There are so many areas of my life, where I feel I can’t. I have a terrible time sticking to plans, I can’t pay my bills on time even when I have the money, I’m almost always late. I change appointments, put off calling people I need to talk with, lose control of my schedule, and keep revising my to-do lists. Eventually, of course, the bills get paid, the work gets done, the friendships are maintained. Somehow, I wrote a 950-page novel over the last 10 years, and although revisions on it have stalled for a combination of my-fault and not-my-fault reasons, I suppose I will eventually revise and therefore complete it, though at the moment that seems unimaginable.

But perhaps that is the point. I don’t trust myself to finish the novel, though it seems even more unimaginable that I won’t. When I look at the situation from this moment in time and space, I feel only my incapacity. To believe in my ability—or rather, to believe that the book will somehow get done, entirely apart from my ability to finish it—I have to think outside myself, almost in fictional terms. Am I the kind of character who would write a 950-page first draft and then leave the work unfinished? Does it make narrative sense that this work, whose potential greatness I and my friends have glimpsed in sparks and slivers, will die stillborn rather than be delivered into the life it deserves? I am the kind of person who finishes great novels; the story of this novel’s arduous creation demands fulfillment—and so it makes more sense to me that I’ll finish the book than that I’ll let it die. But that’s different from trusting myself to finish it.

Or is it? When I sit down at the poker table, there are two elements that guarantee success—yes, of course, success in the long run; we’ve already established that the immediate results are all random acts of variance. Still, in the long run, I can guarantee success, partly because of what I know. I can follow the system that the Numbrist has taught me; apply the principles that I’ve learned from him; calculate odds and outs and equity; put my opponent on a range of hands; and then calibrate my actions accordingly. That’s knowledge, or maybe even skill, and it’s been steadily growing since I met the Numbrist, but the breakthrough there happened about a year ago. I’ve known for a while how I was supposed to play a tournament; I just didn’t always do it.

So the other element, the one I’ve been lacking and now have finally found, is execution. A word which apparently carries such an enormous burden that when I reached the end of that sentence and typed in those nine letters, I immediately found a reason to stop writing and do something else. (Significantly, to take the new set of supplements my naturopath has prescribed for me, which I had forgotten to take with my meal: apparently that’s yet another thing I can’t trust myself to do.)

What, exactly, is that burden? It’s the idea of having to keep delivering, again and again, no way out—is it that I can’t trust myself to do that or that I don’t want to? Although skill and knowledge are important in all areas of endeavor—novel-writing as well as poker—what really counts, ultimately, is execution: not what you know, but what you can actually do. Not even what you can do: what you can count on yourself to do. Can the athlete make the jump shot or sink the putt while the game is actually on; can the actor turn in the performance while the audience is there or the cameras are running; can the therapist come up with the insight, the intervention, when the client is in the room; can the surgeon cut what she’s supposed to and miss what she’s not; can the parent translate hope, love, and theory into an actual relationship with a child—that, in the end, is what counts, right? What counts is what you can count on.

I’m asking The Numbrist for yet another poker lesson, and yet again he is refusing me. He tries to explain that my reviewing his notes as part of the preparation for writing his book is the best poker education I could receive right now. He reminds me of our previous conversation, back at the World Series, where he offered me the choice between learning a system and mastering a form. He points out that mastery of a form takes time, that—and as a writer, I’m supposed to know this—it can’t be rushed. He even acknowledges that nothing much seems to be happening in my poker progress right now—since the Series, I’ve played a bit online but put more energy into reviewing the Numbrist’s notes and writing my own poker articles. He assures me, though, that if there were anything else I could possibly do, he would be telling me to do it.

Finally he just smiles.  “Have you ever seen The Karate Kid?”

“No. . . ”

“Well, that’s something you can do. Watch that. Then everything will be clear.”

So the next time I have a free 127 minutes, I put The Karate Kid into my Netflix “Watch Instantly” queue and settle in for a feel-good evening with Daniel-san and Mr. Miyagi. I watch the ancient master give the young novice a little bonsai tree to shape and trim as he sees fit.

“How will I know when it’s right?” the kid asks.

The master smiles. “Look inside yourself. You will know.”

Then I watch the kid beg for lessons. Fine, says the master, but you must do exactly as I tell you—no questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard this part—when we first met, I told The Numbrist a similar story, some kind of Buddhist parable to explain either learning to write or learning to play poker—I don’t remember which.

