So it's nearly my birthday. But I only just had one.
I got an early birthday present today when I found out that my gig in Oxford on Saturday afternoon has been cancelled, which means I now have all day to celebrate living fro another 366 days. Sorry if you were hoping to come and see me, but the people organising the festival I was going to be part of have gone bust. Which is sad for them. But I get to celebrate my birthday, so every cloud....
And the really surprisingly good news and the thing that makes it an excellent birthday present is that the bust company paid two thirds of my fee in advance, so I will still get most of my money for doing nothing at all. It's win win win.
I wish all gigs could be like this. I'd happily take a third reduction on my earnings if I never had to leave the house. Probably with the prevailing economic conditions loads of theatres and production companies are going bust. But as long as I still get two thirds of the money I am owed then I can only applaud their destruction. Maybe I am being short sighted somehow, but at the moment I have made tens of pounds from the recession. Who knows how many more tens of pounds I might get before I am 42?
The gloss was taken off my victory when I went out to play poker tonight for the first time in ages and lost pretty much all the money I will be getting from the gig that will never happen, despite making no actual mistakes and playing as well as I could with the cards that I had been given. That's poker. So those tens of pounds ended up in the pocket of someone else, who essentially did nothing to receive them. Is that justice? I don't know. I think probably not, as according to a text I got when I got home, TV's Emma Kennedy won the tournament and thus walked off with the money that I got for doing nothing. Hopefully she will end up handing it on to someone else for no good reason and the tens of pounds that I won, then lost, will continue to be passed on to someone who has performed no actual service in order to receive it. Perhaps she'll buy something on ebay that will never be delivered. Or spend it on several copies of Andrew Collings' book, which she will then accidentally leave on the tube.
How much money do you think floats around, going from person to person for no good reason, never having been earned? Probably most of it, if we're honest.
On a positive note I took my final defeat at the table rather well. I had got AK which is a great hand and I was reasonably short stacked, so was always going to go all in. A loose guy in front of me, raised my mini raise and I was delighted as I was sure I was beating him (I was by miles, it turned out he had A 10), but the woman to my right reraised. The previous hand she had had AA, the best possible hand. So like some kind of man with Noel Edmonds' understanding of probability I was pretty sure she couldn't have it again. Maybe she'd got a pair, but I was still in with a great chance of tripling up and getting back into the game. I went all in and the first guy folded, the woman called as she had to as it wasn't a large amount. She turned over AA. For two hands in a row. What are the chances?
About 50,000 to one as it turns out.
I would need two kings to come down or maybe 10, J, Q. Obviously it didn't happen. Even though the chances of these things were much greater than back to back pocket Aces. But I accepted my defeat with good humour, wished the lady well and went on my way feeling OK about it all. I had done the right thing. I had been unlucky. Funnily enough a 10 came down on the flop so I would have lost to the other guy who I was way ahead of anyway, which would have been much more galling.
It is good though that I was not furiously angry and petulant. I would have been in the old days. But then I was just passing dead money on to someone else to waste.
Don't you just miss the old poker posts?
