“Psychic Poker”: The First Chapter

The eBook version of Psychic Poker, my brand new book, is now available on Amazon. Here is the link to the Amazon listing.

Psychic Poker Amazon eBook Listing

This listing is brand new as of the time of this post and does not even contain a description. Amazon’s systems work in such a way that the full listing of a book happens over a timeframe of several days. However, you can buy the book now and start reading it on your Kindle or iPhone or iPad or Android phone. The eBook is priced at $6.99. The paperback edition will be available soon and it will be priced at $9.95.

First, here is what is on the back cover. This should give you a good grasp on what this book is all about:

Poker is a game of skill and chance.  Some say it is 50-50%, while others say it is 70-30%. You are told to ignore the “chance” element and focus purely on “skill” because it will pay out over the longer run. In time, however, even seasoned professionals find that they have reached the peak in terms of skill – and they resign themselves to just playing their best game.

What if you could control the “chance” element in poker? Would that improve your game?

This book defines that “chance” component as being composed of luck, intuition, and foresight. Human beings possess a subtle energy field that envelops the physical body. When activated, it is capable of manufacturing luck and producing remarkably accurate powers of intuition and foresight. Beneath the deceptive fabric of everyday reality, energy fields continually wage wars to determine who “gets lucky.” Individuals who possess active energy fields will dominate those with passive energy fields.

How can you activate your energy field and put it to use at the poker table?

This book provides the answers.  Author Sunil Padiyar offers an engaging study of both the scientific and spiritual aspects of luck, intuition and foresight. He takes the reader on a riveting journey from the modern theories of Quantum Physics to the metaphysical theories of the ancient Hindu Upanishads (written as far back as in the first millennium BC). Based on his intriguing findings, the author presents practical techniques to harness psychic powers and put them to use in winning at the poker table.

Here is a reproduction of the Preface followed by the first chapter that is titled, Introduction. 

Preface

This book is a derivative work off of my original larger book, The Psychic Gambling Supersystem. The reason I created the book, Psychic Poker, is for the benefit of poker players who wanted a book that was exclusively focused on the game of poker.

Poker is an exciting game. It has a skill element and a chance element. Anyone can learn and play poker and the game appears deceivingly simple at first. Later it turns into a lifetime of learning and adventure.

Poker players largely give up on the “chance” part in poker and spend a lifetime mastering the “skill” part. They are told that poker is a game of odds and that if they play well and make the right decisions as favored by the odds, they will win in the longer run. Some believe that poker is a game of 50 percent skill and 50 percent chance while others believe that it is a game of 70 percent skill and 30 percent chance. Whatever the split may be, there is no denying that the “chance” part is a large number. It is large enough that if you can even make a small dent in terms of an improvement there, you will win significantly more money in poker.

I want to ask you this question. Just how many thousands of dollars have you spent on mastering the “skill” part of poker? Besides the many books that you have read, many games you have watched on TV, many blogs that you have perhaps browsed on the Web, you have probably spent thousands at cash tables and in tournaments trying to get a handle on the “skill” part of poker. What have you done, if anything, with regards to the “chance” part? At times you may have worn a shirt that you felt was lucky or carried a talisman that you thought brought you luck. Over time, however, you largely resigned yourself to fate when faced with evidence that odds of the game ruled over any temporary luck you experienced with your lucky shirt or talisman. You have effectively given up trying to do anything about the “chance” part and focused yourself instead on the seemingly endless quest to master the “skill” part.

I am here to tell you that there is a way that you can get a handle on the “chance” part. I define the “chance” part as comprising of luck, intuition and foresight. If you had all these three on your side and are skilled as well, you will be unstoppable in the game of poker. My job in this book is to teach you a system that will enable you to manufacture luck and significantly enhance your intuition and foresight.

Before I detail you the system the roots of which come from ancient Indian transcripts (called the Upanishads written sometime in the first millennium BC), I will take you on a journey of modern day quantum physics. Why? Because I want to satisfy your rational “scientific” part that you are walking on solid ground and this is not some cooked-up, over-extended spiritual gobbledygook. You will discover that what I find in these ancient transcripts matches with amazing accuracy what is being discovered in the frontiers of modern day quantum physics! The root concept is that matter is malleable and an individual has significant control over the state of matter. Quantum Physics tells us that an individual’s observation can make stateless matter assume a state leading to the question, what then can directed intention do? Can you make matter assume a state of your choice by just intending that state with the power of your being? My book answers the questions. I bring science and ancient findings together showing you that our ancients, as far back as in the first millennium BC, knew what Quantum Physics has only recently started uncovering. It is that this universe of ours is a vast ocean of energy and superior forms of energy will rule over inferior forms. That all individuals possess a field of energy that surrounds them and that an active field of energy of an individual will rule over the passive field of another individual. And that the individual with the active energy field manufactures luck and is blessed with significantly enhanced intuition and foresight.

