#229: “Bad Faith”

When I started this blog on September 15th 2008, I was doing what a lot of poker players do when they start a blog. I was recording the details of a path charted through what would be an unusual career. I was also desperately clinging onto some semblance of a former self, a self who wrote stories, who philosophised, who made connections between things. As time passed, the tone of the blog changed as I morphed from enthusiastic problem solver to world-weary grinder-monkey. That is not to say I don’t appreciate what poker has given me. I do very much. It’s just I used to feel engaged and now I feel plugged in.

There’s a wonderful passage in ‘Being and Nothingness’ by Jean-Paul Sartre in which he describes the behaviour of a waiter playing at being a waiter, how he is mannered and obsequious in his gestures and by doing so, how he is participating in a forlorn drama of inauthentic self-performance.

“His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid.”

Sartre’s point is that society imprisons people in their conditions. The waiter plays at being a waiter because he is not a waiter. His acting performance belies the fact that he is consciously deceiving himself. His function is that of a waiter but his being is free.

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us. There will always be forces outside of our control and you just have to accept these but if I say “I am a poker player and that’s all I’m good at”, then I am knowingly objectifying myself. I am what Sartre termed ‘acting in bad faith’, simultaneously aware and unaware that I am free. While my function is certainly that of a poker player, I can do something about the fact that my relationship with that function, that role, is way too close for comfort these days. Nobody wants their epitaph to read, “Was good at 45-mans” or “Played a short stack unexploitably”.

The problem is that while poker probably isn’t the only thing I’m good at, it is the thing I’m likely to make the most money at. It’s been a poisoned chalice and for years I’ve repeated the mantra: ‘Just a couple more years or one big score and then you’ll be set… Sure nobody ever wrote anything decent before they were 40!’

So, what can I do about it? Well, firstly, I need to be as balanced in life as I am with my ranges and with that in mind, I have for the past five weeks been developing a poker podcast with Dara O’Kearney and Daragh Davey. The show is called ‘The Chip Race’ and it will be going out every Monday starting this Monday. My hope is that it will shine a light on the Irish and UK poker scene. If it clicks and finds an audience, it might just sate my hunger to do something different and prevent a premature retirement from the game altogether. If it doesn’t, well I might just jump on the bandwagon and become one of those Twitchy fuckers.