Answerable to nobody

I played on Friday evening for a couple of hours, and made another small profit – just $14 – between a lost sit and go and a PLO8 game. The snooker champion showed up in the Omaha, first time I have seen him in a while. He plays very tight so I was pleasantly surprised when he paid off my nut-nut hand to get me into the positives after a bad start.

PLO8 can be a maddening game. Chips get shuffled around a bit, and you perhaps get one chance per session to really get your chips in with a big expectation AND get called. Those pots play a huge role in determining your results. Friday I got rivered by the over-aggressive player I spent all night waiting to trap, and lost my first buy-in. Later I had to settle for half of a $120 pot against two opponents when I had a 50/50 shot of scooping – those are the hands I am talking about.

The good thing was that I kept my equilibrium after the early bad beat and just continued plugging away, my play unaffected. I might be wrong, but I feel like I have started to become a better gambler; more sanguine, increasingly able to accept the vagaries of fortune and and just keep putting the chips in with the best of it.

All of which makes it quite maddening to be in an enforced break from poker. My contingency plan (for the few days until my phoneline gets connected) fell through, so I have not played since Friday night, and have another two evenings to endure. I am trying to look on the bright side, since I have a rare opportunity to play my football management game and watch a couple of DVDs, but it really rankles to not be able to play poker in utter privacy at last. Plus, I really need the money.

Anyway, moving into my place has made me very happy, despite the lack of poker thus far. I am now answerable to nobody in my living space, and can lock the door and hide without feeling rude. I have gone from living a bus-ride away from town in a crappy village, to being 10-15 minutes’ walk from just about every bar and amenity in the town centre. My snooker club, my favourite drinking places, a bar with every live televised football match (plus some illegal ones), Indian restaurants and fish and chip shops, newsagents, the railway station, an excellent supermarket, a cinema… all this and more is within walking distance, and even closer by bicycle.

I’m surprisingly excited about shaping my room the way I want it. I never paid much attention to décor or furniture in the past – my ex used to decorate and move furniture around and I was totally uninterested – but in this space that is 100% mine (and needs to be utilised effectively) I am looking forward to creating the environment I want. At the moment I am still half in boxes, but I do have the TV in place and my Playstation set up for the first time in about two years.

Valentine’s Day was sort of predictable. A nice meal, then an argument (at least partly about my feelings for my ex) and a frosty night in bed. That was probably 2/1 second favourite in the pre-game betting.