Proof That I am Cursed

Well, maybe not real statistically significant proof, but the anecdotal evidence from tonight's outing seems to me to be reflective of historical reality. During the course of several tournaments, I was involved in five key races. I lost three and won two. Not much to go on there. In those same events, I had two major suckouts and suffered seven significant bad beats. A little more to go with there, but what's the most frustrating element is that four of the seven bad beats and one of the lost races put me out of tournaments. And since I only played in nine tournaments on the night, that means that I went out on bad beats in close to half. Three of those were river jobs the other was just your standard AJ < 97 situation.

Blech.

Another Close Call…

Reasonably proud of this one, as I survived desparation mode with a few key double ups heading for the money bubble and hit the cash positions in sixth place. I worked my way up the ladder into the top three and took a nice chip lead with a massive suckout after I made a steal attempt with K8o and was priced in to call a shove from a short stack with AA. K on the flop, K on the river and I was in first with 11 remaining. I was still in the lead at the final table, albeit not by much, but went card dead or had a mediocre hand facing a raise in front of me. Other than a few steal attempts, nothing much was happening. Then I lost 2/3 of my stack with KJo vs. KJs when we both flopped second pair, but he rivered the flush. After that it was off to the races with AJo vs. 88, but no help was forthcoming and I went quietly away with $686 and change.

The buy in for this event is a little steep for my budget, but I played it yesterday and went fairly deep. I would have been in a sweet postion in that one too, but made the mistake of getting AA in vs. QQ pre flop. My 4-1 favorites are just like chum in the water for whoever I'm up against. I don't know what's worse; that hand or the two coolers. Things were looking snazzy there too, as I won a small pot with KK and drew KK two hands later. I raised and got called, then we got it all in on a low-card rainbow flop and my opponent flipped over AA. Two hands later and short stacked in the blinds, I found AK and ran that straight into AA. So, over the space of five hands I had KK twice and AKo once, and ran into AA two times. Awesome.

Off to the beach. Back in a week with a decent and growing bankroll. May have to hit at least a couple of the BBT events even though I have no realistic chance of doing anything vis a vis the rankings or the ToC; short of winning one of the damn things that is.

Oh, and my car is ready to roll so it's time to send the piece of shit Chevy back to Enterprise. I keep hearing that American quality is back and maybe that's true with Buick, but if the car I'm driving is any indication Chevy has a long way to go.

Adios!

Well, well, well…the excitement is palpable.

Can you feel it? No? Hmmm. Guess that I’m not the only who’s not charged up by this sorry little blog in the last few weeks.

I think I continue to play better and over the last week have won another $12 turbo 180-man SNG on Stars, had a deep run (12th) in the morning $14K Guarantee on FTP, final tabled a $5K Guarantee 6-max MTT on Stars (yes, an actual final table for ME on Stars) for $720 and busted Scott Fischman out of the 50/50. Yay me. I’ll spare you the ubiquitous bad beat stories and just be happy with my t-shirt (provided that it ever comes, unlike the shirt I already should have after busting Karina Jett a few months ago).

The final table on Stars did save the night, which started with me getting out of the gates faster than I ever have in the FTP $35K Guarantee. Just a few hands into the game I hit one of those rare dream situations where I woke up with AA and found myself as a 30-1 favorite all-in, pre flop against two opponents with AKo. No miracle board for them and I tripled up and vaulted into the chip lead with something like 1,200 runners still alive. A few hands later I ran into some nabob who for some reason felt that J8 was good on an 8xx board facing a preflop raiser and was happy to call near pot-sized bets down all the way to pay off my QQ. That padded my nascent lead and I held on in the top five for quite a while, before a series of misadventures had me heading for the rail with nothing to show for my early success.

In the life beat category, my car is having $1,250 worth of cosmetic body repair work done thanks to my idiot neighbor managing to back into the side of it while it was parked in my driveway. It takes a diagram to fully explain how that is possible and I’m not patient enough with MS Paint to make one to post here. The biggest beat of all may be that I get to spend this week tooling around town in a sexy, bright red Chevy Cobalt.

I also appear to be over a nifty bout of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo that was oh so enjoyable for about a week. There’s nothing quite like getting full blown room spins from just rolling over in bed or reaching back to wipe your ass on the toilet. It’s been over a week since the last real spins, so hopefully my upcoming flight to Florida for Spring Break won’t become an epic disaster by triggering a relapse. I do have some Antivert that I plan to take in advance of the flight just in case.

And if the plane doesn’t trigger anything, perhaps I can set off a spell by swimming with the dolphins at Discovery Cove or on a roller coaster at Busch Gardens Tampa. It’s always nice to have something to dread when thinking about your upcoming vacation, so I’ve got that going for me.

Perhaps I can blame the Fastidijituity post on some kind of pre-vertigo dementia? Or not.

Altruisitic Punishment and the Poker Player’s Perspective

An article in today’s Washington Post discussed how the emotional response to the current round of government rescue plans may play a role in causing some of them to fail, even if from a practical, objective perspective they should work. There was a very interesting section in which one economist discussed the results of a game developed to test the concept of altruistic punishment in general (not in the context of the current environment) and here’s what happened:

Four people are given $5 apiece. They are then told to contribute one after the other to a common pot. If the amount in the pot totals $12, they are informed, each player will get a $6 bonus. In an ideal world, each player would give $3, collect the bonus and go home with $8. The temptation, however, is to free-ride -- to contribute less than your share and hope someone else gives more.

Experiments show that when players No. 1, 2 and 3 contribute only a total of $7 -- far less than their share -- No. 4 faces a dilemma: If the player puts in the whole $5, the common pot will reach $12. A purely rational, selfish player would pony up the $5 in order to get the bonus, because it is always better to go home with $6 than with $5.

But the experiments show that large numbers of people refuse to do the "rational" thing. Seeing that they are being played for suckers, they contribute nothing. They forgo the extra $1 in order to punish the selfish players who came before them.

So, what’s your play?

For me, I guess I view this situation and life in general as most comparable to a cash game. If I come out ahead, that’s the play to make. It’s no skin off my nose if someone else comes out a little farther ahead in any given situation. I may note that they are a douchebag and keep that in mind for potential future situations, but I’m not going to pass up a guaranteed win just because someone else might win more.

Now, back to our usual programming.