Work, Play and The Time of Day

I’m not good with schedules. Anyone who knows me will tell you that one of my most characteristic traits is that I’m always late to everywhere. I’m at least 15 minutes late to every single casual meeting I have with my friends, not to even mention more important things. I’ve missed more than 20 flights on my poker trips because I didn’t make it to the airport on time (once I also missed one when I went drinking in Germany and woke up in Poland an hour before my return flight, but that’s another story).

I had the same issue in all of my past jobs as well. I used to work in various entry-level jobs — fast food joint, grocery store, gas station. I have no idea how I managed to get fired only from one of those jobs since I was late to at least 50 percent of my shifts. Actually I’m pretty sure I was late to all of my job interviews too.

It’s not like I would be unable to estimate how much time and preparation it takes for me to get to place X from my bed. It’s also not that I’d usually be deliberately late. It just happens. I guess it’s mainly because I’m a night owl, and even when I’m not playing poker tournaments until seven in the morning, I just can’t get myself to go to bed on time, even if I know I have to wake up early the next day. As a result of this, my brain doesn’t function normally in the morning and I’m in zombie mode for the first few hours of being awake, and it takes me twice as long to get anything done — like the difficult task of taking a shower. I’m not a morning person.

After a very unlikely chain of events I landed my dream job when I was just 21. It was the sole thing I had ever dreamt of doing for a living since I was a kid (aside from being so rich that I wouldn’t have to work). To land that job you’d generally have go through five years of university level studying and some unpaid practice. I did none of that, and magically managed to get the job five years ahead of time.

I liked my colleagues, the job was even more fun than I thought it would be, it never felt like I was even going to work and I got paid more than I could’ve asked for. It took me less than a year to screw that up, too. I was always late, varying from 15 minutes to never showing up at all, and I didn’t get any of my scheduled projects done on time. My projects being late actually cost the company some serious money on a couple of occasions. Still, I was given second chances and third chances. Finally, after approximately the seventy-eighth chance, the board decided that I was too unreliable to be kept.

Why did I do it? Honest answer: I have no idea. There wasn’t a single thing I wasn’t pleased with. I just couldn’t get things done. In a way, I just couldn’t bring myself to care enough, even though I didn’t know why.

Most of the successful poker players I know are like that. We are a unique group of adults who are awful at many aspects of life. We are all lazy. If a group of five poker players reserves a table in a restaurant at six, no more than one person is ever going to be there before 6.30. No one even bothers to make excuses. That’s how we are.

We are not good with money. We spend loads of it on stupid stuff, and more importantly we are willing to pay obnoxious amounts to avoid doing anything that would take the slightest effort. We are often hard to approach, we aren’t very good conversationalists or socially talented. We were the kind of kids who our parents thought would never become anything. We pretty much suck at life for the most part.

But when we play poker, study poker or discuss poker hands, we become entirely different human beings. We are deliberate, precise, intelligent, smart, and enthusiastic. We are zombies brought back to life. We are willing to do any amount of work to get every single detail in a random poker hand analyzed, doing research, networking, just to make sure nothing goes unnoticed. We are motivated.

I know more than a few very successful poker players who aren’t even intelligent at all. They got pretty unlucky in the gene pool lottery in that department. Still they absolutely crush poker, and without even realising it think on a higher level playing it than they would otherwise be capable of. When they discuss current affairs, politics, history or anything that matters in the grand scheme of things, they appear uneducated. But when they discuss poker, they talk like geniuses. I spoke to one of my smarter poker friends about this a while back, and he agreed that many of the most successful players are “stoner types”, guys who smoke bongs, eat take-away food in their briefs, and play it like a video game. And make millions of dollars.

They do work too. No one gets good at poker, no matter how talented they are, without spending long nights on the computer studying. It’s an on-going process and everyone I know spends an hour or two just studying poker, after doing long shifts at the office. You could never get any of these guys to do a minute of extra work at a regular job or at school. Poker just happens to be the one thing they are enthusiastic about, and studying something you’re enthusiastic about is actually fun.

Back to my story. When I look back at my past jobs, I still think that I was a pretty good worker when I was actually at work. I don’t know why, but even when I was making burgers at Maccas I desperately wanted to be the best employee in the house. I, for sure, paid more attention to detail and put my heart into serving customers in the best possible way more than any other person there. Same thing with every other job when I was present and my mind was there too. I was a good worker, I just wasn’t good at getting myself to work.

As you can probably guess, poker ended up being a blessing for me too. I never have to set my alarm clock to wake up for work, I can start and finish whenever I want to, I’m accountable to no one and if I decide to get lazy no one will get mad. If we ever get a universal Black Friday and I’ll have to quit playing, I’m going to be in major trouble. I can’t think of a single other occupation where I’d be able to get my full potential to play day after day, where I’d have enough work ethics to work 60 hours a week, and of course where I could make enough money to justify my spending habits.

Same goes to many of my poker buddies. Right now they excel in a small area of life that just happens to be one that pays amazingly well. In their minds they are still just twenty-something guys playing a video game, not caring about the world. They could only be seen as losers if they weren’t so damn good at what they do, and weren’t making so much money. If poker was taken away from them, they’d be in big trouble.

And so would I. I know it, because I live in a country where the government is preparing a law that would ban online poker. But still, I haven’t been able to make the effort to contact the guy I voted for in the last election and try to make things change. It just takes too much effort to fire a single e-mail. But after putting my thoughts on this to paper and actually realising what a slacker I am, I’m going to do it. Right now. If any of you live in countries that are preparing similar changes, which alarmingly seems to apply to many European countries at the moment, please give 15 minutes of your time and contact your own politician. Let’s keep the ball rolling. ♠

Miikka Anttonen Spews is an occasional column from Finland’s most outspoken poker pro. Read more of his adventures at CardPlayer.com.