♠ Friday, October 29, 2004
8ight
The streak stands at eight live-play losses in a row; I did in fact go to Manistee on Wednesday and blew $240, or 30BB. Although I made some mistakes, I made no huge mistakes, and in fact the biggest tale of the night was that two bad players and one loose-aggressive but decent player put a number of beats on me with unlikely holdings that just happened to be the stony nuts. (Okay, I did make one huge mistake. And while it cost me 2½ big bets, it wasn't a colossal boner on the scale of the 57♠ I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.)
This losing streak reminds me of something Mike Caro says in one of his tapes, of a seminar he held once. The tape is mostly notable for the way his makeup look like he's wearing plastic eyebrows, but in the seminar part he talks about how you can mess your head up when you're on a losing streak, being on tilt thereby. Let's say you're running bad, so bad that you've started keeping count, and you've missed thirty-seven flush draws in a row. (By my math the odds are about 300,000:1 against this happening, but it could happen.) Pretty soon, you start thinking to yourself, hey, what if the record is thirty-eight? You start rooting against the flush, and worse, you start playing to miss your draws. If you get to this point, take a walk.
I don't this streak is tilting me. While it is eight casino losses in a row, those are interspersed with generally a winning trend online. And many of the losses are just a matter of a couple of bets, and have to be considered basically break-even sessions. But most importantly, I still go into a low-limit casino session considering myself a favorite to walk out with the money. It's possible that I'm wrong about that, but I don't walk into the casino expecting to lose.
♠ Comments:
What days do they run tournys?
Thanks
: 3:15 AMManistee is the smallest room of the ones within reasonable driving distance, with five tables. Their tournaments on Mondays and Tuesdays fill the room (call ahead on Sunday), and generally the biggest variety of games occurs right after the tournament (including $100max NLH).
Otherwise, the usual game is $4/$8 Holdem, although they'll start a list for anything you want to play, although I haven't heard of them actually spreading anything weirder than Omaha/8.
The room is my favorite within a reasonable distance, primarily because it's so small; one gets to know the whole staff and many of the players relatively quickly, and vice-versa. They let you get away with a little more for the same reason; when I wanted the TV to be the hell off of figure-skating I just went and changed it, and nobody on the staff jumped down my throat.
I figured it out: On a night with just one or two tables going (Wednesday and Thursday) the room feels like you're hanging out at the bar; it's that kind of atmosphere. On Wednesday the two bad players were talking so much smack to each other (they're in the same home game) that they were keeping the rest of us solidly entertained.
Well, crap, now I want to go back. And I'm working every day until next Wednesday ...
LGW
: 7:31 AM
