Well, first, I’ll be sending The Secret out to beta readers pretty soon–probably next week. I’m waiting to hear back from my loyal First Reader, also known as my wife. And as Mommy. Plus she has a name, and maybe aliases. Which is a joke that I don’t think I should explain here, but I may be wrong about that. Should be interesting to see what happens with her feedback, and also other feedback. Y’know, the thing may suck!

Second, I’m going to try re-instituting my Weekly Challenge, starting next Wednesday. IOW, for the uninitiated (if any such happen to come along and read this): I’ll be putting out a free story every week. Why? Mostly because I loved doing it. I reserve the right to serialize novels and other longer works as I go along, which I may or may not publish directly on the website. Plus I may do other weird stuff. Surprising, I know.

A couple of things will be different. In general, most of the time, I’ll publish the stories directly to Amazon instead of posting them here. My blog posts will give some background and say whatever I want to say, and include a direct link to each story. In addition, I’ll include a direct link to…you know…post a review. If, ah, anyone cares about that part! {8′>

I have some “cushion” here again in case of life events, as I never got around to publishing some of my previous “Weekly Challenge” stories anywhere but the blog. Frankly there wasn’t much reason to do so: I don’t have a lot of readers on Amazon. Or anywhere, really, but far more people have read the stories right here on the blog than did elsewhere. Of course, that was before I started making them free on Amazon (for five days, and also to “Kindle Unlimited” subscribers). There were some readers on other sites, but in general Amazon still outshone ’em all, so I’m going all-in with that for now. (Also this blog’s long hiatus seems to have shed most of its readers, which is awfully reasonable. I’m really liking the idea that those of you who are left might actually like my stuff. Unless you’re just too lazy to unsubscribe. Either way: my kind of people!)

Third, courtesy of that so-clever segue, is this: I have my first post up at my brand-spankin’-new poker blog, aka Caveat Aleator. There’s more stuff I want to post over there, but…hey. There’s a post. Maybe a second to follow soon, because there have been developments in my poker plans and I’d like to write about ’em. Eventually there will be a separate mailing list over there, and probably a nicer theme, and all that. But anyway! There’s a post!

Which puts that blog one ahead of Cave Spurii, which will be for general rants but ain’t got nothin’ nohow as of yet. Soon, I hope. Meanwhile it’s looking pretty generic. I’m linking to it anyway just so you can laugh at me if you’re of a mind.

So…that’s what I’ve got going on over here. How about you guys? Anything cool happening in your neck of the woods?

Have fun out there!

Wow, I feel good!

I know: I promised–well, sort of promised–no more polyphasic updates until I was done with the first month. But come on, people! I’ve had an epiphany. I have a new goal. I’m totally going to have a blast. And you think I can shut up about it all? No way!

First, the epiphany.

Actually you might do better to skip this part and move on to the “new goal” section if polyphasic sleep per se doesn’t interest you. You have been warned.

I think polyphasic sleep is a fairly natural process. Or procedure. Something. Anyway, I strongly suspect many people make it harder than it needs to be. Chiefly, I blame a slavish adherence to schedules for many of the difficulties our sleepytime explorers encounter.

Here are a few principles I’ve either come across, or deduced, or simply declared. These principles are very likely to help those who design schedules for polyphasic sleep. But I think there is at least one better use for them! More on that in a bit. First, the principles:

1. Circadian rhythms are real, and not to be trifled with unnecessarily or without a well-defined purpose.
2. Ultradian rhythms (recurrent periods or cycles within a single day) also exist and serve a purpose.
3. Nonetheless? It’s clear from the fact that I’m not dead–nor detectably more insane than usual–that these things can be modified somewhat.Chiefly, it appears well-established that with sufficient (un?)training the human body can derive a great deal of useful rest from a 20-minute nap–which can be fully sufficient for survival and happiness even if no other type of sleep is allowed to occur. This conflicts with pretty much everything you’ll read about sleep in humans. However, I am demonstrating it on a daily basis–and I’m not the only one doing so.
4. Although some polyphasic sleep schedules, such as the Uberman, are set up to assume equal intervals between naps and equal nap lengths, there is no immediately obvious reason why this would in the long term be ideal for me or anyone else. (It is, however, an excellent way to train the body to usefully take 20-minute naps!)
5. Shit happens. Interruptions to schedules are virtually guaranteed. It’s necessary to know enough about the theory and one’s own body’s reactions to compensate usefully, or–it appears to me–failure is inevitable.
6. Schedules are often planned in terms of the effects of circadian rhythms and also specific ultradian rhythms called BRACs (“basic rest and activity cycles”). These can apparently be anywhere between 90 and 120 minutes in length. Their precise duration supposedly responds well to training. For the classic Uberman schedule, BRACs are trained to repeat every 120 minutes, and thus naps can be taken every four hours–with the possibility of an “extranap” at the intervening two-hour marks.
7. Some schedules call for one or more “core” sleep periods, with lengths ranging from 1.5 hours to 6.5 hours. These are often most usefully performed at times of day that are consistent with an individual’s circadian rhythm.

