improved my ability to focus at the tables and that there is opportunity to improve my game through the additional information I'm picking up while at the tables.

Online I've registered with partypoker and deposited on that site. So far only played two tournaments there without cashing. Over the next week or so I need to put some time into understanding what is happening with respect to cash and tournaments on partypoker. And I'll continue to try intermittently to get some money deposited to America's Card Room. For some reason I'm having trouble getting money into my Skrill account and really, whenever I hit a road block there I stall for a while before trying again. At some stage I'll get some dosh onto America's Card room and see how it is.

I've played a bit of cash and some tournaments on pokerstars. With a bit of bad play and runbad on pokerstars welcoming me back and testing my resilience with respect to tilt control.

Enough typing for now. Time to post and move on.