After having proved the concepts to you that I dug up from the ancient Upanishads, I detail a system where you can activate your field of energy with a few simple steps in as little as 5 minutes. I also get into the specifics of the game. I talk about pre-game preparation. I talk about what to do post-flop and walk you through different situations. By using this system, you will improve your luck and significantly enhance your intuition and foresight.  The more you practice the better you will get in controlling the “chance” part of the game. It is my hope that you read my book with an open mind and take to heart its key concepts. It is my hope that you will now not only enjoy playing the game of poker, but also win more often.

So come with me on this exciting journey to master the “chance” part of the game of poker. You will surely enjoy it and ultimately find it quite profitable as well.

Chapter: INTRODUCTION

You have made it past the bubble in the Texas Hold’em tournament with an above-average stack. The tournament has more than a million dollar prize pool and the top 10 percent are getting paid. You are in the top 10 percent! If you exited the tournament in the next hand, you will at least get your entry fee back and then some. But that is not what you are focused on. The top prize in this tournament is nearly a quarter million dollars. A win will change your life. You daydream what you can do with all the money. A new car, a trip to the Bahamas, maybe a new house . . . your spine tingles with excitement. From past experience you know that, even at this later stage in the game, it is a long way to the final table. You also know that you may have at least two if not three near-death situations that you have to face where you will likely put all your chips in the middle of the table. You will risk your tournament life. Even your best hand such as pocket aces could be overcome by an opponent who makes a set on the river with a lower pair and ousts you from the tournament. You let out a deep sigh thinking of all the times you have made this far only to beaten by an opponent that got lucky.

You remind yourself of all the times that luck helped you win in poker. A smile forms on your face as you remember the time when you made an improbable flush on the river to beat your opponent. That was in a big cash game and your opponent cursed and swore at you for several minutes afterwards. There was also that incredible moment when at the final table you survived a showdown to make two-pair on the river and won the first prize. Alas, you remember the times when luck deserted you and caused you a premature exit from the game. There is no question that luck has both helped you and hurt you in the past. You are just hoping that it will continue to “hold up” for the remainder of the tournament helping you make it to the final table and perhaps even help you win the first place prize.

How about intuition? You think of a time in the past when you let your top pair go because you correctly sensed that your opponent had flopped a set. It was not a poker tell that made you discard your top pair, it was something else. You remember wishing that you had such an uncanny sense of intuition all the time. If you did, you say to yourself, you would be at the top of your game. Unfortunately, you remember many more times when your intuition had led you stray and you had gone all the way to the river with the second best hand and lost a huge pot. You shudder as you think about a situation from the past where a poor sense of intuition had eliminated you from the game just prior to making the final table.

You then wonder about foresight. Foresight is the ability to see something happen before it has happened. You wonder about the many times when your best hand on the flop became the second best and sometimes even the third best hand on the river. You could have let many of these hands go on the flop but instead you persisted only to take a big dent on your stack. Now if you had foresight wrapped up inside of you then you would have won in these situations.

Luck.

 Intuition.

 Foresight.

You have concluded that you have no control over any of the three above factors. You have been told that luck is random. You have absolutely no control over it. You have been told that intuition is a natural gift and some people have it and some people don’t. You vaguely remember reading a book or an article about eastern philosophy where you were told that meditation improves mental concentration and improved mental concentration gave you better intuition and foresight. You remember sitting in a funny pose on your couch and trying to practice meditation. Surely, you figured, how hard can it be to sit still for a few minutes and make your mind a blank slate as required by meditation? Oh, no, it turns out be impossible to keep your mind free of the clutter of thoughts. Any time you cleared a thought a new one kept cropping up. After thirty minutes or so you give up because you actually developed a headache trying to control your thoughts. Instead of improving mental concentration, meditation ended up giving you a headache!

You wake up from the mental stupor as a fellow player nudges you and urges action. You look down and realize that you were dealt cards while you were daydreaming. You compose yourself; look around calmly and serenely as you peek at your cards. Presto! You have been dealt pocket queens! Wow, the two red cowgirls look dazzling beautiful! Inside you smile yet your exterior registers no expression. You pride that you have mastered the art of deception. You have read the mad professor’s (Mike Caro) book on Poker Tells and know not to let out body language tells that your opponents may pick up on. You know from reading Harrington’s book that this great starting hand must be handled right and you must bet the correct amount which is relative to your table position. You remember from Sklansky’s book the odds of a great starting hand like pocket queens and feel very comfortable as you bet three and half times the BB (Big Blind). You then sit back, adjust your sun glasses, and wait for a reaction. Sure enough you get a reaction from the button. He raises you making it cost you a third of your stack if you want the see the flop. Everyone involved in the hand folds and the action is upon you. You now frantically search inside your memory banks for a proper response. You have read a wealth of poker literature that has given you strategies to deal with the situation. You realize that your response here actually depends on your reading ability. If you have read your opponent right, then you are supposed to know whether he is calling you with a higher pair such as pocket kings or even pocket rockets. However, he could be doing the same with pocket jacks or even a lesser hand! The reason is he has a stack two times bigger than you and could certainly afford to bet heavily on a hand less stellar than yours. For all you know, he may have pocket jacks and he may have put you on Ace-King. In such an event it is a race and he is more than likely to want to race you given the size of his stack. Or, you fear this innately, he may have a higher pair in which case you have less than 17.5 percent chance that you will beat him. What to do? Oh, what to do? This is where your poker education falls short and you now step into the realm of the unknown and the unknown carries a hefty price. The price that you pay for seeing the flop here could very well cost you your tournament life.

