Thursday 13 October 2011

Rock Bottom

My current mental state can be summed up thus:


Arghhh! I think this current disastrous swing is poker karma for failing to show any sympathy whatsoever to James666 when he has been whining about his bad luck for the past four years.

To be fair, I probably deserve it. Even after this horrific start to the month I'm still only down $1k or so in EV over my poker life - which is now about 700k hands. If I can stay almost bang on EV for the rest of my poker career then I have to be happy about that.

Still, in the short-term it's been affecting me more than it should be. I've been getting quite depressed about poker as I lose more each day and I'm also starting to feel less and less confident - which is completely irrational given that I have gone through two similar swings within the past year and recovered within a few weeks on both occasions.

There's a number of things I'll be looking at over the next few days - more mentality work, training vids, hand reviews (all the dull stuff basically) - and then I'll make sure I hit 70k hands for the month and hopefully claw some $ back. It's weird, it's not even the money that annoys me when I lose at poker, I just hate 'failing' at something I am fairly good at.

I played my biggest hand ever this month too - and lost. The guy in the hand was a complete fish so I think my line is pretty fine but what does anyone else think?

Hand info:

Date:Friday, October 07, 09:50:05 ET 2011
Type:Cash Games
Game:Hold'em NL
Table:40413926
Blinds: $5/10

Table info:

Seat 1: sobaaad ($1,484.49)
Seat 2: gier1 ($1,616.07)
Seat 3: cevzy ($1,000)
Seat 4: KazakhstanAA ($2,174.12)
Seat 5: james666 ($1,080)
Seat 6: MrStarch ($2,785.34)
Dealt to MrStarch


Preflop: (Pot: $15)

RAISE MrStarch, to $30
CALL sobaaad, $30
FOLD gier1
CALL cevzy, $30
CALL KazakhstanAA, $25
FOLD james666


Flop: (Pot: $130)


BET KazakhstanAA, $130
RAISE MrStarch, to $300
FOLD sobaaad
FOLD cevzy
RAISE KazakhstanAA, to $900
RAISE MrStarch, to $2,455.34
CALL KazakhstanAA, $1,114.12


Turn: (Pot: $4,599.46)

River: (Pot: $4,599.46)

Showdown:

SHOWS KazakhstanAA

SHOWS MrStarch


KazakhstanAA wins the pot of $4,415.24

It seemed quite hard to put him on Q-4....

Funnily enough, I posted about this hand on Twitter when it happened and the great Neil Channing tweeted me back saying 'sorry to hear that. Switch the laptop off and get it back tomorrow. No steaming'. I know Neil a little bit from various interviews and work in the media (FWIW he's probably my favourite interview in the poker world & a great guy) but it's good to know that he has my back too :)

Besides poker - and thank God there is more besides poker! - all is good. I had a great holiday with Hattie on a small Greek island called Symi for a week which involved a ton of beaching, eating and drinking. Perfect. Then we came back and had four nights in a huge Devon cottage for her Dad's 70th birthday with all her family. I had my own Masterchef stress moment there cooking ten steaks to order on a massively annoying AGA cooker too!

I'll finish on a few pics to remind everyone that there is definitely more to life than poker!

The blog debut of Ms. Starch.

Food highlight of the holiday: a whole sea bream baked in sea salt and then prepared for you at the table.

About to eat said sea bream. Don't worry, the starch is just off-camera...


Good luck at the tables or elsewhere everybody!