Mirror image

So, I started seeing The Girl I Was Seeing again at the weekend, and decided that was a firm decision and I would be strong at avoiding temptation elsewhere. Naturally, as soon as I reached this decision the hot older woman at work who had cooled off on me suddenly got interested again. I had a drink with her after work last eve, just friendly, but ended up snogging her after she spent the hour talking about sex and touching me as much as possible. Eesh, I’m not impressed with myself. However, I’m not going into paroxysms of guilt. I’ve done worse in my time, and at least I made no move to go further when I probably could have.

The rest of the evening saw me sandwich more drinks with a (male) friend in between two sessions online. And it snowed. Most unusual in these parts, especially in mid November.

The first session was horrible, like a mirror image of the good session on Monday night. Two tables, and I got battered on both for a total of $112 in an hour and a half. It’s a long while since I’ve found myself collecting hand numbers to check out my bad beats later on, feeling the bile and frustration rising in me. I also need to check out whether a big all-in call I made with a reasonable straight draw was as bad as I fear it was or as good as it may have been. That was a $140 pot. The hand that hurt most was a $62 pot in which I trapped a guy nicely with my top full house on a very low board of rags, only for him to hit his one out for quad deuces on the river.

It may have been a good thing that I had to depart at this point for beers. That was okay, but I really must learn that drinking on an empty stomach is foolish. I got more drunk than I would have liked whilst my friend confessed to his foot fetish…

Returning to my lair, I fired up three tables: two 6-max PLO affairs, and a 6-max $1/$2 limit O8 game. ($1/$2 doesn’t seem to attract players very often so I wanted to take it while it was there).

Within an hour I was down another hundred dollars and more - no outright terrible beats but a succession of bricks on turn or river. I suspect that three tables of 6-max (eg swift action) is too much for me, as I was repeatedly having to make tricky decisions very quickly and without really thinking. That is not a good situation in pot limit play.

Still, I kept my head strangely enough. The booze helped me to take a laid-back attitude to my losses and just keep (trying to) make good decisions. And perhaps the flipside of playing three fast-moving tables was that it kept me too busy to lament my misfortune.

Either way, I felt like I could turn it around and I did. The odd pot started to get pushed my way, the O8 moved into profit (despite what I would call a very unlucky run of cards overall in the game) and I won a really nice PLO pot to move me into the black for the session. I was up $22 when I finally succumbed to the alcoholic tiredness at about 1:40am. A small profit for sure, but having been three figures down an hour earlier it salvaged something from what could have been a disastreous day.

It hasn’t been a great November so far. I’m up just over $200 at only about $6.70 per hour. Yuk.

Also ‘yuk’ to Sklansky’s tournament book. I just don’t think it is that useful, personally. I’m a moderate tournament player at best, and I didn’t find anything in the book that set off a lightbulb in my head. Further, a lot of the book’s bulk is made up of material relating to limit tournaments, stud tournaments, razz tournaments, that the majority of people rarely play. On the plus side, it wasn’t quite as ‘dry’ as a lot of Sklansky’s stuff.