What should you do in this situation? As your mind debates the various alternatives, your opponent looks at the dealer and shrugs his shoulders as if in exasperation. Now you start becoming angry. You remember him taking an inordinate amount of time during a few previous hands and you were incredibly patient. How dare he not extend you the same courtesy! As your blood boils you remind yourself that this is a trick by your opponent perhaps designed to make you go off balance. “Oh, no!” you say to yourself. “You are not going to put me on tilt, you jerk!” You raise your hand and say, “Time!” to the dealer and then proceed to go into deep thought trying to come up with an appropriate response.

One option is to re-raise your opponent and put yourself all-in! While such a strategy might get you a big reward if your opponent holds an inferior hand, it will also cost you your tournament life if he holds a better hand. Another option is to just fold and pick a battle later. That is however not an option you are seriously considering. Blinds escalate rapidly in a tournament and premium hands are hard to come by. I must at least see the flop, you tell yourself. I can then decide on the flop what to do next. You realize that such a strategy carries its own set of issues. What if the flop is all lower cards? In such a case you face a new quandary. Your opponent could go all-in as long as he holds a pair higher than what you see on the flop. In such a case, you are back to square one because you won’t know whether he has a higher or lower pair than yours. On the other hand, the flop could present a king or an ace in which case you have a hard decision to make. Your future action depends on the hand that you put your opponent on.

After contemplating the various choices you decide that you must at least see the flop with a premium hand such as pocket queens. So you go ahead and just call and wait for the flop. The flop is a rainbow with all lower cards and the highest being a six of diamonds. The flop is not well-connected either and presents no danger of a straight or a flush possibility. And now you really need to put your opponent on a hand. Oh, you say to yourself, an Ace or a King on the flop would have made my choice somewhat easy but now I am in a real quandary. You search your opponent’s face for a clue. Unfortunately, from his reaction (which is a dead pan expression) you gather no clue. You can now put forth a sufficiently large bet to see if you can make your opponent fold or simply check and see what response he will put forth. You realize though that both courses of action have their own danger scenarios. If you bet, you will now likely have committed more than half the starting stack and thus be “pot committed.” If you don’t and chose simply to check, you have given your opponent a chance to check behind and see a free card. This is one of those “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!” situations. “What would Phil Ivey do in a situation like this?” you wonder. From your memory banks you recall situations where Ivey has gone both ways in this type of a situation. There are situations where he has pushed and situations where he has just checked. When Ivey persevered he was credited with a great gift of intuition and foresight and when he lost with a better hand the commentator saying, “That is poker!” You hate the expression “That is poker!” There have been many times when you have lost your better hand and heard the expression said aloud by players as you have walked away from the table in disgust. As you look at your opponent wondering what to do you wonder, “Oh, I wish I could read his mind!”

But is reading his mind in a situation such as this sufficient for you to make a decision? It is not exactly so. You could read his mind and find that you hold a better hand, possibly go all-in, and find that your opponent win by sucking out on you. For instance, your opponent may hold pocket jacks in which case you are a 90 percent-plus favorite to win this hand. That means 10 percent of the time you will lose if your opponent gets a jack on the turn or the river. This is a situation where great foresight will cause you to lay down your hand and not cost you your tournament life. However, if you knew that your opponent held pocket jacks, there is no chance whatsoever that you would lay your hand down. If he gets a jack on the river and breaks your back then you are likely to say, “I hate poker!” as you walk away from the table.

You have taken a lot of time because now you see exasperation apparent in the faces of other players. You decide to take a chance and check and as soon you did that your opponent mutters the dreaded words, “I am all-in!” For a while you don’t know how to react to this event as a rush of feelings overwhelms you. What is he betting with? Pocket jacks? Pocket Kings? Pocket Aces? Pocket nines? A set? Or perhaps he has an Ace-King and is trying to get me off the pot? In your memory banks as you search for answers, you realize that the way he had accumulated his big stack might have been through bluffing and grand standing. You remember a situation where he called a similar big bet with an inferior hand and he got lucky on the river. As you think deeply you realize that he may very well be in the process of pulling a similar stunt on you. You are thinking so hard that it is beginning to hurt. You look at your opponent’s eyes and you believe that you saw an expression of bluff in his dead pan face. You look at the dealer. “I am all-in as well!” you say.

