Lockup!

Let's work the problem people. Let's not make things worse by guessing.
-- Gene Kranz - Apollo 13


Last night I had the most surreal and unpleasant experience I can ever recall having in my life. To set the stage, I live in the duplex. This duplex has 3 bedrooms and mine is at the end of the hall. The hall goes about 30 feet and turns left into the living room. The whole place has a vaulted ceiling, so sound is pretty amplified all throughout the place. This generally isn't a problem since I don't have kids. Anyway, it's about 12:30am. I'm lying in bed watching the weather channel. The wife is asleep so I have it down pretty low, and I have a humidifier in the living room that is putting out a little white noise, so it's pretty quiet all around.

Now, I'm sure you all can relate to that semi-concious feeling right when you start to doze off. Your mind starts to tune out your surroundings, and you're not quite sure if you're in a dream state or awake.

All of the sudden, I hear the most blood curdling, ear screeching yowl come from... somewhere. I can't accurately put into words how absolutely horrifying this sound was, and how loud it was, but I can accurately describe what it did to me. My eyes snapped open, but my body refused to move in ways I commanded it to. I couldn't even get my jaw to respond correctly to yell out at what I could only guess was the cat. It was such a surreal experience being so absolutely terrified that you don't have full control over your body. It took a good 15 minutes for me to come down off the adrenalin rush. It fucked me up pretty bad.

Turns out the cat spied another cat or some other creature wandering around the back yard and decided to pitch a fit about it. I was half expecting to discover my cat trapped in something or injured in some way, what with the sound coming out of it. I've lived with and owned cats almost my entire life, and I've never heard this sound come out of a domesticated cat.

Anyway, I've always heard the term "scared stiff". Now I know what it is.

Poker today was cut short by the Party servers taking a dump. I was playing around in 1/2 6 max and was carving out a pretty good rate. I went up about $30 on one table, then it broke up. Went to another table and it had terrible texture. Lots of pre-flop aggression and crazy play. I dumped about $20 there before bailing and looking for better fishing. The third table was looking very good. Very passive and easy to control. I was just setting in for another nice winning session when it all locked up, of course while I was waiting for a pot to be pushed my way. Figures. Ended the shortened day up around $12.

I've gotten some good advice so far. Please keep it coming! I especially liked the suggestion from Poker Nerd about taking a Post-It note and covering up my "buy-in" amount. I sometimes find myself thinking about my stack size when deciding what to do in a limit ring game. During no-limit games, your stack size is important and should come into consideration, but in limit, I don't think you want to try to change your play just because of your stack size, up or down. I don't know that I want to fall back to .50/1 yet. The play there is just too insane for me, and in reviewing all the levels I've played so far, it appears my highest BB/100 earn is on the 1/2 6 Max tables, with about 1050 hands recorded. I enjoy the shorthanded games because they are easier to follow and they move faster. This discourages me from opening up a web browser or another table to break up the monotony of waiting for 9 other people to get their shit together. In the shorthanded games, too, other players make a lot more mistakes by chasing hands without proper odds.

And the most important of these, I enjoy playing them.

Another suggestion was to take a day or two off. This I will do. I'm heading up to my mom's place to drop off the car I brought up from Florida last week, so that will be at least 2 days I'm not playing poker. Every time I've played when I'm up there I tend to lose, so I'll just stay away. I might try to squeeze in an hour or two Wednesday night when I get home, depending on what's going on and how tired I am. We shall see.