Down is up

One of the benefits of having written 1,386 blog posts about poker is that there's a lot of material there to crib from :-) Whole passages can be taken verbatim, and reapplied to chess. To wit, on November 18th of last year I wrote a post with this self-same title. Here's how it began:

Johnny Depp is one of my favorite actors. Captain Jack Sparrow is my favorite Johnny Depp character. "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" is my favorite Captain Jack Sparrow movie. Johnny delivers so many great lines in it, it's an embarrassment of riches! One of my favorites is "Send this pestilent, traitorous, cow-hearted, yeasty codpiece to the brig". What does "At World's End" have to do with poker? It's simple, really. There's a great scene where Jack figures out that the way to get to World's End is to capsize his ship, The Black Pearl. He figures this out because of a cryptic phrase on the map he has to guide him. It takes him a while to figure it out; here's another great line he delivers while doing so: "Up is down. That's just maddeningly unhelpful. Why are these things never clear?". In poker, up is down and down is up. The way to make money is to lose money first. And the way to lose money is to make it first.

As I've discovered, the best way to win games in blitz is to lose a lot of games first. By the way, I never do this on purpose! However, whenever you do lose a lot of games, your rating goes down, and chess.com then matches you up with weaker opponents. That enables you to win more games than you lose, until such time as your rating goes up enough to force you to play against opponents who are your equal or your superior. Then the whole damn cycle repeats :-) This causes you to alternate between euphoria and depression; in the euphoria phase, you feel you can do no wrong and don't see why your rating can't just keep going up without interruption. In the depression phase, you feel you can do no right and don't see why your rating can't just keep going down without interruption. Of course, the truth is somewhere in between; it's just really hard to decide where :-)

neostreet: 1234 (174-169-20 (363))
monvieux: 1344 (358-295-16 (669))