Boo, Poker

Yesterday was a pretty frustrating exercise in getting kicked in the junk. Repeatedly. And then some more. And then a little more.

If I'm going to give this thing a whirl full-time, I guess it's good to experience days like that early on, before it's even more for reals when I actually, you know, quit my job.

I can deal with losing money, being the good degenerate that I am and having accumulated much experience in that arena. And I can get my head around the idea that both the frequency and magnitude of beats will increase as my volume of hands go up, especially when I'm playing at juicy tables with people who will cap any two cards pre-flop and call down to the river.

But man, it's hard to deal with putting in a solid eight hours, three tabling for most of it, and finishing the day with about a thousand dollars less than I started with. While I understand that idea in a theoretical sense and completely understand that it goes with the territory, I wasn't quite prepared for the fact that getting in that many hands is reasonably hard work. And pretty much my entire life if I partake in reasonably hard work for eight hours, there's something at the end of the day to fall back on. More money, the satisfaction of accomplishing some sort of task or goal, feeling good about helping others. Something. Anything.

Not so with the poker, though. And I knew this, yes, but experiencing it is another thing. And I'm also aware that I'll have entire weeks like this, in the future, even possibly months. Which is a little scary.

All that whining aside, things are still looking really good for the month so far, and prop payments will wipe out all of the losses from this weekend, plus possibly a little more. So all I'm really getting my panties wadded about is basically playing a shit ton of poker and breaking even for the week. Which is not exactly the end of the world, by any stretch of the imagination.

Switching gears, what the hell happened to NFL officiating crews of late? Being a ref is a horrible, thankless job, as not only is someone always pissed with any close decision you make, but any error is broadcast to the entire freaking world and replayed, over and over and over. I get that. Most of the time, you do an amazing job, getting bang bang calls right the vast majority of the time, even without the use of replay.

But this weekend, good sirs, you stunk up the joint. What the hell was that call in the Steelers-Colts game, that wiped out the Polamalu interception? That's the kind of shit that leads otherwise sane people to hatch conspiracy plots, as far as it being a better Super Bowl, ratings-wise, if the Colts are in it, as far as the Dungy human interest angle and ol' Peyton there, doing his chicken dance, trying to draw the defense offsides 162,182 times during the game. He caught the ball. He had possession. He caught it, rooted around on the ground for half an hour, started to pop up to run, dropped it, then recovered it. Interception. Steelers' ball.

As far as Bears-Panthers, umm, it's not that hard to see that the game clock expired. Really. There's no confusing people running around, doing stuff. All you have to do is watch the clock and the snap. That's it. There's no intangibles or wildcards or mitigating circumstances, as far as you getting screened on the play, or some obscure rule. All you have to do is watch the damn play clock and make sure the ball is snapped before Mr. Clock reads 0. Even worse, you should be playing pretty close attention when you realize it's going to be close, as far as the offense getting the play off in time. Yet somehow, someway, everyone misses that fact, allowing Rexy to throw an interception on a play that shouldn't have been a play.

Boo, refs.