Well, guess what? I came up with my own schedule, to which I intend to shift after my first month of Uberman is complete (IOW, in about a week). But…although I love many things about polyphasic sleeping? I do not like the rigidity of schedule that many seem to believe is required. Plus, the notion of scheduling things to occur near “dusk” is pretty damned laughable to those of us living in, for instance, Alaska. Plus, I’ve never really been strongly tied to a circadian rhythm, sleep-wise. Like many people’s, mine appears to naturally be a bit longer than 24 hours. And a regular sleep schedule is just not something that’ll ever make me happy.

So instead, I’m introducing a “new” scheme: The Polyvagrant.

It consists of the following rules for napping and sleeping:

• All naps will be taken as close as possible to 30 minutes past the hour on (some but not all) even-numbered hours. This is arbitrary, but matches my current schedule.
• There is no goal of striving for an “equiphasic” schedule (meaning the naps can be of different lengths, with different amounts of time between them).
• Naps will be either 20 minutes or 1.5 hours in length. A semi-inflexible goal is to take a maximum of one 1.5-hour nap per calendar day.
• During the hours I tend to be wide awake, I will tend to space the naps more widely. During the hours I tend to be sleepy, I will either (a) space the naps more closely, (b) precede the shorter naps with a longer nap, or (c) do both.
• I will feel free to move naps around as seems convenient. I will not take a nap simply because a clock tells me to–I will do so only if I am currently sleepy or trying to use the nap to be sure I’m awake and alert for some non-nap activity that is scheduled in the near future.
• I will feel free to take extra naps, of either length, to compensate for periods of unexpectedly long awake-time.
• When planning naps I will take into account what I have learned (via the Uberman schedule) about the times of day/night during which I tend to be especially alert or sleepy. If necessary, I will also take extra naps to account for the effects of exercise.
• Just for fun: jet lag should be impossible with this scheme. In half the world’s timezones, I’ll take naps 30 minutes after odd-numbered hours. The others should require no modification. In any timezone, the local sunrise and sunset (and/or my exposure to light) will very likely affect the timing and length of my naps.

This actually strikes me as easier than sticking to any of the schedules currently extant. It will require a certain degree of mindfulness. Perhaps even a bit of good judgment. Well, I might make it work for me anyway!

My “starter” schedule currently consists of one 1.5-hour nap, three 20-minute naps, and one optional 20-minute nap. I think it’ll work very well for the majority of my days–it’s designed to fit my family’s current schedules as well as my sleepytime needs. But! I can modify it whenever I want…such as when I want a night on the town during what would normally be my 1.5-hour “core” nap.

My New Goal: Vegas, Baby!

In a couple of months (or so), I intend to put my polyphasic superpowers to the ultimate test. Bear in mind that I’m a big fan of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books and stories–Reacher travels the world without a suitcase and with no fixed address. He doesn’t own a car. He buys new clothes as needed, and rents places to sleep. He doesn’t keep much of anything besides a toothbrush. It’s very cool.

So what am I going to do? Simple: I’ll go to Vegas for 30 days. I’ll rent a car. I will not rent a hotel room or an apartment. I will do all my sleeping via naps–most or all of which will happen in the car. I will play many many hours of poker. I may even do a few days’ worth of 20-minute naps only (a la Uberman) in the car in a nearby parking garage, or possibly in some sort of lounge if I find a good one where I might be left alone, and I’ll see if I can keep playing at the same poker table for…three days? Five? Who knows?

Speaking of that, I’ll do some sightseeing. I’ll get into odd conversations, and exert myself somewhat to make new friends. I’ll visit old friends and acquaintances.

And I’m going to write a book about it all. It’ll involve my Polyvagrant adventures in Sin City, the difficulty/ease of maintaining my fasting schedule in the midst of that, probably a few barefoot escapades, my decades-long love affair with Las Vegas and how it’s changed over time, the poker subculture and its changes over time…for me, this trip will be a blast. Guaranteed.

And my wife love love loves the idea. Which is how I feel about her, too. She gets me, and she likes me just as I ever-changingly be. Cool!

The book’s working title? Same as this post’s. But that may change. Much, in fact, may change before this adventure is completed. In fact I’m counting on it.

