The gunslinger

I'm a big Stephen King fan, as I've said before. Sometimes, particular phrases he's chosen embed themselves in my memory as soon as I read them. Other times, it's the images his words call up which I remember, though I don't remember his exact phrasing. This was the case with one of the passages in "The Gunslinger", the first book of his Dark Tower series. At one point in the story, the hero is attacked by a whole town of furious people intent on killing him. To save himself, he must kill everyone in the town. What stuck in my mind was that King likened this to a trick of the gunslinger's hands; his hands knew how to do it on their own, with no thought required on his part. Thanks to the magic of Amazon allowing one to peek inside books, I was able to find the passage:

The guns were empty and they boiled at him, transmogrified into an Eye and a Hand, and he stood, screaming and reloading, his mind far away and absent, letting his hands do their reloading trick. Could he hold up a hand, tell them he had spent a thousand years learning this trick and others, tell them of the guns and the blood that had blessed them? Not with his mouth. But his hands could speak their own tale.

How does this relate to poker? When I'm at the top of my game, it's almost as if I don't have to think at all; some part of me knows instinctively what to do. It's a trick learned from playing many thousands of hands. You could even call it a trick of my right hand, since that hand must manipulate the computer mouse to click on the appropriate buttons in the PokerStars client interface :-)

buy_in entry_fee num_players num_hands place winnings

 45000      5000           6        24     1   175500
 45000      5000           6        31     5        0
 45000      5000           6        63     5        0
 45000      5000           6         6     3        0
 45000      5000           6        19     1   175500
 45000      5000           6        59     2    94500

The second and third tournaments I played last night were 8-games; the others were no limit hold'em.

delta: $145,500
tournament balance: $2,267,090
balance: $9,149,789