Christmas cards

Bleeeeurghhh! Yesterday was a really crappy day; even more so, considering I had the day off work.

First, after getting caught without a train ticket on Friday I bought one yesterday morning, only to sail home with no ticket inspector appearing. I can’t catch a break at the moment, zigging when I should be zagging and getting no luck. Then my haircut didn’t turn out all that great. Then, having taken the day off purely and simply in order to spend a day at home alone - no incessant chattering, no guilt over tying up the phone line, no disapproval of gambling activity - I walked through the door to find my mother was also off work. I was absolutely gutted.In the end I went over to my friend’s house for which I still have a key from house-sitting in the past, but it all meant that I got about three hours less time alone and playing poker than I had eagerly anticipated.

Maybe that frustration and impatience contributed to my managing to spunk my (admittedly rather tiny) bankroll in the course of about three hours. Bleeeeurghhh! Nothing really went right, which seems to have happened a lot over the past week or so. In particular, when you are subsisting on a tiny bankroll, you need to have the big pots go your way. I managed to get a chap to put all his chips in with only one card to come, and needing a club versus my nut straight, but he hit the club and I waved goodbye to a $110 pot. That pot alone would have kept the day within very manageable boundaries.

But still, I suspect my overall results since the beginning of November would make quite alarming reading, so something is probably wrong. I wonder if I have got too loose; if my PLO game is more suited to a full table after all; if trying to mix straight and hi-lo Omaha is messing my mind up a little; if I am just not concentrating enough…

I am going to do a bit of number-crunching later today, to see if anything sticks out like a sore thumb. I believe, for instance, that I am probably behind in PLO8 at the moment. I also wonder whether it is more than coincidence that I always seem to do poorly on my days off. Could it be that on a weekday daytime the site is simply clogged with serious, strong, semi-pro players? That last point reminds me about game selection. Yesterday afternoon I was sat in a pretty poor game really, yet didn’t even look at other tables. I have gotten complacent, perhaps.So, the upshot of all this is that I have to make a deposit again - the second in four weeks, although to be fair I have been leaving my bankroll at a lower level than usual lately.

These damn bad runs always come at the worst possible times. There was that humdinger back in June or July which destroyed my plan to smugly pay for my holiday out of my poker roll, and now this cold streak arrives just in time to snafu my hopes of using some poker dough for Christmas presents. Talking of Christmas, just how much of a waste of time are Christmas cards? Or, specifically, Christmas cards sent among workmates? I have eight here on my desk, none of them from anybody I would call a ‘friend’, a couple from people of whose identity I am not even entirely certain. What an almighty waste of time, money, paper, effort… why don’t we all go on an outing to a forest and cut a few trees down together? At least we’d get some exercise that way.