1/3 Grinding and Bankroll

Congrats on getting the job Dumbo!

Ggoodluck,gogogo!,imoG

Thanks!!! Super excited!

I was in such a good mood today while playing. I can already tell this change will be really good for me.

Good morning! Now that I’m off to start a new chapter in my life I wanted to take a moment to extend an olive branch to anyone I’ve gotten into an asinine argument with over the years who is reading this. Competition can bring out some confrontational tendencies in players, especially with money on the line. I liken it to the trash talk on a basketball court between opposing teams. Not unusual at all and sometimes even expected between rivals. It takes a lot or courage to put your money on the line and I respect that in my opponents no matter who they are.

I can be disputatious at times, I will readily acknowledge - especially when running bad over an extended period. Anyway, to anyone reading, no hard feelings. Nonstop poker made me very unhappy there for a time and sometimes it came out the wrong way. I wish you all the best, even my worst “enemies” (who I don’t consider enemies anyway). Take care and be well!

Fortunes can change in the blink of an eye. I was a recent law graduate in a fellowship in a prominent prosecutor’s office. I was working tirelessly, manically even, but was constantly worried my supervisors were out to sabotage me. My boyfriend at the time probably worked undercover for the FBI and was investigating me surreptitiously. “Do you have a working neuron I your brain?” demanded the anti-prosecution judge after a particularly difficult sentencing hearing. Truthfully, my brain wasn’t working normally at the time, it was totally off the reserve.

Not long after I kept spiraling, eventually panic attacks fearing heart attacks sent by evil demons controlling AA meetings. And then completely falling apart, pacing the house with an aluminum bat in my hands hearing the snow-muffled footsteps on the roof of the intruders conspiring to kill me. A hammer placed above the foyer door in case my father needed to use self-defense to protect my mother. “What’s that?!” I asked terrified, “You’re scaring him!” exclaimed my mother. Frightening attempts to sleep and eventually forced to sleep by some well intentioned doctors.

Life had thrown me a lemon. As a nurse said in the hospital, I had had everything up until then. As soon as I got out I finished my legal work, got my client out of federal prison, and started the course of saving my own life from utter depression.

When life is unlucky to you sometimes you just want a little good fortune. Must be why I gravitated towards wining at poker for so long. Something I had some illusion of control over. But the heaters only last so long before reality sets in that we don’t have as much control as we think.

Playing last night I decided to play one last waterfall with the table before heading home to sleep early in preparation for my job. I don’t look at my cards until all the community cards have been dealt. The flop was KQ9 all spades. “I need Jack ten of spades.” I said in my head. That would make me lucky, change my fortunes a little, undo the pain and horror of the cards life dealt me. The turn was an inconsequential 6 of diamonds and the river was the ace of spades. Now jack ten of spades made a royal flush. I turned over my cards: a jack of spades, followed my the ten of spades. I tabled my hand and won the pure gamble of the waterfall. Sometimes a little gamble can pay off in unexpected ways. Life’s fortunes can change in the blink of an eye. They certainly have for me.

One of my students was a jolly Indian guy. He enjoyed the game and had been losing at plo and wanted to improve. He liked it so much he started playing some afternoons before work got out. His employer caught him and fired him. Now he still plays, better than he used to, but he has no job. He has applied but still no new position.

I ran into a hopeless gambler by the elevator the other day. A redneck, did construction jobs. I played with him often and he was lively yet clueless about strategy. I suspected he had an intellectual disability. He had just gone on a bender at a different casino and self-excluded after losing $51,000 in a weekend there. He was going up to play one last time before self-excluding from MGM. His mother always followed him around in an effort to protect him and curb his worst impulses, to no avail. I told him it was probably for the best. He asked me for some money before we parted ways.

My friend who did a decade in prison for robbery called me this morning out of the blue. I also met him though poker. We bonded because he knew I did postconviction work and his friend got out through a pardon around the time I was trying to get my mentally ill client out.

A few months ago he was complaining about trouble with his wife related to his gambling habits. I told him at that time, “gambling will never love you back.” He told me he remembered that statement and that his wife accused him recently of abandoning his family due to his excessive gambling. He lost $1,000,000 last year gambling. He owns a business but that money could have supported his children, education, etc. He seemed determined to change his ways. But then he trailed off…I knew he was considering gambling again eventually. I hope it’s not too late for him.

