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No Whining From the Chicago Cowboy

In Kenna James world, there are no bad beats and no blame game, unless you are going to condemn or forsake yourself.

"Why am I drawing this person into the pot? Is it because of greed, which then leads to losing the pot? To say that 'I am greedy,' well, no one really wants to look or listen at that. But why did not you raise? If you had raised, this person would not have called and you would have won the pot. So you brought it on yourself. It's not a bad beat.

"That is how I choose to look at it because when you have the initiative to take full self-responsibility of what you do, that is when you can affect change and that is when you can become a professional.

"When people say, 'Why me,' they should be saying: 'Why not me?'

"I think character is formed through adversity," he stresses. "When the game had me down, and there have been times when I have lost month after month or even day after day, I believe the game was just fashioning me.

"It had to teach or show me discipline and patience, and if it did not, it would break me.

"That is what I love about this game. Before, when I was working for a company every day of the week, it would be six months before you would get an evaluation. With this game, you get an evaluation every time you sit down to play."

For the winning player, the real battles are fought internally. A poker player can be his or her own worst enemy.

"People think poker is a game of you against everybody else. To me, it is a game of me against myself," James says.

"It is a totally different approach. It is not about what I am doing to you or what you are doing to me. It is about me having the knowledge of what I am supposed to do, now do I have the discipline to do it? Do I have the patience and understanding to carry it through? And you have the same responsibility I do. It's up to you to let the game teach you."

But those lessons can be brutal. Can you take every painful blow the game throws at you and keep coming back for more?

"In poker, there is no curtain, no shadow. It is what it is. You are more out there, there is more on the line every day. In poker, you know it's coming, you know the risk, and there is no place to hide. In life, you may not always see it coming," says James. "People say they don't like to take risk, but you take a risk every time you walk out the door."