“Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill part is hard,
but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck.”
(Somebody who knew the game)

What do you think about this?

"Everybody heard about the power of positive thinking. Essentually, good luck works the same way. There is an opinion that God (or the Universe) always says "yes" to whatever you think. If you think "I am unlucky, my life is out of luck" the Universe says to you "Yes, you are right. You are unlucky." The good thing is, once you sincerely believe you are lucky, then you can be sure good luck will soon pay you a visit. It sounds really simple, but it's not that simple, after all. The key word here is 'sincerely'. Our subconsciousness gets so used to negative thinking that switching the polarity might require some hard work. Try saying "I am a good person, I have a wonderful family, I have a great job, I live in a great country governed by worthy people; I am satisfied with the world around me, I am living a happy life, and God loves me". To some of us even saying this is a problem, leave alone sincere belief. And maybe our life is not really that good all the time, but the trick is: once you start believing sincerely in those words, the Universe will say "yes, you are exactly right", and your life will start changing.

Now, what can help us to convince our subconsciousness that we are blessed by good luck? Positive thinking is a good thing, but it can be hard to believe that you are rich, when you drive a 10 year old car and buy all your clothes in Walmart. Driving a new Infinity will surely be a lot better for your self-esteem. In other words, we do not appreciate the things that are cheap. We buy expensive stuff, in most cases, not to show off, but to prove to ourselves that we are worth it. Another example, if you live near a Hawaiian beach, you probably take it for granted, but I have to pay a considerable amount of money to spend a week in Hawaii, and it makes me appreciate every moment there. So the more we pay for something, the more we value it. In our minds the words 'cheap' and 'free' stand right next to 'useless', while 'expensive' is synonym to 'good' and 'valuable'."

Anybody even only remotely following our little blog here knews it was just not our year. We achieved almost nothing and end the year now with a big fat red negative amount in the books (Statking that is). The late 2005 showed it's teeth once more with ridicoulous beats in high buy-in events and the few cash games we are playing these days, both online and live. We've done it all: bad management, bad play and bad luck with almost no break almost the whole year. We are consistantly thinking about what to change and tried a lot of so called "tricks" (the usual stuff as stepping down, changing games and limits, concentrating on one game kind, playing live only, playing tournaments only as well as the more superstitious ones and making funny promises to fate, changing seats, running around your seat after a beat etc etc). Nothing really helped. Until now. Well you bloody bad run, we won't miss you! And vanishing you will, as I now found the ultimate solution while surfing the web: www.luckforsale.com! After almost closing the site right away in the very last second I read over the 'theory behind' (see above) and as I said, the reasoning there is true to some degree. So I bought my share of luck right away. And now, you dumb subconscious mind, luck is ours! Not that we now forget about the small skill assets that we own but no more expecting the worst from now on!

While we struggle at poker our buddy Sebastion from Cardcore.net made a fortune this year. Playing serious since August 2005 only he already made a nice amount of cash (way over 50k), mostly playing SNG's at party and lately by killing MTT's also. He topped that by winning a 35k guaranteed two days ago and adding more than 12k to his bankroll. He's only 23 years old but you don't want him on your table - what he's maybe missing from experience he makes more than up using his feared "lucker" skills ;) - Anyway, congratulations Sebastian, well done and good work! We look forward to traveling to Vegas/WSOP with you in 2006!