I lost over a year of my life that could have been spent helping clients. I became very unhappy and depressed by the end. But unlike the poor gamblers I made a lot of money and hopefully I will be able to use it to start a project one day. A poker mixed friend asked me today, “how much longer do you have your freedom?” “Freedom comes in two weeks, this is the prison,” I said.

These sound like the thoughts of a crusher who is definitely beating the games. 😅😅😅

I stumbled upon the first page of your thread and saw a post from 2018 and now I’m confused because you were already in poker “prison” since 2018 clocking in more hours than the average pro:

Wish you the best of luck on the new job and hope it keeps you out of prison this time!

Thank you. The past several days have been a blur of studying the law of mental health, playing (much less) poker, and buying new clothes - blue and green colors, apparently preferred by people suffering from mental illness. I feel an eagerness and excitement I have not for a very long time, and a similar precipitous fall in my interest in poker.

I am releasing a fourth edition of my PLO5 strategy guide. See my books and publications thread for more info. This will be the last edition I plan on releasing.

Been doing a lot of research lately to prepare for the job and have learned a lot about mental health law, some of which I’ll summarize below for those interested.

Everyone has certain inalienable rights guaranteed by the Constitution by virtue of living in the United States. Among them are the right to liberty and to due process of law if the state wants to infringe upon someone’s liberty. The authority to commit someone to a hospital against their will, a form of loss of liberty, finds its roots in the state’s roles as a guardian of those who cannot care for or who endanger themselves and as a policer of those who endanger others. For a long time there were few procedural safeguards in place to prevent abuses of this power of the state, and many people were confined without adequate basis by today’s standards in often deplorable conditions and subjected to ineffective and grotesque treatments against their will.

Individuals who had been confined against their will in this manner began challenging their commitments in court, and legal standards slowly developed. The landmark decision on involuntary civil commitments was not decided until the 1970s during a great civil rights movement for mental health consumers, when the Supreme Court held that mentally ill individuals who were capable of living safely on their own in freedom and who were a danger to no one could not be involuntarily committed. The Court explained that mere public intolerance or animosity towards people with mental illness could not justify their confinement. (In the case, Mr. Donaldson had been committed for over a decade in a hospital against his will and received minimal treatment, and several outside organizations were willing and able to help him in the community.) The Court also found that due process required that the hospital actually provide treatment to justify continuing to hold someone. Later on the Court also held that the hospital must prove by clear and convincing evidence that the person it seeks to commit meets the criteria for involuntary hospitalization. A “least restrictive means” criterion was also articulated, so that if a person with a mental illness can just as well receive care on their own outside the hospital, that alternative takes precedence over coerced confinement. Courts also recognized a patient’s right, subject to limited exceptions, to refuse treatment during their hospitalization, and to a hearing before they can be committed.

All 50 states now have laws codifying these requirements in various forms, some stricter than others. With respect to the dangerousness requirement, some states simply require a person to be a danger to themselves or others, while others require the danger to be “immediate” or evidenced by an overt act. Many states also permit hospitalization when someone has a “grave disability” that renders them unable to care for themselves and endangers their own welfare, even if they do not threaten the safety of other people. Scholars look at three factors when assessing danger: type of harm, immediacy of harm, and likelihood of harm. But there is scant guidance from higher courts on what level of danger is necessary to confine someone in a hospital, so even somewhat speculative threats of future harm have been found to be sufficient, for example, the risk of driving while medically impaired.

The medical literature on mental illness and dangerousness is inconclusive, with some studies showing a correlation between the two and others showing the same risk expected from the general population. Certain factors do correlate highly with violence and mental illness like a history of violence or substance abuse, while in the absence of these factors risks levels are about the same as controls. It is well accepted that individuals with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of violence and that media portrayals of high-profile mass casualty events distort the public’s perception of mental illness in ways that unfairly stigmatize and stereotype those who suffer from it.

What’s the lawyer’s role? There are two schools of thought. One is that the lawyer should seek out the client’s best interests, even if they conflict with the client’s wishes. The rationale for this approach is that many mentally ill clients have diminished capacity and are legally incompetent due to the symptoms of untreated mental illness, so the lawyer should substitute his or her judgment to help the client get better, even if that means agreeing to the hospital’s involuntary treatment plan. The other is that the lawyer should serve as a zealous advocate who advances the client’s stated interests, even if those interests are communicated under the influence of a severely impaired mental state. Under this approach, the lawyer contests the hospital’s evidence and tries to obtain the client’s release from involuntary confinement and seeks community alternatives. The first approach seeks to help the client recover from their illness even at the expense of their liberty, while the second better respects the client’s rights, dignity, and autonomy.

