Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Much to Say About Poker

...and yet, little desire to say things about poker.

The last few weeks have been pretty interesting, poker-wise. In a twisted, car-wreck, can't-avert-your-eyes sort of way. I've never come close to a stretch like this before, where not only every villainous draw gets there, no matter how far behind they start, but that the deck itself seems rigged, as far as hitting my seeming money card, which in actuality turns out to be a two-outer that makes me a very expensive second-best hand. Not only does it seem like I'm playing with my cards face up, but that the deck was monkeyed with while I was in the bathroom, to maximize the pain.

Which wasn't much fun. At all. Determined to play through it, I soldiered on. And pretty much kept getting smacked down. Repeatedly.

The last few days, though, have returned to some sort of normalcy, as if the big lumbering tanker vessel is finally turning and changing course.

In the grand scheme o' things, it could have been worse. If you include prop and rakeback payments, I'm only in the hole $500 or so from poker for the month. We'll just ignore how much I got paid for propping and rakeback, as that's too depressing.
Ditto for my high water mark during the month, as I went on a tear early in the month, and bleed every bit of that back, plus some.

The wacky thing is that my silly sportsbetting and casino bonus tomfoolery ended up more than making up for the poker shortfall, so when you add it all up, my degenerate activities managed to produce a pretty hefty profit on the month. Like, umm, three times what I get paid for the silly day job. Which is good, obviously, but not something I can really count on, going forward, and more a freak of nature sort of occurence.

Despite the poker carnage, in a backwards way I'm almost glad I ran so poorly. And, honestly, played so badly at times, during the midst of the downswing. I realize things can always get worse, but that's about as bad a run as I can imagine, and that didn't even come close to breaking my pokery will.

As far as plans to give playing full-time a shot, those are pretty much still a go. The key thing there is that I'm mainly looking to take some time off and give it a whirl, but with the idea that it'll probably be a short-term thing. The carnage did clarify that a bit for me, as far as whether I have the psychological makeup to let the fickle nature of pixelated cards be the sole determining factor in whether I make money or not that month. And the answer is nay, not so much, not in the long run.

In the short run, sure, let's do it, to say I did it. But I like saving and hoarding money too much, methinks, and poker is the perfect lurcrative side job for that. Sole means of income? Meh, not so much.

So yeah, there you go. Terrible January, as far as poker. I sucked.

Bring it on, February.

1 comment:

cmitch said...

Good Luck in Feb. It always seems like the biggest winning streaks come right after those downswings.