Personality Crisis

It’s been a long December, but there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell my myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass
And it’s one more day up in The Canyon
And it’s one more night in Hollywood
It’s been so long since I’ve seen the ocean...I guess I should

Every year I find another reason to love that song.

I was really beginning to wonder if I'd been deluding myself regarding my mad skillz at the poker table. I guess I probably say that every other entry or so. Still, it had been a long slow slide, and accompanied by everything else going on I had allowed Despair into my Heart. Or something like that.

The JetSetPoker Bonus Whoring Experiment has been going badly. I cashed in only two of the 18 SnGs I'd played since the beginning of November. Not a terrible blow at 2.50+.25, but ten consecutive losses still dampens the spirits a bit. Back home at PokerStars, I haven't exactly been crushing the games either. At 5c/10c I'm down to about 6.5 BB/100, whereas I was making more like 12 before November. I've also had a bad run of tournaments, only making it past the first break once in the four I'd played. Overall, a bad month plus.

In my defense, of course, there were Extenuating Circumstances. Most of that play was during brief breaks from work, and I never play my best when I'm stressed like that. Then there was my brief foray back into those Other Addictions, about which the less said the better. I'm trying to forget that not-brief-enough lapse in judgement, since nobody except my mom seems to have noticed, but let's just say I'm glad I wasn't playing poker then. I spent my recovery time at my mom's, getting treated like a stupid little girl who'd picked up a bad cold playing with someone she shouldn't have (which was relatively true, I suppose). It's probably best that she doesn't have internet access, since I was probably bored enough to play but mentally vacant enough to lose.

Amazing how much a personality break-down can affect your game, isn't it? But now, with work finally caught up and my other problems left behind again (for the moment), it's been good to be able to focus on the cards again. I think the aforementioned lapse in judgement was due at least in part to the limited amount of time I'd been able to spend really playing at the beginning of the month. Anyway, a few days back with my concentration restored have done wonders for my confidence. I finally broke my losing streak at JetSet last night, tripling up early with 88 against AQ and JJ on a flop of QQ8 and proceeding to bully the rest of the table into submission over the next hour.

That was nice, but really just a return to form and therefore not terribly exciting. Tonight, however, I feel like I made some real progress. PokerStars is running a promotion leading up to their billionth hand, giving away a bunch of cash to the winner of every 100,000 raked hands. Of course, my favorite tables down in the 5c/10c area are unraked (I guess they figure what's the point of taking a cut of my tiny pots), so they've reduced the number of active tables to almost nil. The last few days I've had to cut my play short to keep myself from taking The Big Slide. It's not that the play is too tough for me, but it's far looser than I'd like considering my vulnerability to variance at that level. Well, that and the bad beats. KK goes down to 64 of diamonds. AA loses to JT that spikes a second pair on the river. Other various and sundry disasters of slightly lesser magnitude, all leaving me broke and cursing.

Tonight, though, I finally managed to put it all together. I think I finally picked up a clue to better table selection and took a seat at a tighter table than I'd seen. My big pairs held up. And I just played better, more confidently, than I had been. Or maybe I was just lucky, I don't know. Whatever factors contributed, I finally managed a real winning session at a 25c/50c table, tripling my buy-in in just over an hour and erasing the losses from my previous two sessions this week. All in all, a good night.

And of course, the third and most important reason I feel on top of my game again is right before your eyes: my second post in less than a week! I also spent some time playing for the formatting a bit, although I think I managed to screw up the early posts as much as I improved the more recent ones. I'm new to this CSS stuff, but I don't think I did too much damage considering I'm working from an internet tutorial one of the guys at work found for me. Expect more improvements in the near future. By the way, does anyone know if there's any way to include images? How about how to include a page counter?

Okay, enough for now. It's Mandy's bedtime. Good night dead readers, sleep well, and dream of rockets and hammers.