Toothpicks taste bad

A lax week of blogging. I’ve become a little more circumspect about updating at work, and had a lot of nights out.

Actually, I also don’t have a lot to say. Or, I feel that a lot of what I say is boring crap. Mind you, I write this primarily for myself. So for me, reading back in six months’ time, it might be interesting to record that I got a spot on my face last week, for the first time in at least a decade. Or that I continue to half-heartedly try to quit smoking. I have been managing 36 to 48 hours before cracking. If only so many of my friends didn’t smoke, and if only chewing toothpicks didn’t taste so bad.

I didn’t play many hours at all last week due to all the going out and being tired. Got eight hours in over the weekend, the usual thing of playing 6-max PLO with a sit and go as second table. Really I ought to play TWO cash tables (assuming decent line-ups) plus a sit and go. Anyway, I made seventy bucks over the eight and a bit hours, which is okayish. I took a fair few bad beats, although never in huge pots, and made two or three crying calls which were losers – as I knew they were. I really do need to trust my reads a little more; I call a little too often just because the pot is big, and fold to very suspicious bets too often, as I mentioned in one of my recent posts.

I’m not doing too bad though, the hourly PLO rate is still very respectable given the size of game I play ($50 max, 50c big blind – I don’t like the sound of these games where you only get 50 big blinds). The sit and goes make me a little extra, although not as much as I’d like at present. I have had a ridiculous amount of bubble finishes lately, and am still trying to decide if that is due to pushing too hard with four left (folding into the money is more viable for $9 profit than it was at the $5+1 level!), or letting myself get too short-stacked too often, or just a bad run of luck.

Just a quick mention of last night’s cash session. There was this one girl playing who, some time ago, I educated out of buying in with a tiny stack. Silly of me, but I’m a sucker for women. Last night she bought in for the maximum, and proceeded to win hand after hand after hand, hitting the nuts repeatedly on flop or turn, and making some very slim river hits (including an irritating – although not too costly – couple against me). She had her $50 up to something like $250 pretty quickly. I was salivating, because one or two things had made it clear she still wasn’t that good a player. I just had to wait.

Sure enough, she ended up donating a large pot to me which effectively formed my entire profit from the session, and when I quit for bed she was back down to about $100. I like her, she’s spunky, and we had a little dubious chat going on about her caning and whipping me.

Which brings me neatly to an update on the quest for a shit-hot woman. So far, so bad, but I am chatting to a very, very attractive nurse on that dating site, who lives and works in my town. She’s being quite ‘hard-to-get’ and I’m trying to strike the balance between ‘pursuing’ and being ‘cool’. It is so nice not to be too hung up about all this anyway; there was a time I’d be getting obsessed with girls and having all that angst-ridden self-loathing any time a bird didn’t fancy me.

Postscript: I must take a look at the fact that my hourly rate at 6-max is actually somewhat lower than my overall rate. Am I being seduced by the pleasure of the game, even though it is not as lucrative? I don’t have enough hours yet to make too firm a judgement, but I clearly must resume at least looking at the lineups on the full tables.