Now comes the time for both of you to turn your cards up and you were the first one to put your pocket queens on the table. You see a nod of approvals go around the table as players now turn to see what cards your opponent has. He looks at you and smiles as he moves forward to flip his cards open. “What was that smile for?” you ask yourself as a chill crawls up your spine. “Perhaps, he has pocket rockets in which case I am dead!” you say to yourself as you lean forward expectantly. “I was trying to get you off the pot!” says the opponent smiling as he unfolds Ace-King on the table. “Yes!” you scream jubilantly. “Good move!” whispers the player next to you as you pride yourself in your extraordinary reading ability. You look at the dealer and he seems to acknowledge with you your incredible reading ability. You sit back ready to scoop in the huge pot. “Final table, here I come baby!” you say to yourself excitedly ready to stack the chips in a neat orderly imposing manner. You will now have enough chips to build a castle!

The dealer puts the turn card out. It is a harmless seven of spades. Taking what seems like an eternity, the dealer puts the river card out. “Oh, no, it is the dreaded King of clubs! Oh, no!” you look at dealer in utter disbelief as he merely shrugs his shoulders and abdicates any responsibility for having ruined your life. You stand up in disgust, shake hands with several of the people simply going through the mechanics, and leave the table. You hear someone yell in the back, “That is poker!” and you realize just how much you hate that expression when it is mentioned in your context. You walk to the casino parking lot feeling like an empty man. You get into your car and sit behind the wheel and hug the steering wheel as if for comfort. “How am I ever going to make it in this game if these kinds of bad beats happen to me?” you say aloud.

Technically, however, what happened to you was not such a bad beat. On the flop, you had an approximately 75 percent chance that you would win the hand. The words, “Bad Beat”, are reserved for much worse scenarios. Here are the several other ways you could have lost the same hand.

• Your opponent could have had pocket jacks, gone all-in like he did on the flop, and made his hand on the river. With pocket queens on the flop against your opponent’s pocket jacks, you would have been a 90 percent-plus favorite. Surely, you have been defeated under a similar circumstance in the past? How many times in the past did a worse hand up-end your better hand by the time the river got around?
•  Your opponent could have made a backdoor flush by the river and eliminated you from the tournament. Surely, this would be classified as a bad beat but it has happened to you, has happened to me, and has happened to virtually everyone who is reading this book one time or another in their poker playing experience.
• There are several other ways your opponent could have held an inferior hand on the flop only to emerge victorious by the river. This is the reality of poker and you have been told to accept it. In this particular case, after you get home you can post your defeat on poker message boards and have lots of people sympathize with you but yet recount similar horror stories of their own from the past. “Get over it, shit happens, it is just poker!” they will yell at you.

You are now ready to turn your wrath on me and say what else you could have done besides what you already did the result of which is that you are eliminated yet one more time from a top notch poker tournament. Many readers will for sure have their own observations on how you played your game. They would perhaps say one of the following things.

• You should have gotten away from the hand pre-flop. In response to this suggestion, if you threw your shoe at the TV, I would be there in soul and spirit with you. It is difficult, if not impossible, to get away from this kind of a premium hand pre-flop unless you suspected (and later were proven right) that your opponent held a better hand. Clearly, in this case he did not and that backs up your action not only to the flop but even all the way to the river. Yet, a small piece of you inside tells you that if you had gift for foresight, you would have perhaps done the extraordinary act of laying your hand down and saved yourself your tournament life. Mind you, it is a small voice but it does have merit.
• You could have laid the hand down on the flop suspecting wrongly that your opponent had a better hand. Great players have been known to lay down premium hands so some could say that you could have still gotten away from this hand based not on your uncertain read but the theory is that it was not worth risking your tournament life.

There would be many more arguments, logical or illogical, that could be made regarding your play but what follows is a theory and I urge you to read it a few times before either accepting or rejecting it. They are as follows.

• What did you do prior to the tournament to influence or even manufacture luck? Huh, what do I mean by that? Let me explain. What if I showed you through a mix of both science and spirituality that you have significant influence on luck and are even able to manufacture it? In such a case, besides spending hours if not days studying poker and gaining experience through playing thousands of hands, you would buy the notion that you should perhaps invest a little time in manufacturing luck.
• What if I told you that you can significantly enhance your intuition and foresight with a little time and effort and the payback is even bigger than all the investment you have made studying body language and poker tells? What if at any time during the hand your sense of intuition and foresight could have made you do the right thing? Such as laying your premium hand down on the flop? Yes, the world which saw only the flop may laugh at you, but you would have had the last laugh by staying alive through this key hand.
• By manufacturing luck and having a significantly enhanced intuition and foresight you would have had an entirely different result from the same hand! Imagine for instance you did exactly what you did but that King did not show up on the river. You would have won the hand. What could you have done to give you a favorable outcome from this hand than the disaster that happened?

