In the words of Hannibal Lecter, just as he was about to chop off his hand at the wrist with a meat cleaver, "this is gonna hurt..." I am talking, of course, about my previous live poker session in town which took place on Saturday night. It will not only hurt because of the loss involved but also because I'll need to recall the manner in which I went about losing it. It will also hurt because every single time I seem to get my poker results back on track with a good meaty win, I seem to go ahead and throw the money down the toilet.
First off was the 7PM, £40 freezeout tourney at The Fox. Apart from the fact that my depressing week at work should have been warning enough for me not to sit down and play poker at all in the first place, my worst move (needless to say) wasn't any of the bets, raises or folds that I made at the table (I busted out as standard) but the pouring of lager down my throat as I played. Once again, if I just went home there and then after I busted out, this would have gone down as a minor inconvenient loss with no real damage done. BUT this over-drinking at small buy-in MTTs really HAS just got to stop because of the sums I almost always seem to lose afterwards.
Yep, tanked up with quite a few beers, I headed straight off for The Empire in the mistaken belief that, surely, I had some sort of edge. In actual fact, with a buy-in of £300 in front of me, I could hardly keep my eyes open at the table and after about 40 minutes called off my entire stack after the loosest and tiltiest player at the table hit his runner runner flush to crack my turned set of jacks!!
Did I bet heavily enough beforehand? Of course I did. I saw this guy fritter away a HUGE stack just while I was sitting there for that 40 minutes. I bet a large amount preflop and remember throwing in £75 on the turn when the beautiful jack hit to match the two that were already in my hand. What I DIDN'T bargain for, of course, was that this guy who was steaming in early position had decided to call the preflop bet and the big turn bet with Q 4 of hearts!
In my sleepy drunken state, when I saw that jack of hearts hit the turn I had already decided that all my money was going in. It just didn't even occur to me that the last red card on the river had matched two others on the board and what was more - that there were now three hearts on the board which put a possible flush was out there. When he put all 180 odd quid in on the river I insta-called thinking it was payday time! It wasn't. It was, thank you, goodnight and goodbye to £300 time.
The only real consolation in all of this is that even if I HAD thrown all my chips in on the turn, there is little doubt in my mind that he would have called in order to see that last card. This, at least, would have made it more of a cooler than dubious play. Anyway, with the way things are going at the moment and with the dark days and cold nights creeping in, I just feel like going into hibernation with the whole poker and blog thing. I know I won't, they'll always be another card game around the corner, but that's really the way I feel.
I'll keep ya posted.
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