Which approach is better? In my view a mix between the two, like mixing frequencies in poker, is the best approach. The way mixing works is by advising the clients what their best interests may be and trying to persuade them (for example, to remain in the hospital voluntarily and to receive treatment as prescribed), but ultimately following the client’s directives. This way the client’s self-determination is intact but the lawyer has presented them with reasoned alternatives.

I imagine a recurring dilemma would be establishing the extent to which the client's "directives" are compromised by their health issues. Is the lawyer able to conclusively say that the client's "diminished capacity" is such that their directives are effectively harmful to both the client and society? I assume that's what lawyers in the first school of thought conclude. I would think lawyers are accustomed to persuading clients to agree to a more pragmatic approach (to help them resolve legal conflicts), but what happens if a client doesn't or cannot comprehend what being pragmatic entails? It's as if you told a student that x is a decision with greater EV than y but the student did not have the capacity to understand what EV means. In your situation EV refers not to BBs won or lost, of course, but a person's health and well-being. I can fully understand that knowing how to advise a client in these circumstances requires a great deal of skill, particularly as what constitutes dignity and autonomy, or even being healthy for that matter, is not always clearly defined.

A medical journal a while ago published a piece called “dying with their rights on,” and someone responded by saying well “they shouldn’t live with their rights off,
either.” It’s quite the debate. Do the ends justify the means? Does treatment and the possibility of improved mental health justify their deprivation of rights to be free and to self-determination? Not to mention the collateral consequences of involuntary commitment like losing some rights of employment and gun ownerships and the stigma.

One of the larger aspects of my grandfather's practice was preventing his elderly clients from involuntary commitment by relatives that wanted their money. The biggest argument against involuntary commitment is it is often done for evil reasons not good ones. Would you support the government having the right to throw you in prison just because it fits their agenda to do so?

I'm in favor of culling mentally insufficient people. Don't make your problems mine .

Seems like a suicidal argument to me.

I’m glad he protected them but it’s sad there was such a large market for it. I’ll be on the lookout for anything like that, although my clients will be mostly poor so there usually won’t be many assets for family members to go after. Still important to look for any ulterior motives by those seeking commitment.

Another reason for these hearings is that the family member in question is just too much to handle even though they are not dangerous and their relatives want them off their hands due to the burdens of caring for them. That’s sad to me as well - that the family doesn’t want to look after their loved one. Anyway, that’s why there’s law and constitutional rights in place to prevent unjustified deprivations of Liberty.

As far as poker goes, playing way less but oddly running better in mix. Still ready to start the job though. The wait has been long!

Been nice to have dogs around lately!

Good luck on your new adventures! Hope all goes well with the new job!

Thank you!!

First week went well, learning a lot in training and taking in as much as possible before I start handling my own cases. Not much time to play, going to be weekends mainly going forward. Now that I have balance and a fulfilling career, poker is also more fun. Sprained my ankle right before worked started, re-injured an old avulsion from a bicycle accident 12 years ago. Very annoying timing.

Hopefully a background my clients will appreciate when we’re in interviews:

If I was a mentally ill menace to society I would greatly appreciate those prints. I think they would help pacify my urges to lash out in unhealthy ways. Yeah dolphins.

First week of work and it’s already a fulfilling career! Dumbo is the biggest crusher on twoplustwo

Thanks ya’ll. I was too wired to sleep much last night, I guess the excitement over work. My friend made a good point, “you’re choosing to work.” He can be very insightful. I guess one difference between my last two jobs is that now I have some financial cushion to do what I want and I chose this job because of what it means to me. I sat in on hearings last week, saw the humanity of even those suffering from severe mental illness. I was not appalled, rather I could relate. Interviews start this week. This is good in so many ways and so far I am handling everything well.

The weather is warming up too!!

Congrats, Dumbo! That first win is huge, to have it on a tough case, even huger.

Thank you. The client was still experiencing a manic episode in the hospital and the hospital wanted her committed but I elicited testimony from her loving husband that he would still be willing to care for her at home and take her to her outpatient psych appointments so there was a less restrictive alternative available than inpatient commitment. I also argued successfully that the patient although showing some strange behavior was not a danger to herself or others under the law. Yippie!