We will begin by asking the question, “Is luck random?” One will say luck is entirely random and over the longer run the game of odds and probabilities will pay out giving you a checkered experience of being lucky at times and unlucky at other times. Is it possible to be luckier than others at least over duration of say several years? It is quite possible that amongst millions of players there could be one or two or maybe a dozen or even more players who are consistently blessed with good luck. Remember, as per conventional wisdom, the longer the time horizon the more certain that the odds and probabilities in a given game of chance hold up, but the length of time it takes for this to exert could vary. I have met poker players who have had not one, not two, but several years of consistent downswings that have put them outside the norm in terms of odds and probabilities. Similarly, I have met poker players who have been blessed with consistent good luck and who give many more bad beats than they take and have this spell last for several years. So, ok, we can safely theorize that over a million years luck will match with odds and probabilities in a given game of chance, but we don’t live a million years. We need to talk over a 20 or 30 or 40 or even 50 year time period and question whether luck could be biased enough to bless us for that long. I would suppose a statistician would readily agree that it is entirely possible to beat the odds and probabilities over such a time period but he would hasten to remind you that over the longer run the odds and probabilities will rule over luck. We can thank him for his wisdom and move on, because we are only concerned with luck over our lifetime and not a hypothetical thousand or a million years.

Let us move on to intuition. Let us revisit the definition of intuition. Intuition is defined as the apparent ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason. People who have great intuition (they are often right even when not all the facts are available) often cannot tell you why or how they arrived at a decision, except saying that it felt right. World class poker players, such as Phil Ivey and Daniel Negreanu, possess an uncanny sense of intuition where they would do the opposite of what every poker book would say and come out on the correct side. When you listen to how or why they did what they did their answers do not make total sense. It is as if something is missing. They didn’t know why they did what they did, yet they did it. Disappointed with their answers, you read a book on poker that covers “tells” and try guess how they arrived at the answer they did.

How about foresight? Let us look at the official definition of foresight. Here is an answer from Wikipedia:

“Degree of analyzing present contingencies and degree of moving the analysis of present contingencies across time, and degree of analyzing a desired future state or states a degree ahead in time with regard to contingencies under control, as well as degree of analyzing courses of action a degree ahead in time to arrive at the desired future state.”

Huh? This makes sense to you? A better definition to me is knowing that something will happen before it has happened. It is sort of like a poker player ignoring pot odds and closing his hand with a set on the flop because he deduces (correctly) that his opponent would have hit a flush by the river. Any poker book would reason that, if you have the pot odds in your favor, you would show it down all the way to the river. Yet, had you been in the showdown, you would have been eliminated from the game (if it is a tournament) or taken a big dent in your stack or bankroll. Foresight, here, is correctly sensing that your opponent would hit his flush and lay your hand down. Foresight is more applicable to poker or a similar game where there are lots of twists and turns.

Luck.

Intuition.

Foresight.

So, what if I postulate that you can manufacture your luck, develop significantly better intuition and over time even develop the capability to be correct and develop an uncanny sense of foresight? Would you be interested in hearing me out? What if I told you that I have constructed a solid theory that is based on science and that I borrowed a framework that was invented as far as back in the first millennium BC and that science is only recently finding out this to be true. Then, would that interest you? Tell me if you believe at least this much:

• There are many mysteries to life that science has not yet uncovered. If you want even a basic debate on this, ask a scientist what consciousness is. Where exactly it is located? Can an autopsy show where consciousness resides in the human body? If he can give you a satisfactory answer, stop reading this book and become his manager so that you may shop this genius around and make yourself a bundle of money.
• You have had at least one or two or maybe even several events happen in your life that could be classified as supernatural and ones that cannot be explained by science. I can recount without thinking at least half a dozen events in my life of the paranormal or supernatural nature. Being born in India and raised in a family and culture that greatly valued spirituality and the supernatural potential of the human mind really did help me in getting more than my fair share of supernatural event occurrences. There are many that I detail in this book and I am quite sure that you have a few that you can recount yourself. Have you ever heard the voice of an aged relative and later learned that he or she had already passed away? Have you ever changed your route at the last minute and later found out that a major accident would have claimed your life?
• As a poker player, there are some days that nothing (I mean absolutely nothing) could stop you. You gave so many bad beats at the poker table that players would no longer play with you in a hand. You make near-perfect decision at every twist and turn in the game that people look suspiciously at you wondering if you are a psychic!
• Also, as a poker there are some days when nothing goes your way. Let me ask you, how many times have you sat at the poker table and watch your opponents suck out on you, hand after hand, resulting in unlikely and improbable beats? Your pocket aces on a rainbow flop is undone by a player who calls you all the way to the river and makes his second best hand better than yours by hitting a flush. Your set on the flop is undone by a better set by your opponent on the river. So on and on. You feel like you are cursed by God or powers unknown. If you don’t believe me go to poker forums and see several posts every day by poker players that God does not love them or lady luck has simply abandoned them and that their downward spiral is now at a record one hundred days plus.

Luck.

Intuition.

Foresight.