But I really, really want to pack up (lightly!) and leave right now.

Thoughts? Opinions?

Either way, have fun out there! I know I will.

If this blog had a topic, this post would be off somewhere else. I could try to justify it by pointing out that Pagan Sex is, after all, a book with poker players in it. “Pagan sex” is also a phrase I used to totally own on Google (especially in quotes), and–just to be clear–I’m mostly linking to my page for it right now to see if it can get a bit more scrumptious algorithmic love on a server farm somewhere. I love that title. Don’t hate me, unless you really want to.

So. Moving on. Yesterday I read Poker’s 1%: The One Big Secret That Keeps Elite Players On Top by Ed Miller. I played poker with the author a couple of times a few years ago, but to the best of my recollection we only had one conversation away from the table (after a ridiculous situation one night at Caesar’s Palace where a guy bluffed all-in at me and the whole previously-full table got up to leave before I got around to calling his bet…this guy was from Sweden, and I kinda wonder just how much he enjoyed his visit to Vegas after that…maybe not anybody’s finest hour there). Neither of us mentioned our names, and in fact I didn’t recognize Ed till I saw his picture much later.

IOW I have no financial or personal interest here. But I’ve read all of Ed’s books and articles. Plus lots of others. So, if you’re into that sort of thing, let me give this strong opinion: Ed Miller is the best poker author out there today.

It’s tempting to qualify that. There are topics he hasn’t covered in a lot of depth. Sometimes he oversimplifies in a way that annoys me. Fairly often I think his recommendations are a bit impractical as written–but the thing is, I’ve tried to figure out better ways to convey his points (sometimes being a writer kinda sucks that way), and I generally haven’t succeeded. Ed simply makes sense. He is an original thinker who can communicate his ideas. He hasn’t written the One True Guide to Complete Poker yet, but he’s come up with a few chapters.

Here’s a caveat: it’s barely worth reading the books he co-wrote with others. To my mind their logical flaws are so great that, though I suppose they’re better than nothing at all (why would you play poker to win and read nothing?), they strike me as likely to derail future thought about the game if you happen to get hooked by them. Once upon a time I used to read that sort of thing even if it was suboptimal just to help me categorize players I met at the tables–if I could figure out what had influenced them, I’d have better insight into how they played.

So, about once upon a time. Ed says poker is a math problem. Twenty-plus years ago I used to sit around with an old 286 and a spreadsheet program (not a recommendation, by the way). A friend and I did a lot of modeling of poker situations, basically looking to understand the game and (ideally) find counterintuitive winning strategies we could employ–ideally, also, while looking like idiots as we did it. Plus we’d sit around in the Horseshoe coffee shop in Vegas (before it became just “Binion’s,” which it didn’t do until the Binions had left) and scribble math on napkins and placemats all night long. Fun stuff!

Back then we played limit poker in Vegas. No-limit just didn’t exist aside from occasional tournaments, and even then it was usually…er…limited?…to the final table–the standard wisdom at the time was that suckers lost their money too quickly in no-limit, which adversely affected the casino’s rake, so casinos wouldn’t “spread” the game. Before coming to Vegas, I’d played mostly pot-limit in private games, and a group of us were working pretty hard to figure things out. Essentially, this is what Ed is recommending in his book: study. Away from the table. I used to talk about pattern recognition, and Ed talks about a trained intuition, but it amounts to the same thing.

I was a kid. An introvert. The next-youngest serious player I knew had twelve years on me. So I really got into the study thing–in fact I still do that, all the time. It’s how I learned to write software too. Somewhere along the way I quit being such an introvert (which I think was likely due to a combination of poker games and a related aggressive approach to salary/hourly-rate negotiations…that’s another story), but I clearly remember being that kid.

Here’s the thing. There are lots of people out there who would like to improve their poker games. Ed tells them how to go about it. Then he tells them it’s going to be a lot of work, for months or years. Well, he’s right.

This particular book is somewhat skewed toward introverts, and also toward people who don’t already know a lot of math. It ignores most of what I (for one) actually think about during a poker game. But the thing is? I can only think about that stuff usefully because I’ve done a lot of homework along the way. And besides that? He’s suggested a couple of new wrinkles I hadn’t considered. Always useful, that. More than worth the money. Buying this one should not be a close decision.

In “live” (meaning “not online”) games, there are other approaches to improving your poker game. Some of them may even have more immediate benefit for you, depending on your tendencies and aptitudes. But at some point, you really do have to start doing your homework (and, worse luck? not just the sort Ed recommends). If you want to improve.

Great book. I’m looking forward to whatever he writes next.

Have fun out there!