For as long as I’ve had this blog, I’ve started every year with a series of posts about my poker-related goals and resolutions, and I’ve ended every year by assessing the progress I made towards them. I set goals for 2011- my most ambitious ever, actually- but now it seems pointless to even look at them, as Black Fridayrendered them more or less irrelevant.  The best laid plans of mice and men, eh?

A dark omen in Montreal.

I’m not really in a place to start setting poker goals for this year, either, since I have no idea what the year will look like for me, poker-wise or otherwise. Not since my final semester of college have I felt this level of anxiety and uncertainty about my future. Those Big Questions are back: Where will I live? What will I do? Who will the people around me be?

I’ve spent the last week and and a half fending off questions, some idle and some concerned, at various gatherings of friends and family. My recent life as a nomadic poker professional was strange enough to them that they’ve learned to accept without alarm the fact that I don’t know where I’m going to be two weeks from now.

Online poker made enough mainstream headlines that random aunts and uncles knew something had happened. Explaining everything that’s happened to online poker and to me in the last eight months is a mouthful that hasn’t gotten much shorter despite the amount of practice I’ve had spelling it all out.

I want to be clear that I’m “anxious” rather than “worried” or “depressed”. There really aren’t bad outcomes, which is very reassuring. Making big decisions is stressful regardless, but it is considerable consolation to feel confident that everything will work out in the end.

The two big advantages that I have over my 21-year-old self are money and experience. I graduated from college with $10,000 in the bank, $50,000 in student loans, no job, and no plan. OK, I had a bit of a plan, but it was a stupid one.

I never would have predicted it, but poker proved to be the missing ingredient that salvaged that plan. It enabled me to live with my girlfriend in Boston, start a non-profit organization, and travel extensively. What began as a way to make ends meet while searched for a job has blossomed into a full-on career, a phenomenon that was highlighted when I joined PokerStars Team Online. Knowing that I was able to muddle my way through a period of anxiety and make a very satisfying life for myself once before gives me a lot more confidence for this go-round.

The funny thing is that after two years, the whole nomad thing was wearing a bit thin, for me anyway. I wanted a little more stability and to feel at home somewhere. This didn’t make its way on to the blog, but one of my goals for the year was to get more settled somewhere.

Fail. The girlfriend and I returned to Boston intending to settle in place there and work out some big decisions about where to go and what to do in the longer term. Those conversations were taking place in late February and March. You know what happened next.

The breath-taking scenery in the Canadian Rockies was just one of the many hardships I faced this year.

Suddenly I was driving to Montreal on Easter Sunday to open a Canadian bank account in the hopes that it would facilitate withdrawal of the money I had online. Of course that was before PokerStars painlessly returned US players’ funds and before that other site did the things that it did (or before we realized what was going on there, anyway). There was a last-minute trip to Madrid, and although I didn’t cash in the European Poker Tour main event, my third top-100 finish in the WSOP main event certainly took the edge off of Black Friday. Then two months in the Canadian Rockies, a European road trip, two months in Vancouver (featuring another deep run in a live tournament), camping in Death Valley (do you know anyone else who flies to Las Vegas to take a break from gambling?), then my mother’s house in Maryland for the holidays and some undefined period thereafter. You can imagine how quickly family members’ initial concern for my professional well-being melts away when they hear that list of “hardships”.

The only advantage that 21-year-old Andrew possessed over the man I am now was having his twenties ahead of him. Before all the 30-, 40-, and 50-somethings start rolling their eyes, let me clarify that I don’t feel old in the sense that my best years are behind me or that I’ll never have the chance to do all those things I wanted to or anything like that. As usual, David Foster Wallace captures the feeling far better than I could:

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.

OK, it gets a little too dark there at the end. My own feeling is that, “It’s not too late but it soon will be”. I’ve managed to make remarkably few major decisions or long-term commitments in the last eight years, but that’s starting to feel less tenable.

As a poker player, my instinct is always to gather more information, and there’s still so much we don’t know about the Whos, Whats, Whens, Wheres, and Hows of online poker in the US. Whether not I’ll be able to supplement my income by playing online poker has huge implications for what I do and where and how I live.

Carpet-Bagging the British Columbia Poker Championships

Poker has also taught me to play the hand I’m dealt and accept that the eventual outcome may not be under my control. At the moment, I’m looking no more than a few weeks into the future. I’ve got a few more days in Maryland, then I’ll be in the Bahamas for the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, then it’s a little vaguer but possibly visiting friends and family in some combination of Maryland, New York, and Florida, then in Boston for a Boston Debate League tournament, and then… well, that’s still a work in progress.

Skimming a year’s worth of posts actually turned up a quote that should conclude this little rant nicely. It’s from one of Jared Tendler’s post-Black Friday blog posts, and I originally quoted it in my own post-Black Friday post:

Right now you’re looking for answers. The problem is that some of you are so desperate for answers you’ll listen to almost anything or anyone. That desperation is very similar to feeling desperate to win. You’ll do almost anything to shake this feeling because the uncertainty is almost too much to handle.