You get them all firing on 12 cylinders one day and the next day they run like a lawn mower. You have more days when you are a lawn mower than when you are a turbo engine. You say to yourself, if only you could get control over these three things you will rule when playing poker. You sit, you wonder, you Google, and you try various strategies that have to do with luck, intuition and foresight. You end up with mixed results and are more often wrong than right. It feels like you are limping around frantically, groping your hands in darkness, and every now and then you feel like you grabbed something substantial; but alas you cannot reproduce it. And the next day that strategy goes out the window, to be replaced by a new one. There are days of desperation where you feel like nothing is working in terms of getting a handle on these three ephemeral entities. Then, you decide to dumb down your game to basic strategies found in a book. That too, doesn’t work so you just surrender yourself to fate. You keep saying things like, “Whatever happens happens and I will deal with it!” Or “I have the worst luck and my sense of intuition and foresight are downright disgusting so I will do whatever comes to mind and deal with what happens!” Or the most popular expression, “That is poker!” and walk away from the table in disgust after taking your final bad beat.

Let me tell you my own experience playing poker. I, too, had exactly the same experience with poker that many have had. Some days everything went my way, but most days things went the opposite way. Yet, I saw players who fell in the other camp where they had a great day most days but a poor day some days. And I did meet a few (very few!) who had such a consistent streak of good luck that they did not even have time anymore for poker because their luck, combined with a superior sense of intuition and foresight, got them engaged in many great business opportunities. They are making money hand over fist and are busily engaged in intellectually stimulating ventures no longer showing up to play in poker. Clearly, I needed to at least reverse my ratio (lucky days to unlucky days) before I could aspire to be one of the very few who had it their way every single day. So what was it that I was doing wrong? I undertook a perilous journey that I almost gave up on many times, but kept coming back, because something within me told me that I would find the answer. After a long and exhaustive process, an answer emerged, hopefully, you will benefit from my findings.

I started first by reading the book, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (published by Atria Books/Beyond Words). The premise behind the secret is fairly simple. It is the use of the Law of Attraction in getting the things you want in your life. The Law of Attraction says that like attracts like and the way to attract things you want in your life is by literally radiating the feeling of already having it from every cell in your body. The reason I underscore the intensity aspect of it is because the Law of Attraction requires you to both consciously and subconsciously want a thing and if that doesn’t happen (the conscious and subconscious are not in alignment), then the law would not work for you. So if you get the conscious and subconscious in alignment when you practice the Law of Attraction, then great things happen, and if not you fail. We will cover this more in detail in a subsequent chapter, but it suffices to say that it is really not as simple as it seems and you need to get the hang of the technique to get your subconscious in alignment with the conscious. In my using the Law of Attraction I found that it would work in spurts but I could not consistently make it work in a reliable manner. More research on this uncovered why it was not working in a predictable and continuous manner. Apparently, you could not put a time frame on when the universe delivered something to you. Sometimes it would happen overnight and sometimes it took days, if not weeks, because such was the nature of the cosmic force. So if I am sitting at a poker table and want to influence my participation in the next pot that is a bit hard to do, I could definitely influence my poker career with the Law of Attraction. The Law of Attraction has its own rhyme and reason and one that is hard to fathom. I concluded my research, thinking that the Law of Attraction definitely worked, but it alone was not sufficient and I needed more help. There were missing pieces in the puzzle.

As if by coincidence, what that other piece is came to me when I was talking to my mother in India. After the death of my father, my mother had taken to spiritual studies and had extensively studied ancient Indian literature including the Vedas and the Upanishads. While she was doing that I was engaging in an intellectual pursuit to understand everything there was about Quantum Physics. The quantum world has become a sort of fascination for me, because one day I had come across some literature that described the quantum world and how unlike it was from the everyday physical world that many have aptly termed as the Newtonian world. Just as I finished telling my mom about the interaction of energy fields at the quantum level, she started talking to me about the subtle energy field that overlays humans. She explained how an impaired energy field can manifest itself both physically and mentally as negative ailments, and as serious diseases in many cases. As I was contemplating this, I was struck with a thought. I asked myself the following questions:

• Is bad luck a manifestation of an impaired human energy field?
• And some days when I was blessed with good luck was it because I did something inadvertently to lift up my energy field? It is like living in Seattle where most days of the year you have cloudy and rainy skies but every now and then the sun does peak out and offers its glorious shine.
• Obviously, if luck could be a factor influenced by the energy field, then how about intuition and foresight?

So what was this energy field that my mother was talking about? It turns out that, in her exhaustive reading of every ancient Indian scripture she could find, she had read through the holy scriptures of the Vedas and the Upanishads. The Vedas are ancient Indian texts written as far back sometime in the first millennium BC. The Vedas are composed in the ancient Sanskrit language that is said to be one of the world’s oldest languages. Vedas means Knowledge and the texts of the Vedas contain spiritual knowledge that encompass all aspects of life. The Upanishads were derived from the Vedas. The term Upanishad literally means “Sitting down close to” and implies listening closely to the translation of the Vedas as rendered by a guru or a person of extraordinary spiritual powers. The Upanishads, my mother said, contained texts that detailed the human energy field interacting with the larger energy field of the universe. Being an engineering graduate and one of a strong scientific persuasion, I immediately saw parallels between this and recent breakthroughs in the field of Quantum Physics. It was as if a lightning bolt had struck me. Science and spirituality had finally intersected and I may have been privy to be right at the junction point. To my surprise, Quantum Physics answered some questions, but left many unanswered. Some of them were so fundamental that they would make you wonder how a scientist could even sleep at night knowing how little they know about the very basic building blocks of the universe. Advances in nuclear science and space flight would not happen without Quantum Physics, but the more I read the more convinced I became that we had hardly uncovered the tip of the iceberg. There was so much more to discover that it could easily take several more years, if not decades. Perhaps I could get a leg up by using the Upanishads as a secondary source when I contemplate unanswered questions in Quantum Physics.

