Poker and a relationship (part 1)

Let me start off with a short introduction of myself. My name is Morten and I’m 26 years old. I was born and raised in The Netherlands and moved to Italy with my girlfriend in 2012. I’ve been a professional poker player for about 3 years now, but as most players this game has been my obsession since 2005-2006. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how poker affects my relationships with other people, my way of thinking about the future and life. So I decided to start a blog where I can share my thoughts on how poker as a profession effects your whole life.




Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. I think poker players are from a different galaxy, and we cruised our kickass baller space ship into The Milky Way, and decided Mars looked like a nice sunny place to stay for a while. We seem to blend in just fine with the Mars men, but we’re different. How different are we, and how does this affect our relationship with our significant others? To play this game for a living I’ve developed a specific skillset to cope with the high stress full environment. “Skills” to suppress emotions under stress and to try and rationalize every decision are two important skills to have. I think I’ve had those skills before I got introduced with poker, but this life has definitely made me train those daily. This is not a skillset I have an “on/off” button for. So when I’m having a discussion with my girlfriend, for some reason I try to find a solution to whatever problem she has at that moment. But these women from Venus usually don’t want a solution and I find it extremely difficult to understand her emotions or to talk about mine. I’m used to suppress all emotions while grinding, how do I change that? And how can I expect my girlfriend to understand that? Did you ever find yourself in a spot where your girlfriend is upset, and you’re thinking “what is the best line I should take here?”. I think poker definitely made it more difficult for me to express my emotions towards my girlfriend, and also made it more difficult for me to understand hers or how to deal with hers.




As a poker player I enjoy absolute freedom. I eat when I’m hungry, sleep when I’m tired, wake up when I’ve had more than enough sleep. I don’t need to plan anything in my life. I just need to make sure I get enough hands in every month and that’s basically the only planning I do, and want to do. I’ve always thought I would be the easiest guy to live with. I don’t care when we have dinner, don’t care what’s for dinner, and don’t care if we go out to eat. I’m always up to do something fun, but don’t really mind what we do for fun. I don’t mind to just relax every night either. In reality I’ve learned that apparently this can be very difficult. My girlfriend wants me to make decisions on what time we eat and what we eat. She finds it very annoying that she has to ask me what I want to do every day and that my usual reply is “I don’t care, whatever you like”. So in my mind I’m easy-going, but in reality I’m difficult. Or are we both easy-going, and is that the reason things are difficult? Like a double negative makes a positive?




To play this game for a living, you have to be a little obsessed with it and highly competitive. I enjoy winning, but seriously hate to lose. And a few big loss sessions can stay stuck in my mind, repeating hands in my mind, going on skype sharing thoughts with other grinders, going into my database to check for a leak. Obviously I understand the variance, but lots of buys ins is often not only bad variance. And that can stay stuck in my mind, like a broken record. This means that when I’m in a downswing I find it difficult to focus on anything other than poker. When I’m not behind my computer and just relaxing with my girlfriend, a part of my mind is still thinking about poker. Which means she does not get the attention she needs and deserves. A downswing can go on for many hands. It can last days and even weeks. How can I expect her to cope with that? A woman has her needs too, and how can I satisfy those needs when my mind is in another place? Obviously a downswing can’t last forever, because eventually you would go broke. But how can I force my mind to stop obsessing about poker, and focus on my girlfriend?




I always loved the quote from the movie Rounders: “In a poker way of life, women are the rake!”. I’m sure a lot of poker players agree with this. And I’ve always smiled and felt some sort of recognition when I heard this quote. But now I think these women that take care of us “easy-going” grinders, they are the Casino! They make sure we have a comfortable chair, that there is enough food and drinks we need, and they stack our chips very neatly. They make sure everything is set for us to just grind, and if they take some rake for their trouble, that’s just simple economics.




I guess I have to accept the fact I’m not as easy-going as I’ve always thought I was. This life has it’s downsides too, like any other profession. For next time I will try to think about how poker has changed my future career path/choice forever.




Morten