Turn And Face The Changes

"On the bubble as you've noticed, things appear to get so tight that farts are ultra-sonic." - Sloejack - In a comment to my last post


Before I get to this post, let me just say that you guys are awesome. I can't begin to tell you how valuable the comments I got from the last post helped to put things in perspective.

Monday nights are bowling league nights for the Wife and I. When I started practicing for the league, about two weeks before the start, I bought a new ball. My old ball was, well, old. It was a good ball, but it was some 13 years old and what was technologically a very advanced design back then was now a serious dinosaur today. In any event, I went to practice with this ball and I found my game had taken a turn for the incredible. My average went up 20 pins and I was flirting around at a 200 average. This continued through the first two weeks of the league, and then something started to go wrong. My 200 average turned into a 180. I would play one great game, and follow it up with a complete crapazoid. I was losing it.

Last night was no different. I stepped up to the plate and put up a 149. Nothing was working. I would put the ball on the right mark, but get no action and miss wide. I would overcompensate and come across. I was missing spares I used to have dead to rights. I was all over the dial. Finally about 7 frames into my second game (and running towards another 150 game) one of the people from the other team offered a suggestion. It was a simple one.

"slow it down"

That was it. Nothing fancy, just slow down. Take some off it. I had been wracking my brain trying to figure out for myself why I was doing so poorly, and when he said this, review quickly showed he was on to something.. I was trying too hard to get the ball where I wanted it, and not letting it do its thing.

The last game was a 201.

"So," you may ask, "what does this have to do with Poker.. And where the Hell did the Tournement Challange stuff go, you wuss!?" Well, I've done about 160 of these tournements. I'm up $90. Not bad, to be sure, but the varience is insane, and losing 6 tournements, 5 of which I busted out on the bubble, is not fun at all. It was exciting, and the ups and downs were fun to chronicle (and hopefully an interesting read), the emotional toll it was taking on me didn't make it worth it. When I lost that $130 a few days ago, I was depressed. I mean, beyond just annoyed, or tilted. I was genuinely sad.

A clearer sign that I was playing above my confort level could not have been seen.

So, as of now, the Tournament Challange goes into the books as a successful failure. Success in that it's padded my bankroll by $90. A failure in that I neither busted nor did I get to $3000. I'm going back to the grind, but I'm going to try something a little different. The other day I finally broke down and picked up a 19" monitor. Besides the obvious extra screen real estate, this monitor is also capable of 1600x1200 resolution, so I can fit 4 tables on there without overlap. Good stuff. Basically, after a week of getting back into the limit grinding mindset, I'm going to try some 4 table action.

You'll also notice that the bankroll is smaller, even though I haven't played since Sunday. On advice from a couple of other folks, I've taken $50 out of the roll for the purpose of bonus whoreing the online casinos. I'll run through only two or three and put the subsequent profit back into the bankroll. With luck, I'll do well with this. It seems a little too easy, but what the heck, it's $50, and I've blown that doing more -EV things. I'll keep you posted on how that's going too.

So, the fun starts tomorrow! Please hold on to the bar.