The reality is that there aren’t many answers out there right now. If you try to force an answer too soon, you’ll be making the same mistake if you were forcing the action because you need to win money right now. You have to stick to a sound and logical strategy.

Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s make it a good one.

PokerStars was the first place that seemed to be in it for the long term. They had clearly invested in their product and their personnel. As a result, it seemed to be where all the best players were playing, both those I recognized from TV and the legends of the online poker forums.

What do you remember about the early days of PokerStars? When and why did you start playing there?

Loose-aggressive play has become so common among the best players that many of them tend to assume that anyone who doesn’t open 50% of hands from the CO can’t be all that good. No American in the tournament is going to be bad, since we all had to travel quite a ways to play, but I think that playing the way I did gave the impression that I was merely competent and perhaps uncomfortable in deep-stacked spots. That’s a fine image to have as long as you know how to exploit it by stealing in spots they don’t expect.

As always, please let me know what you think!

From there we took a subway to Tribunal for some botellon, the fine Spanish tradition of outdoor, public drinking. I’ve never been a big fan of bars, since I’m mostly going to talk to the people I’m going with and could do that more easily and cheaply with drinks at home, but there is something to be said for the atmosphere and for being among people. Botellon is the perfect combination: you’re outside with plenty of other people milling around, but you’re drinking your own alcohol rather than buying it at inflated prices!

The only catch is that while it’s largely ignored by the police, it’s technically illegal. After sitting cross-legged on the ground of the plaza for half an hour or so, drinking cans of beer we bought from roving Chinese merchants with six-packs, Nico suggested that we ought to move along. The police had shown up and did actually seem to be ticketing people.

We sauntered into a club he knew to have live music from time to time, but we didn’t stay too long because there was no band this night. After trying several times to explain to the bartender what a vodka martini was, I settled for a rum and coke. When that was finished, we went back outside to drink in the narrow street just outside the bar. In less than a minute, a Chinese merchant found us and we had beers in hand.

Roughly two hundred people, almost all younger than I, filled the street, retreating to the sidewalks only when the occasional, stubborn motorist slowly forced his way through the mass. Some of those motorists were police, but none showed any interest in the hundreds of open beer cans or the smell of marijuana that occasionally wafted by. The beer merchants were omnipresent when you wanted them but never pushy when you didn’t- they’d walk by saying, “Cerveza, cerveza!” but always in a way that made clear they were doing a brisk business with or without you.

A sudden shriek and splash of water interrupted our revelry. An old woman in a nightgown was out on her terrace four stories above us, dumping water in the general direction of the open-air fiesta. It wasn’t hard to sympathize with her: it was 3AM, the noise from the crowd was surely intruding into her apartment in a serious way, and it was clear that the street would be a mess in the morning.

Still, her aerial assault proved counterproductive. Everyone thought it was hilarious and began cheering and egging her on, some even offering themselves as targets. Amazingly, the old woman seemed to get into the spirit of things and started waving and blowing kisses jovially in between sorties. I thought I was in a safe spot but she very nearly got me, as it turned out that she also had access to the window adjacent to her terrace.

Even after she stopped throwing water she stayed up there for a remarkably long time. She’d been out there for probably two hours and was still going strong when Nico and I decided to call it a night.

We slept late into the morning, and then I packed and made ready for my departure before we went for lunch. Mediterranean food is wonderfully suited to my palette, but after two weeks of it I was hankering for something different. A quick internet search revealed that Madrid is one of the worst major cities for ethnic food of any kind. Apparently Spanish people traditionally prefer very simple preparations and tend to suspect that spice and sauces conceal subprime meat.

Nevertheless, my research turned up a small neighborhood called Lavapies that was rumored to have some good Indian places. It proved to be a fascinating couple blocks with not just Indian restaurants but Indian grocery stores and even a Bollywood movie rental shop. It didn’t seem to be a particularly Indian neighborhood, though. The vast majority of people strolling the street were white, and occasionally an African would offer to sell us hashish, but the only Indian people I saw were working at the restaurants.

All of the outdoor seating was packed, and the staff generally seemed more concerned about finding room for more new customers than attending to those already sitting. The food, when it finally arrived, was excellent and quite cheap, so it was all good in the end.

So after one last delicious meal it was off to the airport. Nico brought the infamous trance CD for the drive, and we talked about when we might see each other again. He’s planning a trip to to the States next summer, but EPT Madrid comes first, and having a place to stay drastically reduces the cost of playing, so maybe I’ll get to Spain once more. I feel like I’m getting to know Madrid reasonably well, even corrected Nico on something today, though I’ve spent less than two weeks there in total.

Likewise, I feel like I know Nico a lot better than the three weeks or so we’ve spent together in the last few months would suggest. We get along very naturally, and it’s always been easy and fun to spend time together, even in the large quantities of the last two weeks. “See you soon,” he said as I walked into the terminal, adding, “Somewhere.”