Nevertheless, the movie is engaging. I watch the kid waxing and unwaxing the master’s cars (“Wax on! Wax off!” Mr. Miyagi explains.), painting his fence (“Left hand up! Right hand down!”), and staining his deck—I don’t remember those instructions, but by this time, I’m laughing, because of course I get the idea. When the kid finally begins his formal training, all the muscles are there—not even as a matter of effort, but automatically. His arms and legs and shoulders have absorbed the lessons at their very core: this is what they are for.

I remember from my own several months of studying t’ai chi—which Master Yu taught as a martial art—that the goal was to absorb the form so deeply into your being that you couldn’t not use it. Then, when an enemy attacked, you invented everything on the spot—attached to nothing, expecting nothing, fully within the moment—and all within the form. “You don’t know the system well enough to not be able to make mistakes in it,” The Numbrist told me back when he was trying to teach me the system, and because of that t’ai chi class, I knew exactly what he meant.

So here’s the story I told The Numbrist, just to prove that, before he ever told me to watch the movie, I got there first:

A student comes to the master jeweler, eager to learn the mysteries of his craft. “Master,” says the young man, “teach me, please teach me, for I long to learn.”

The Master regards him skeptically for a long time. Finally he says, “All right, my son, I will teach you, but only on one condition: You must do exactly as I tell you and ask no questions, no matter what I require.”

The young man laughs at even the thought of challenging the Master. “Of course!” he says. “Of course!”

So the Master hands him a piece of jade, ushers him into a tiny room, and shuts the door. After two hours have passed, he opens the door, and motions the young man out. “Go home,” says the Master, “and return tomorrow.” The young man is puzzled, but he obeys.

And so it continues, day after day, week after week, year after year. Each day, the young man arrives, is given the jade, shut in the room, and left in silence for two hours. Then, without speaking, the Master opens the door and sends him home.

Finally, after several years, the young man has had enough. Promise or no promise, he must speak. “I’ve done everything you told me!” he bursts out, “but you’ve never explained anything, never shown me anything, never taught me anything—only shut me inside the stupid room with your silly piece of jade. . . And today, it wasn’t even a real piece of jade!”

Okay, Numbrist, you win. Wax on, wax off. The magic, I know, is in that moment when you suddenly see: the jade’s mysteries will never belong to you, but the ability to see them does. The magic is in that quantum leap:  the burst of the water into steam, the burst of blindness into vision. I lived through too many years of nothing not to know that, in the end, there’s suddenly everything, and I do trust you, Numbrist, to see what I cannot.

The magic is in that moment when you suddenly see: the jade’s mysteries will never belong to you, but the ability to see them doesStill. When you’re the Karate Kid’s age, or maybe even older, you kind of hope for some control over the process, or at least for some way to make it yours, when the point of it, of course, is that it’s never your process—it’s not even your Master’s process. It’s not you who perceives the mystery, it’s the jade—or the cards—or life itself—that reveals it to you, and it takes its own sweet time doing so. You can’t hurry love, or art, or mastery, or even the process of knowing who you are and what you’re capable of, though once you have the ability to see, you can’t imagine a self who was ever without it. That’s why lack of faith is so puzzling to the faithful—and why faith is so mysterious to the ones who are without it. The knowing, as much as the not knowing, is absolute, and if it doesn’t belong to you, at least it fills you.

When I see The Numbrist struggle with the obstacles in his path, I wish I could transfer his knowledge to him, just as, when he watches me struggle, he wishes he could transfer my knowledge to me. Nope. Wax on. Wax off. In the end, that’s all you’ve got—but luckily, it’s enough.

It was my fault. I can’t do anything about it now. The way they all looked at me when I walked away (even if they didn’t), embarrassed for me, amazed at my incompetence (even if they weren’t). The way I could have—the way I might have. . . Why didn’t I know? I did know—why didn’t I remember? I did remember—why didn’t I act?. . .

Like any heartbreak, the pain is physical: heavy, aching, roiling, sore. Like any loss, it comes and goes, a wave breaking, ebbing, flowing, breaking.

