Canute

I am beginning to lose any faith that I can ever record a winning session, ever again. I just cannot buy a card, a flop, a draw, a river. I can't get an opponent holding a 9-high flush to fold against my semi-bluff that screams, consistently and plausibly and powerfully, that I have him beat. I can barely drag a pot over ten bucks.

Yesterday (Tuesday) and today I have played with focus, desire, position, discipline, selective aggression. And absolutely nothing has come of it. I've had an idiot call down my well-played set with his awful flush draw, been straight-flushed on one rare occasion that I filled up, flopped nut house on 998 flop but had the guy with the other 9 hit a kicker, seen an endless sequence of high flops to my low cards and vice versa in PLO8, seen what feels like almost every flop in PLO come paired or complete-flushed whenever I have raised pre-flop, and only ever been dealt strong starters when I am under the gun.

The game is driving me absolutely, totally fucking mad.

I need to hit a hand somewhere along the line to actually kick me off, to get the bankroll moving in the right direction, to give me some much-needed confidence. At present I truly cannot recall how it feels to have the board pair to my set or flush to my suit. I have not had a winning set in five (looking like six in my current session) with one break-even. That is probably my worst sequence ever - not monetarily, but in terms of confidence-sapping, frustrating losses.

As we speak I raise KKxx and an Ace flops.

And one minute later I hit a very lucky river for a $65 pot. Maybe the tide will turn. Call me King Canute.

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.