This universe of ours is not a collection of large objects and things with their properties subject to the classical laws of physics. This is the facade that has been pulled over the eyes of humans for as long as we have been around because a universe where everything is unpredictable is also unlivable. We need certainty and solidness in the universe of ours so nature made things solid and certain. If things were not solid and certain our home for instance could morph itself into an igloo and our surroundings into a frigid wasteland by the time we go to sleep and wake up the next day. Your dad who was 6ft tall and 200 lbs one day would be 7ft tall and 150 lbs the next day. We blink our eyes, we take a nap, we daydream, we go to sleep and wake up and find that things are as they were and you can rely on a framework that gives you much needed continuity from one day to another.

At the subatomic level our universe is completely opposite of what it is until it reaches the size of an atom or a molecule where law and order exists as defined by the laws of classical physics. The larger world is called the Newtonian world in honor of Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727). He described universal gravitation and the laws of motion which laid the framework for creation of the modern industrialized world. The subatomic world, called Quantum world by many, where the laws of physics as we know them fail to work, are explained by a relatively new branch of science called Quantum Physics. Here is what is frightening and at the same time exciting about Quantum Physics: Quantum Physics says that we live in a world of possibilities where everything is random and nothing is certain. This whole universe of ours at the subatomic is ONE giant energy ocean where everything is trading energy with everything else. There are no discrete boundaries in the quantum world. These discrete boundaries exist only when things become large, such as the size of an atom and upward. But underneath you, me, the copy of this book if you are reading the paperback version of it, and the coffee cup on the table, and the table, and the house and the world are all part of one giant energy ocean where every particle from every physical thing is trading energy with every other particle from every other physical thing.

Picture: Sir Isaac Newton

So you pause . . . Huh? What does this all have to do in determining our luck, intuition and foresight? Here in a nutshell is what I saw as the framework within which you, I, our luck, intuition and foresight are all subject to:

• In this universe where every particle is trading energy with every other particle, superior forms of energy will dominate inferior ones.
• Within a field of energy the bearer of the energy has tremendous influence on the outcomes of all events. The bearer has influence on what events will even come forth within its field of energy.
• Luck, intuition and foresight, within the radius of this energy field, are defined, controlled and manipulated by the bearer of the energy.
• The human is the most intelligent life in the universe and is blessed with a unique energy field that overlays the physical body. If scientists cannot locate consciousness through an autopsy of the physical body, it is because it does not exist within the physical body, but as part of a subtle body of energy that overlays the physical body.
• The human who knows how to tune his energy field and cast its aura will dominate anything and everything that happens within the range of that energy field. Man, machines, things, events – all are controlled by the mind that powers this energy field. The stronger the energy field the stronger is the luck of the individual who casts it and stronger is that individual’s intuition and foresight.

In formulating the above, I have not taken a liberal license to extend either Quantum Physics (my primary source for most of the science in this book) or the Upanishads (my primary source for most of the knowledge in this book that could be described as spiritual in nature). What I did was simply extend the framework proposed by Quantum Physics with material that I uncovered in the Upanishads. My main focus area, of course, was how to manufacture luck and significantly improve intuition and foresight. The hockey great, Wayne Gretzky, is said to have quoted, “While other players follow the puck I plan on being where the puck is going to be!” Just like Wayne Gretzky, this book is intended to get to the model that the quantum scientists will eventually uncover. Then you will have the so-called first mover advantage in understanding this model and perfecting your use of it before everyone else gets it. As a first mover you will be further along the road to perfection before the less aware become aware of it and start adopting it.

Consider this before you debate in your mind whether I am right or wrong. How is it that an ancient text written as far as back in the first millennium BC knows so much that scientists have only recently discovered? If the wise gurus and the sages who authored the Vedas and the Upanishads knew these basic principles that far back what else did they know that may be of great value to us in helping lead a better life?

I believe that the greatest poker players in the world already have powerful fields of energy and are manipulating it each and every single day. They may be using the power that comes from this energy field even though they may not know they have it! In one poker tournament I was able to watch the great one (Phil Ivey) cast his energy field to get a read on the opponent. The lighting was dark enough that I was able to make out the faint outlines of his energy field called the aura which we will cover later in this book. As Phil contemplated his response to his opponent’s aggressive move, I could see the outer bands of his energy field intensify and literally envelop his opponent within it. For a little while it was as if the opponent’s aura tried to fight away Phil’s aura but was soon overcome by it. Imagine a smaller galaxy being dwarfed and literally torn apart by a larger giant galaxy because such was the nature of this interaction. Phil did this for a few seconds and he knew exactly what to do. Of course, he turned out to be right and later explained why he acted the way he did and could never make sufficient sense. Later in this book you will see exactly why Phil was unable to make sense in his answers and for that matter why great poker players are never fully able to explain the logic underpinning their decision making process. It is because they are masters in involving their subconscious in making decisions and, by the sheer nature of it; their conscious minds do not know the nature of information contained in their subconscious. No wonder then they are unable to explain to you coherently why they did what they did!