Over the years, I’ve talked with The Numbrist about how to bear the pain of tournament losses, something for which I believed my writing struggles and other artistic failures had equipped me. (Not failures. Setbacks.) The grants you don’t get, the audiences who don’t come, the queries that go nowhere, the readers who don’t care. The years of looking back, then forward, unable to see any signs of hope except the ones you make up yourself, and it’s not like you can’t find evidence for them, both logical evidence (This editor praised me, that agent almost took me on) and evidence born of faith (Before becoming best-sellers, The Great Gatsby was out of print, Moby-Dick failed–me too, me too!). It’s just that the evidence doesn’t matter, finally, because you know you’re making it up. The Numbrist knows, with a certainty born of volume and variance, that if he plays enough tournaments, he’ll eventually get the results he wants—and yet, when he loses, he suffers, there’s no other word for it. It’s one of the few times when what he knows and what he feels don’t seem to be on speaking terms. The discreteness of the tournament—the specificity of the contest—is both a blessing and a curse: you might win another; you won’t win this.

Professionals and the writers of poker books normally reserve a great deal of scorn for those who play simply “to get into the money.” “If the money matters to you, you’re playing too high,” The Numbrist says at tournament boot camps. What you want is the top three places, or at least the Final Table. Or at least, in this event, a significant payday. To play your heart out for four gruelling days, plus waiting around for all those days off in between, plus your plane fare, your hotel, and all your other expenses, and then just to net a $9,000 profit—well, there are easier ways to get there, especially when you figure in the 80%-plus times  you’ve played your heart out and lost. You need tens of thousands of dollars to pay for them.

The one exception, The Numbrist always adds, is if, like me, you’ve satellite in. In my case, the profit won’t be $9,000, it will be $19,000+-$50, my initial investment, since my expenses and buy-in were all covered by my prize package. Now there’s a payday. But I’m still trying to act like a professional and scorn the money per se, focusing on the plays that will put me into a position to succeed over the life of the tournament rather than simply survive. Besides, as the Poker Buddy reminds me on one of my desperate phone calls during the break, trying to survive is no guarantee that you will. Those blinds and antes are going up pretty fast, so even if I don’t play a single hand, I might not make it to the money anyway, especially since the entire room—full of many people who do care about making it to the money—is playing pretty tight.

With the exception, of course, of the big-stacked pros, who understand that their role is to use this pre-bubble time to accumulate as many chips as they can from us smaller fry. The online pro to my right has an enormous stack; the European pro basketball player across from me has a similarly large hoard; the aggressive online guys further to my left aren’t doing too badly either. I do outstack another Oldie McOldenstein to my right, who carefully goes all in or makes oversized bets that no one ever calls, since it’s all too obvious that he’s playing only the best of the best hands and making it as expensive as possible to ever even see a flop. He’s treated kindly, without obvious condescension, but there’s a kind of mascot aura around him that makes me cringe, though he probably doesn’t care because, unlike me, he doesn’t aspire to be a pro or even a semi pro—he just wants in to the money. Like me, he’s won his buy-in on Full Tilt, and he reports the latest news from the site: anyone who makes it into the money today will get a free Main Event buy-in next year. I try to ignore this information, which has just made the money worth not $19,000 but closer to $29,000. I still want to play real poker, the way the big guys play it, and I’m going to do my best to do that.

That isn’t to say the grinder never bluffs or that he’s not capable of poker brilliance. If you ever saw his cards (which you rarely do), you might be astonished at how he takes his opponents to school (as the poker guys say), how he puts them into mathematically impossible situations where they have to pay him off while his chip stack remains protected. He’s more common in cash games, obviously, where good players can win 2 out of 3 sessions, than in tourneys, where  great players might cash only 15% of the time after weeks and months of play. But as I sit down with my 100,000 chips at the beginning of Day 3, knowing that we’re unlikely to hit the money until halfway through Day 4, I keep hearing the words of one of The Numbrist’s tweets: Grinding away, just how I like it. As I note the stack of the guy sitting just to my right—which is roughly three times the size of mine—and the stack of the guy at the other end of the table—a good two times bigger, at least—I look forward to a day of grinding.

The guy on my right seems a fairly formidable opponent, and I have to fight my desire to batter back with the wild aggression that such types usually inspire in me. A huge guy with a surly poker face, he seems to have none of the whimsy implied by the little trinket sitting before him: a U.S. dollar bill folded origami-style into the shape of a frog, with two little googly eyes on top. Seeking to break through his forbidding facade—and perhaps to take the edge off my theft of a pot (I’m not aggressive—see what a nice person I am!), I compliment him on the little figure and learn that his aunt made it for him back in Guam. Later, as the day goes on, he frequently chooses to call me a bully, which, given that his stack is always at least twice as large as mine, seems ironic: How can I push around someone who’s so much bigger than me? Now, if he’d called me a guerrilla, maybe, or a freedom fighter. . . Coming from a U.S. military base in Guam, you’d think he’d know what a bully was.

