I'm sitting at my computer and Casino Royale is playing in the background. I've seen it before. It's just noise. But something makes me look up. It's the exact moment Bond walks into the casino to face Le Chiffre. They sit down across from each other. The tension. The reading. The cat-and-mouse of two men trying to see through each other at a green felt table. I didn't know then that those hands weren't real. That situations like that almost never happen in actual poker. It didn't matter. The atmosphere grabbed me. The mystery. The observation. The confrontation. A game played face to face, breath to breath, where every blink means something. That night I started Googling. I wanted to understand what this game was. I wanted to be in that room. And the first thing I did was sit down to play online. Within a week — maybe a month — the first dopamine hits arrived. A pot in a freeroll. A micro-stakes win. Money appearing in my account like it came from nowhere. The dream got buried before I even knew I had one. The thing that pulled me in — that initial spark, that scene at the casino table — was smothered by pings and graphs and volume. Gone in a month. Maybe less. For years, through my entire poker career, I never thought about what that dream actually was. I invented new goals instead. Win a WSOP. Move up to high stakes. Build a real bankroll. They sounded right. They looked like vision. They were never it. I only understood what poker was for me — what it was supposed to be — when I stopped playing. If I could start over, I would do one thing first. I would describe the dream. Not vaguely. Not as some distant "someday" goal. I would write down exactly what it looks like. The room. The table. The people sitting across from me. What kind of players they are. What it feels like to sit there, chips in hand, reading another human being in real time. I would be specific about the emotions I want to feel. The calm focus. The aliveness of a big decision. The quiet confidence of knowing I belong at that table.

I played poker for 10+ years as my job. I failed. Now I know why. 1. I forgot why I started. | The Story | 2. I chased the graph. 3. I set goals and forgot them by lunch. 4. I planned but rarely executed. 5. I thought planning was doing. 6. I grinded hard, then studied hard. Never both. 7. I procrastinated for too long. 8. I made to-do lists I never finished. 9. I missed deadlines and felt sorry for myself. 10. I treated everything as urgent. 11. I did tasks unrelated to my goals. 12. I had no system. 13. I learned, forgot, and relearned. 14. I context-switched nonstop. 15. I was jealous of winners. 16. I compared myself to others. 17. I never asked what was stopping me. 18. I walked into the same barriers repeatedly. 19. I started every day lost. 20. I never reflected. 21. I warmed up randomly. 22. I never repeated a warm-up. 23. I ignored how I felt before sessions. 24. I stopped warming up. 25. I let the graph define "playing well." 26. I never defined my A-game. 27. I never defined my B-game. 28. I never defined my C-game. 29. I judged myself differently every session. 30. I tagged hands but ignored context. 31. I played to win, not to learn. 32. I let the same distractions win. 33. I only saw variance when I lost. 34. I never saw bad sessions coming. 35. I played to recover. 36. I quit early when winning. 37. I played too few tables. 38. I played too many tables. 39. I made decisions on emotion. 40. I skipped cooldowns. 41. I called hand review a cooldown. 42. I waited for the perfect course. 43. I hoarded materials. 44. I consumed more and more. 45. I trusted Full Tilt. 46. I trusted the wrong people. 47. I failed the good ones. 48. I cheated. 49. I played not to lose. 50. I was the best off the felt. 51. I was brainless on the felt. 52. I played for volume. 53. I laughed at fish. 54. I called regs fish. 55. I studied too much. 56. I implemented too little. 57. I ran the wrong sims. 58. I got bored with what mattered. 59. I created game plans and never stuck to them. 60. I listened to every coach. 61. I rarely played what they said. 62. I played under financial pressure. 63. I played under financial pressure and got staked. 64. I played under financial pressure, staked, deep in makeup. 65. My study didn't feed my play. 66. My play didn't feed my study. 67. I treated Poker After Dark as a learning session. 68. I studied sims to remember frequencies. 69. I blamed variance. 70. I ran bad. 71. I ran good. 72. I didn't run at all. 73. I let my son's birth affect how I played. 74. I played sleep-deprived. 75. I let my daughter's birth affect how much I played. 76. I cared too much about opinions of irrelevant people. 77. I didn't listen to those I should have. 78. I went pro too fast. 79. I cashed out too big. 80. I cashed out too often. 81. I never played live. 82. I played online too much. 83. I joined too many study groups. 84. I did only one public challenge. 85. I burned out three times. 86. I played on autopilot. 87. I played for rakeback. 88. I called vs check-raise bet bet all-in too often. 89. I folded vs one street aggression too often. 90. I was surprised by villain's action too often. 91. I played regfests because of ego. 92. I bumhunted too long. 93. I quit.