Ready to talk about it...

This post may ramble incessantly, I haven't decided yet...but I have a lot on my mind.

First of all, the post below regarding my disappointing (to say the least) performance in the 50-50 on Sunday...I finished somewhere in the 900s. Ouch. But then my wife said, "Nice...you're out before I am even asleep. Shut off the computer and go to sleep so you can help with the baby later." Double ouch.

I was "girly chatting" as my blogger friends call me with a non-poker playing friend during the 50-50 and I complained about the two hands that crippled me. Both times I railed on the "donkey" who played "that hand" into my raise and flopped "that" ... how could he do that, blah blah. But do you know what I realized? I never complain when I run my KK into AA. Or when my 99 loses to AQ late in a tourney. You know why? I got my money in when I thought I had the best of it and it just didn't work out. It's always the hands where I have Top-pair, Top-kicker and try to bully a guy out of a pot when he's slow-playing a set and I'm too dense to realize it...those are the hands I berate the donkeys for. After all, isn't it easier to scream at the donkeys than admit holes in our game?

On another topic, I was going to take a run at the $50 satellite to the $500,000 guarantee on Sunday instead of the 50-50. But my lovely wife had her heart set on this "concert in the park" that started at 6. I have NEVER played in the major Sunday tourney...something always comes up. And I felt like I had been playing well in the 50-50 and it was time to try to blindly weave my way through the shitstorm that is the Sunday tourney. But it was not to be. And I was angry. I was tilting before the orchestra played the first few bars of "Yankee Doodle Dandy."

Needless to say, the first thing I did was fire up Full Tilt when we got home. It was around 8:15 so too late for 50-50 satellites and too early for the tourney itself. So what is there to do, but fire up the PL Omaha tables? I started three-tabling and before I could get ITunes started, I was down $80. Not a huge deal...except that with a $50 buy-in to the 50-50 staring me in the face, my bankroll of $250 is suddenly down below my Mendoza-line of $130. So I was in a bad mood for missing the $500K, I was pissed about a few hands of Omaha and I charged into the 50-50 with an attitude. And look where it got me. Nice Tilt. Ass.

To that end, I don't know how, I don't know why, but I FIRMLY believe that there is a correlation between your mood/attitude and your gambling "luck." I don't believe in luck per se, I believe that it's just a mathematical entity, but a session, a year and even our lives are a small sample size and sometimes too small to see the odds play out. That said, there is SOMETHING that ties luck to attitude. I could say that it's your decisions in poker, but how do you explain blackjack or *shudder* slot machines or even horse racing? Scared money is bad money and mad money is bad money. But I'm not sure why.

I played in the 50-50 last night to get the taste of Sunday's debacle out of my mouth. I played pretty well, more akin to my style, early on, but about 30 minutes in I got tricky with AQ with a bunch of paired undercards on the board. I had zero respect for my heads-up opponent and thought I could bet him off his hand by force of will. Not when he flopped a boat. I was down from 2,500 chips to 500. One of my resolutions is to be a better short-stack player and I took this opportunity to start. I was down to 25% of my starting stack, but blinds were still about 20/40 so it wasn't completely hopeless. Long story short, I played my game, scratched and clawed and finished in the money for a satisfying $85ish payday.

I still love the 50-50 and I still have a LONG way to go with the mental part of my game. Bankroll is at $275.