I almost bump into Barry Greenstein, a brilliant player whose face is so familiar to me from photographs and television and instructional videos that I can’t keep from lighting up in recognition. He’s famous enough in the poker world that he must be used to this, and generous enough after his Day 2 to give me an exhausted but welcoming smile.

Well, now that I’ve acted like I know him, I have to at least acknowledge my response. “It’s an honor to meet you,” I say sincerely, and he smiles with what looks like honest diffidence—modesty, even. He may not be humble—rumor has it that he has a very strong and well-deserved sense of his own ability—but he certainly is gracious, putting me at ease for having thrust us both into this awkward situation.

“I wouldn’t say that,” he says. “But you’re still in?”

“Yes!” I say, unable to believe that he is the first one I’m telling. “With about 100,000 chips.”

He half-smiles, half-winces. “Then you’re doing a lot better than I am.”

After sending an awkward sympathy text to The Numbrist, whose crippling last hour I’ve read about on Twitter, I make my way to the little cluster of benches outside the tournament area, at the edge of the enormous Rio parking lot. I sit for what seems like hours in the thick desert night—even at midnight, the heat is a substantial presence, as palpable as the clouds billowing off a stove—and try to come back to life, to let myself cry or exult or do something to let go of all those hours of bearing down–so different from what I need to write or direct or do anything else in my life. It’s as though, having used myself exactly to the measure of the game’s unflagging demand, I simply evaporate when the demand does, a dried-up well that needs hours—at least—to refill.

Well, that’s what I think until I spend ten minutes at my table, unbagging my chips and stacking them in my obsessively short towers of ten (most players use towers of twenty, but I can’t count those as quickly and I’m also always worried about knocking them over).

Then an expansive, smiling man comes to sit on my right, announcing, with his short stack, that he’s expecting one of us to double him up, and I realize, after the parade of reporters and camera men and tournament officials who stop by to wish him luck, that he’s Somebody Famous. When he steps away from the table for a moment, I ask the dealer who he is, and learn that he’s been at one Main Event final table already. Great. Even though I have more chips than he does—and am pretty determined that I won’t be the one to double him up—I’m already in the presence of someone who officially belongs here, making it all the clearer that I, officially or unofficially, do not.

For a while, I grind along with my 40,000 chips, watching Mr. Famous—who also seems to be the nicest guy in the world—slowly accumulate a stack.  Pretty soon, he has over 60,000 chips, though I am, gratefully, holding my own.  The Numbrist reserves some of his most scathing scorn for people who care about their rank in a tournament—above average, below average, chip leader, short for the table.  The only important thing ever, he constantly explains, is the relationship of your stack to the blinds and antes, and maybe, on a hand-by-hand basis, to the stack you’re playing with as well. But that misses the point, the key is for me to pay attention to my own stack and not be distracted by how others are doing, especially when they’re not even at my table. Play your game, The Numbrist insists, and don’t worry about your rank. As a chronically envious and anxious person, I couldn’t have chosen better therapy.

Then, miraculously, The Numbrist calls, ostensibly to finish up some editorial work we’ve been trying to get out of the way, but I can’t help feeling this is yet another example of his psychic timing, since by the time we get off the phone, I feel terrific. I’m not sure what exactly he’s done or how he’s managed to convey his faith in me or whether that was even his intention, but however it’s happened, the switch has flipped. Instead of a dreadful proof of illegitimacy, the tournament has begun to seem what I wanted all along: a huge, unimaginable, and glorious adventure. Ready or not, here I come—ready, at least, for this next jaunt in my poker journey.

For as long as I’m in the Main Event, the Web site where I won the buy-in is putting me up in the Rio, the hotel where the World Series is held. So on the morning of Day 1, I wake up in a strange bed, with the juicer, the rebounder, the refrigerator all in unfamiliar places. I know the routine, though, and as I’d hoped, its familiarity helps to carry me through the stage fright and uncertainty, to build a kind of platform beneath the wild, unpredictable joy. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here! Whatever happens, I’ve made it this far.

