WARNING -POKER BASED ENTRY. YOU MAY WANT TO LOOK AWAY NOW
I have been playing online poker much too much the last couple of days. Much too much. And I am on a monumental losing streak of my own making.
I have recently been playing pretty well and picking up lots of places and edging my money upwards, but I played stupidly and fecklessly for the last 48 hours and lost over and over again. I've had the time because I have not been gigging and my girlfriend is away and I have stopped drinking so my evenings are my own.
But it's like I have been playing badly on purpose. Going in for hands that I have learnt there is no point in playing, suddenly chasing flushes and straights that I would never have done before, playing petulantly like I deserve to be winning, so even though every sinew of my being says the other person has something better than me, i will keep playing on the off chance of a 7 coming up. It's like I want to lose, like I want to throw my money into a big burning bin.
This is partly cabin fever. I have played too much and for several four or five hour sessions and the cards in front of your face cease to seem real or make any sense. This is OK when you are playing patience or Civilisation II, you are only wasting the precious gift of life, but with online poker you are losing money. I got arrogant with my new found skill and went to slightly higher stake tables (still not massively high stakes - don't worry mum), but played without guile or charm and might as well have had my cards turned up for all to see. I felt like I was punishing myself for some unknown crime and almost delighted in how rubbish I was being. Every game I would determine only to play my banker hands and yet every time some insidious voice would chime in my head saying, "Who knows 10 4 might win it, give it a go."
I do have a theory that occasionally playing a bad hand can have great rewards, because if you judge the timing right and it doesn't cost too much to get in (but more than people would generally expect), then you can win big money if you get lucky because no-one will suspect what you're playing with. This works quite well for me, but only when played sparingly and with guile. I seemed to be going in for hands that I knew I had no business in, feeling that luck would be on my side and that I was somehow invulnerable to defeat, despite all the evidence to the contrary. All this off the back of a few days of reasonable play where I had had some success.
You have to get the mixture right in this game. You need to be confident, but mix too much of that in and you become arrogant. You need to understand that it all comes down to probability (ultimately if you played for ever you would on average get the same hands), but that you have to edge yourself an advantage through bluster, bluff and front. Yet also patience and finding the right moment to strike is just as vital. To understand the psychology of how triumph and disaster will make your opponent's game change and yet to not allow triumph or disaster to affect your own game. You don't want to play Rudyard Kipling at this game, that is for sure.
I have got quite good at working out instinctively what other people have got (and on-line people very rarely bluff I have discovered), but today and yesterday I would find myself playing through to find out if I was right, or if I would get the lucky card.
Maybe it was a learning experience, maybe you just shouldn't play poker when you are in a certain mood (or at least moderate the number of games you have) or maybe I have a serious gambling problem that will destroy me and all I care about (yet at the moment it seems to be providing me with an additional career that more than compensates for my minor losses).
I think it's a learning curve. I think you move forwards with this sport (it is a sport and one day I will be world champion) and then inevitably slide back as you attempt to assimilate what you have learned. It is a fantastic thing and I think helping me in real life more than harming me (witness my successful stand-off with the Sky TV network. I still haven't rung them. They might ring me and say they were sorry to turn me down before and do I want free programmes forever).
Hopefully I can get the poker chemicals into the right mixture as I am planning to take part in some high profile and expensive tournaments in the next few months.
I can give it up any time. I have to go now. I am playing one last tournament and have regained my perspective and think I might do all right. Then I am going to bed.
I promise.
