Poker Strategy The Positivity Freeroll URL has been copied successfully! Early on in my poker career, I got a powerful lesson into the power of positivity in poker, leading to my biggest tournament score to that time. And while the story of how it unfolded may seem dramatized (I sometimes still struggle to believe it happened as it did), I want to assure you that every single word printed below happened exactly as it is written, as best as I can remember it.At that point in time I was exclusively multi-tabling $10-$30 SNGs and hadn’t played a real multi-table tournament in over a year due to a slipped disc in my back that made it hard to put in the 10+ hour days that tournaments demanded. But that was about to change in a big way!I can still remember it so clearly all these years later, it was late Saturday night and I was standing on my balcony looking out at the darkness and having an existential moment about the meaning of it all. It came on, as it often did in those days, with an intense wave of anxiety and a questioning of every decision I had ever made. You know the feeling.Although I had already started my journey into Mindfulness back then, something that would prove invaluable in helping me ship my biggest tournament win shortly thereafter (more on that later), I was not yet well-versed in sitting with existential discomfort, or in viewing it as a signal from my Higher Self. So when that Saturday night dread kicked in, my mind – in all its self-protective glory – did the thing it did best, escape the present through endorphin-infused distraction.Although it could have chosen to do so via eating, scrolling, smoking, or the million other ways our minds try to evade our feelings, on this particular night, it chose to do so via poker. Rather than planting my feet in the sand, so to speak, and allowing the anxiety to relay its message to my conscious awareness as I would try to do now, I was immediately distracted by thoughts of the Sunday session I would play the next day (Sundays are notoriously profitable days for SNG players due to the influx of tilted MTT players chasing losses). That’s when I heard it – The Voice.Eventually, I would come to learn that this Voice was the same one that philosophers have been speaking about for millennia. Depending on your preferred tradition, it is sometimes referred to as the Still Small Voice, the True Self, the Atman, or the Chi. A connection with the god-energy that lives inside each of us.Here’s how that internal conversation went.The Voice: Play MTTs tomorrow.Me: What? Why?? I don’t play tournaments anymore.The Voice: You should tomorrow.Me: Why? And how would that even work? My family will be home.The Voice: What would make it worthwhile for you to figure it out?Me (instantly): $10,000The Voice: OK.Me: OK what?Then…silence. ~I stood there for a long while, staring into the darkness, trying to talk myself out of the experience I just had, arguing with myself that it made no sense to hop back into the high-variance tournament waters when there was rent due and bills to pay. That voice, I’ve since learned, is what some people refer to as the Ego – not the “I’m the greatest” type of ego, but the “it probably won’t work out anyway so you better stay safe and small” kind that so often keeps us from pursuing greatness.Fortunately, on that day, for whatever reason, I decided to trust The Voice rather than the Ego. I made arrangements with my wife for her to hold down the fort in my absence and went to bed legitimately excited about the thought, as crazy as it seemed even then, to make more money in a day than I would in a couple of months playing SNGs.~Tune in for the thrilling conclusion of The Positivity Freeroll next week to hear how $12 and a dream turned into a spiritual lesson of attunement.