I’m here. I’m here. I’m here!Every amateur has the same fear:  to go out on the first hand. I’m not seriously worried about that, because we each begin with the enormous stack of 30,000 chips, so if I did go out, it would be some monster scenario like preflop aces versus kings, and The Numbrist would kill me if I laid down either one. Still, it’s a relief to make it past the first hand, the second, the third, the fourth. It’s a relief to find my rhythm, to enter, finally, into my game. It’s a relief to be not worrying, but playing, not imagining but playing, not dreaming, but playing. This is SO MUCH FUN, I text The Numbrist, playing his own game amongst the hundreds of silent tables. Yep, he texts back.

Well, that may be me sometimes, but that is not me today. Throughout all my “morning preparations” (done today in the afternoon, because I couldn’t sleep for hours last night and my Day 2 doesn’t start till 4 p.m.), I am plagued with anxiety and frustration over that final hour of play last night. What really bothers me is that I haven’t figured out what I did wrong—or rather, I’m pretty sure I know what I did, but I want explicit confirmation and an explanation of what I should do differently the next time. But because The Numbrist has other commitments today, I’m not going to be able to get it.

I know it’s up to me to throw off these thoughts and face the contest afresh, especially because The Numbrist does make time to send a text congratulating me on making it this far and reminding me that I do know what to do next. There is a very specific set of skills for playing with 15 big blinds, and regardless of whatever mistakes I made last night, I’m supposed to have that strategy down. This part of the game is all mental—focusing on the future, believing in myself in the present, letting go of the past—so regardless of my poker skills, I ought to be able to do it.

But despite my best efforts, I can’t. And nothing that happens when I get to my table does anything to further those efforts. The middle-aged man sitting across from me says, “Hey, didn’t you have a lot more chips last night? What happened to all those chips?” I say, “I’m not sure when you mean,” or “I honestly don’t remember how many chips I had last night,” and when he persists—literally asking me five or six or maybe even seven times about why I don’t have as many chips as I had last night—I finally say, smiling as pleasantly as I can, “You know, I’d really rather focus on the present.” But even that doesn’t stop the conversation, as the dealer now has to comment on how terrible it is that you’re not allowed to say anything at the poker table any more, and poker is supposed to be a social game. I can’t tell whether my opponent-to-be really is that insensitive, genuinely wants to hear a bad beat story, or is actually engaging in a kind of psychological warfare (if we were on a date, I’d assume it was one of those deliberate-but-unconscious passive-aggressive things that ensures there’ll never be another date), but the key thing, as I realize even at the time, is my own inability to remain completely impervious; to simply shake it off.

But as with the $3000 tournament, the higher price tag meant a higher quality of player. I don’t know whether the guys at my table are outplaying me, but when I bust out before the dinner break—and since this tourney starts at 5 p.m., a pre-dinner bustout means I’m cooked in less than four hours—I’m pretty sure that I have allowed the intimidation factor to ensure that I’ve outplayed myself.

I turn to my usual therapy: another tournament.I am mortified, frustrated, and furious with myself, especially since this is the last WSOP event before the Big Dance, so I turn to my usual therapy: another tournament. One good thing about this Series is that, with the exception of my very first day, I’ve done pretty well in my second-chance tourneys, which means that most of the time, my initial defeat hasn’t put me on tilt (or when it has, as on the day I should have benched myself, I have benched myself).

Last night followed that reassuring pattern: although I was grouchy, upset, and struggling to stay calm, I got into the 10 p.m. tournament at Caesar’s and somehow managed to play it cool. Despite the presence of a very skillful, aggressive, and lucky player at my table, I avoid my usual stack envy and focus on my own play, exactly as The Numbrist would have me do. In fact, learning for once from my mistakes, I stay calm and focused even when my chip stack dips below the magical 30-big-blind number I need to feel comfortable (there are mathematical reasons why that number is so important, but I clearly need to learn patience and clarity and correct play when my stack falls below it).

As a result—or rather, as the happy accident that is also a reward for my correct play—I find myself fairly equally stacked with the other 8 players when we reach the final table.   A deal is struck, we divide the prize pool among us with a tiny bit more for the top two contestants, and I take home about $600 for my $80 buy-in.  Although for The Numbrist (or any real pro) these numbers would be laughably small, by my standards they’re not bad, especially since there were some real pros in tonight’s tournament, or at least some guys who are playing most of the WSOP events and planning to buy into the $1000 Bellagio tournament tomorrow. I’m sticking to the cheaper seats—the $350 noon tournament at the Venetian—even though it is now 4 in the morning.  That’s okay:  The boost from my moral and financial victory should outweigh the sleep problems.