Do you know I haven’t played any poker for over two weeks now?
I expect you didn’t but I shall enlighten you. I took a bit of a beating on the tables just before Christmas and took it quite badly (as is usually the case). We’re not talking losses like Isildur1’s four million in a single session of course. I even made a profit on the month but it would have been a decent profit before those late hammerings got me. So it was enough to make me press the “sit out” button for a while. I thought I would take a little break and work on my game away from the table. Of course, this is far more easily said than done, as we shall see.
Just thinking back to poor old Isildur and his $4m one day loss for a minute, I shudder to think how badly I would react to a loss like that. I’ve been known to hurl laptops at the wall after losing a big pot and no item of furniture is 100% safe when I am playing. When I’m three or four buy-ins down I can play really really badly. It’s frightening to imagine how badly I would play if I was ever 20 buy ins down. Especially if the buy-ins were $200k!
Anyway, I decided I would go away and do some work on my game. The problem was I wasn’t very good at that either. I went and bought one of those super duper poker software trackers that stores all your hand histories and your opponents and then spews a bewildering array of about 9 billion statistics at you.
As I don’t understand what nearly all of these statistics even mean I have just got even more confused and helpless. I seriously think that even by this time next year I won’t understand even 50% of the functionality of this piece of kit. And just you just try getting the damn thing to work in the first place! Just installing it sent me to the brink of insanity. After installation I was required to set the thing up to read hand histories, etc. There is a 200 page document online saying how it all works, containing hundreds of links to yet more instructions. It’s all a bit much for me. I wondered if it is it possible to tilt while not actually playing poker? I can very much assure you that it is.
You see, when it comes to computers, it would take me 6 months of intensive study for me to reach the level of “idiot”. Luckily I was able to enlist the help of a very helpful chap from Canada who I met playing poker online at Paddy Power. He used a programme called Teamviewer so he could do all this for me. None of these verbal instructions like “select this option Freddie, press this button Freddie”. Oh no, they would be far too easy to mess up! We just got on Teamviewer, he took over the controls and did it for me in completely idiot proof fashion. ‘Tis a marvellous thing the internet! The one thing that puzzled me was why there had been 15 withdrawals from my bank account around the same time I handed over the controls.
Never mind, it all seems to work. And if I knew how to work the thing and if I understood the functionality then it would be a really impressive tool! That’s two very big ifs and it is probably what I will spend the rest of 2010 finding out.
There is one beneficiary of my self imposed hiatus from poker. My next door neighbour no longer has to listen to the anguished shrieks of “HOW CAN YOU PLAY THAT SH**T!!!!!” at 2 o’clock in the morning from his screaming lunatic of a neighbour.
There could be another benefit of not playing so much – to my right wrist. Interestingly, I just discovered one of the physical effects that sitting at a computer for long periods has had on me. Yesterday I saw a chiropractor for the first time. I sometimes wake up with a cricked neck and I mentioned this to a friend who by some massive coincidence just happened to have a couple of free vouchers to a local chiropractor on his person. (Lucky hey? Well actually no, because after examining me the chiropractor recommended 24 sessions with her at £30 a pop with overtones of grave consequences should I choose not to). Last week I didn’t even know what it is that chiropractors do but a quick look on Wikipedia told me all I need to know –they fix backs and necks. I’m not selling chiropractors short here – take a look for yourself on Wiki under “chiropractors” and it says “they do backs and necks”. Yep, “Backs and necks - £30 a pop”. That is literally what it says. Last week I knew nothing - now I know everything about them.
Anyway to cut a long story short, while I was there the lady asked me to grab these two bits of metal together in my right hand as hard as I could. It was the same sort of mechanism as the brakes on a bicycle I suppose, with a dial where she could read the measurement. Duly done she asked me to repeat this with my left hand, which I did.
“So you’re left handed?” she said after reading the measurements.
“No I’m right handed”, I said.
“Right handed people are usually 20lbs stronger with their right hand. You are 20lbs stronger with your left”.