Picture: Phil Ivey

The book Psychic Poker is exactly what the title says it is. It is a system of psychic methods and techniques honed towards making you a winning poker player. The system I have detailed in this book is credited to the great Indian sages and gurus who used it over centuries to attain extraordinary powers. In the system, I used the science from Quantum Physics as the foundation and extended upon it the ancient wisdom of the Upanishads. Whenever and wherever I came across complex practices (take for example the chanting of mantras or divine sounds or the power of water in helping energize the body) I researched and uncovered scientific studies that helped prove the value of these practices. The approach in this book is detailed and not superficial. You will get specific strategies to use pre-flop and post-flop. Several situations in game play such as short stack, all-ins, bad beats and others are analyzed in detail.

Several people that I talked to while writing this book wondered why the system detailed in this book could not be used to deal with several situations in life that require luck, intuition and foresight life but, being an enthusiastic poker player, I wanted to cover this area first before I extended it to cover all of life. I discovered and perfected this and I felt that my biggest chance at getting this theory into the hands of people was to orient it towards an activity that is enjoyed by millions of people. Many people enjoy playing poker. So, I said to myself, let me help make it a profitable venture in addition to being fun and entertaining.

If I derived this from the Upanishads, then you wonder why has this not been written up before and used in everyday life. The answer is that the Upanishads are only recently being interpreted fully in the western world and only recently reaching mass distribution status. The system detailed in this book is used in a piecemeal fashion by many but not as a whole. For instance, the Chakra energy system used is practiced by a number of people in the world but not with the focus and direction I detail in this book. While the ancient mantras are used extensively in cultural and religious aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism they have not been “purposed” and used as I have done in this book. The Law of Attraction popularized by the bestselling book, The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne is used (often incorrectly I might add) but not in the fashion as part of a larger system as I have done in this book. The concept of the chakra-based energy fields and the aura cast by it has its own set of believers and writers (Most notably Judith Anodea and Ted Andrews). However, it has not been used as part of a system like the one detailed in this book. The five human senses (touch, smell, taste, hearing and sight) are again covered in many psychic books (Most notably books by William W. Hewitt), but again not used as a complementary part of an energy field as I do in my system. The use of Mantras to address the many situations in life have been tackled by a number of authors (such as Thomas Ashley-Farrand), but again no one has thought they could help power energy systems the right way to get the right results in poker. The use of mystic energies that are embodied in air and water are again covered by many writers (most notably Masaru Emoto and his series of books the most significant of which is titled The Hidden Messages in Water, published by Pocket Books), but again not as part of a larger system such as the one detailed in this book. Playing great poker requires an assimilation of all these different systems into one cohesive and coherent set of techniques and strategies which is what this book is all about.

The book, Psychic Poker, has only one purpose; That is, to help you win in poker have fun, and make money. In this process you will dominate and tower over your opponents at the poker table. One day you will sit across from Phil Ivey and fight off his powerful aura with your own and take him out of the game. You will tower over your opponents and make them dread going to the river with you because of your mysterious ability to produce that one card that would make your hand the best hand.

There is a question I appear to have sidestepped and would like to tackle it head on. Is it inappropriate or simply morally wrong to use psychic techniques and systems in a game of chance such as poker, especially when they are derived from ancient sacred texts? If you look at who first used these systems and techniques then you need to look no further than the great Indo-Aryan warriors who invaded India sometime in the first millennium BC. Their energy fields were so fired up that their super-activated seventh chakra is said to have even cast a visible halo around the back of their head resembling a revolving wheel of light. The unfortunate warriors on the other side who fought them certainly did not appreciate the use of these super powers! I look at the gaming industry as an integral part of our lives. As I write this book there are several measures in several states to expand gaming even more broadly than ever before. My moral take on gaming is the same as it is on alcohol. Moderation in either one is generally not harmful. As a matter of fact, there are parts of this book where I encourage the player to have a budget and give up the game and go home when winning strategies do not seem to be working. There is always another day when the player can return fortified and better prepared to have a winning and thus a joyous playing session.

Your journey has just begun. Read on and enjoy. Even if you don’t fully deploy the system detailed in this book, using even a small part of it could help make a difference in your game of poker. We are not going to discuss science for the sake of discussing science, but only if it helps us win in poker. We are not going to discuss the Upanishads (however exciting that may be) because I enjoy writing about it, but because we want to use the wisdom and methods contained there to win in poker.

Luck.

Intuition.

Foresight.

Here we come. You no longer shall run random. You will now come within our control.