Stuck

Let's see. Where to begin...

Let's rewind to Friday. On the bright side, I telecommute on Fridays. On the not bright side, I was still stewing over my little "coaching session" on my inappropriate non-verbal body language.

I had about thirty-seven odd jobs I needed/wanted to get done. None got done. Couldn't get in touch with roofers for an estimate on possible hail damage, landscape supply place called to let me know that they didn't have the stone I'd ordered, wouldn't be delivering it, as the quarry hadn't cut it yet. Printer suddenly, mysteriously decided to crap out, about one-third of the way through printing up 50 or so CDs worth of tray cards, covers, etc. for one of my side ventures. Swapped everything over to my wife's computer, except I didn't have the MediaFace software installed on there. Found a serial key, downloaded it, set it up, only to find that my source files were in the ancient 2.0 format and the newer version didn't want to read them. Finally found the old version, got everything set up, only to discover that I had 3up CD labels and it was formatted for 2 up. Which is easy enough to fix, except the crappy-ass software exploded every other time you try to edit something. It literally took me over an hour of rebooting, holding my breath, making edits, rebooting again, holding my breath, making more edits, until it was finally done.

So I thought hey, you know what's a good idea? Let's play some poker.

Bzzt.

Found a nice £5/£10 6 max table on InterPoker, sat down, fired up GameTime+, won a nice pot early and was feeling good. It became fairly apparent that this could prove to be an interesting table, as one of the players (Raiser Von Raisealot) blew off £300 heads-up on the river, re-raising with less than the mrtal nuts (way less, as he had a J high flush, with the A and Q potentially in play). Another guy (we'll call him Cally McCall) was playing every hand and never folding, not once, until the river, regardless of the action.

Fast forward an hour. I'm stuck nearly $1,000 at this point. Cally has literally played every single hand since I sat down. He has raised pre-flop 0% of the time. He's up $750. Raiser has played 85% of his hands and is up $1,250.

I manage to keep losing, despite dragging in a £350 pot at one point. Cally keeps winning. He literally plays any two cards and calls until the river, at which point he folds or calls. He never, ever raises. He even simply called with the obvious nut straight at one point.

I tell myself that I can't get up, as long as these two are in the game. So I play for three hours and finish stuck to the tune of -$3,289, which pretty effectively wiped out the bulk of profits I'd booked for April.

Which brings us to the point of this sob story. Well, sort of the point. I turned off the computer, went out to dinner with my awesome wife, and pretty much managed to forget the whole damn thing. Because, really, them's the breaks, and what the hell else can you do.

Moral #1 of the story is that I was pissed off when I sat down to play, and, in a backwards way, was almost looking to lose money, to validate some sort of larger feeling that the cosmos was jabbing a fork in my eye for some reason. I shouldn't have played a single hand of poker that day but I did.

Moral #2 is that there are games that are good for blowing off steam when you're pissed ($25 PL Omaha/$25 NL Omaha) and games that are bad for blowing off steam (any mid/high stakes shorthanded limit game). Pick the right game to blow off steam in.

Moral #3 is that some days just ain't your day. Don't let seemingly juicy conditions keep your ass glued to a seat when all you can do is bleed away chips. Yes, I know, I'm venturing into the land of superstition and luck here. Yes, I know, it's all variance and math and cold, hard logic. But some days you just get bent over. Over and over and over, no matter how good the game appears to be, no matter how well you control your amotions and keep bringing your best game. The only thing I know to do is to abort the mission, turn off the computer, and try again tomorrow.

Had a pretty decent weekend, though, all in all. Played in the WPBT satellite last night, got bounced out in 30 something place when my flopped two pair didn't improve against the flopped straight of the eventual winner. I played okay, weaked out in a few spots where I could have milked a few more chips out of hands, but all in all I played decently, just got no help when I needed it.