“That’s good isn’t it? Means I’ve got a strong left arm haven’t I”, I chirped in my glass-is-half-full optimism.
“No, it means you are 40lbs weaker in your right hand” she replied, slamming the half empty glass right back on the table.
She attributed my puny right wrist to long hours sat at a computer with a mouse in my hand with all the movement coming from the elbow. Good grief. Is this what years of sitting in front of a computer has done to me? Whatever next? If I google too much will I suffer a severe muscle wasting disease by middle age? Will excessive searches on Wikipedia leave me with the bone density of a 95 year old?”
It can’t just be me. Surely millions of office workers out there must have the same issue. Is this how the human race is evolving? Will the advance of the computer literally turn us into a race of limp wristed screen warriors? Who knows?
With no poker to play my gambling instincts had to find another outlet. This was a useful lesson to me purely because it reminded me just how terrible I can be at gambling. You see I used to bet on everything – football, cricket, rugby, tennis, oooh and darts. I used to love betting on the darts, especially in running. In a game of darts I could back the favourite, flip flop to the outsider, then change my mind again and go all in on the favourite. The more the game went against me the bigger my stake would be to smash my way out of trouble. I could end up having my entire account funds tied up in one game of darts in the final leg of the match with a best case scenario of a £12.14 profit and a worst case of armageddon. I used to love it.
But that all gradually stopped when I discovered poker. I actually managed to plug those leaks on sports betting (before creating a new bigger leak at poker, but that’s another story). So on Boxing Day when I had nothing to do I headed off to the dogs for the first time in about 7 years. I used to love the greyhounds as well you see. Nine races and five winners later I congratulated myself that I hadn’t lost my touch. What an easy game! Back I went a couple of days later and broke exactly even. The third time I went it must have been out of sheer desperation for a bet, for it was a “BAGS” meeting. The name BAGS stands for “Bookmakers Afternoon Greyhound Service” and really does say all you need to know - it is a service for the bookmakers. When you bet on a BAGS race you are basically betting on an impossibly handicapped race with the more inconsistent dogs on the track’s kennel strength, with the bookmakers betting to a 140% book for good measure. You can not win over any decent length of time! Yet I knew all this before I headed off to the track and I still went. Like I say, it must have been desperation. I failed to notch a single winner in 11 bets and that is actually quite impressive when you think about it. It’s probably going to be another 7 years before I see a dog track again.
So I turned my hand to cricket betting-in-running on the third test between England and South Africa. I was no better at that. After flip flopping from South Africa to the draw and even briefly to England, then back to South Africa and finally the draw again, I had to suffer 17 agonising balls as England’s numbers 10 and 11 blocked out for the draw. My account funds were all riding on the game. Even if England blocked it out I was a small loser but if they didn’t – well - that wasn’t worth thinking about. What made this even more nerve wracking was the fact I was in a pub with no TV and I wasn’t even watching the game. I had to get the last ten balls by text updates and each time my phone beeped disaster was only one click away. Like I say, agonising. It was just like the old days on the darts.
Nice as it is to know that I am still a chronic degenerate gambler at heart, I actually can’t wait to get back to playing poker and being bad beated at the river. Ah, compared my to other forms of gambling, that would be bliss. Come back poker, all is forgiven!
I’m going to finish on something completely different because I just couldn’t resist this snippet I read recently. Being a huge fan of the film Team America I had to share this with you:
“The family of a Korean-American missionary believed held in North Korea said Tuesday they are working with U.S. officials to get him returned home. Robert Park told relatives before Christmas that he was trying to sneak into the isolated communist state to bring a message of “Christ’s love and forgiveness” to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.”
Poor old Robert Park. I wonder if he’s in Kim’s fish tank with Hans Blix?
If the crackpot leader of a secretive communist state claimed that an illegal alien entered his country for the purpose of spying and the accused claimed that the aim of his visit was in fact “to bring a message of Christ’s love and forgiveness” to Kim Jong Il, who would you believe?
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