Oh dear god, this just isn"t funny. I"ve successfully managed to push my loss for the week over the two times buy in mark and in the last two hours I"ve played ten hands where I"ve been in the lead on sixth street only to lose on seventh. Funniest bad beat of the lot was when, on sixth street I had two pair (aces and tens) and a royal flush draw (card needed for royal and six others of same suit not yet exposed) but was defeated on seventh street by an opponent who completed a ten-high straight with the only ten left in the deck. Its a good job I"ve got my curtains closed as my neighbours may otherwise have seen the top of my head lift off and steam come out of my ears a la Tom and Jerry.
I"ve got a day off playing tomorrow so that leaves me to think about my plans for next week. My options are as follows:
1) Give up poker and walk down the road to Mecca bingo
2) Do exactly the same as this week, after all I cant be this unlucky two weeks running, can I?
3) Drop back down a level, allow my blood pressure return to normal levels and try the step up again in a couple of weeks.
4) Reintroduce a little tournament play into the mix
5) Give up stud altogether and return to a diet of deepstack holde"em tourneys
6) Smash my PC into a million pieces
7) Find religion and decide that gambling is the work of Satan
Stop bloody whinging, bad beat stories are also, without exception, all created within the depths of hell
9) Try to execute a cunning yet fiendishly difficult mystery plan
When I woke up this morning, I thought the plan for this week would be an amalgamation of points three and four. I wanted to play a gentle hold"em tournament tonight to reintroduce myself to the game then spend most of the week rebuilding my bank balance on the stud cash tables. The tournament I chose was the $5.50, $15000 guaranteed affair on Pokerstars starting at 18.00 which I"ve previously had some success in. I haven"t played in this competition for a few months and after tonight I don"t think I will again. There were 4896 entries and I"ve discovered just how far my attitude has changed. I didn"t enjoy playing tonight one jot. I"m not about to tell a bad beat story or regale you with some other tale of woe, but I found myself mind numbingly bored. I just couldn"t figure out why I was sitting down for a tournament which was likely to continue into the early hours without having the possibility of winning sufficient to make me at least consider telling my employers to take my job description, roll it up and use it as a suppository. This has given me a change of heart and I have decided that this week I will go for option nine, the "Cunning yet fiendishly difficult mystery plan". Before I reveal the exact details of said plan, a little background..........
For about the first eighteen months after I was taught this game, my poker education came about solely through playing and trying to learn from experience. I then bought "Harrington on Hold'em" and it made an instant improvement in my game. Where I"d been creeping into the lower reaches of tournament payouts, I started making final tables. Since then, I"ve played live a bit, read a few more books, watched Stoxpoker videos and gradually improved.
The early stages of my serious stud playing have felt very much like my early days of hold"em. I"ve played lots and have tweaked my game to take account of things I"ve worked out on the virtual tables. I think my skills, if not my finances, allow me to move slightly higher up the ladder, but I have hit a couple of snags. Firstly, there are very few sites where there are sufficient stud players to guarantee the availability of a game at all times. In addition, stud tournaments are as good as non-existent which I regard as a major handicap. Secondly, there is very little literature or wisdom I can tap into to help my game.
I have borrowed a copy of "Super System 2" and was disappointed that even this doesn"t have a chapter on stud high, although Todd Brunson has contributed a piece on stud high/low. Likewise, Stoxpoker"s video library seems to have a number of stud high/low films but nothing on stud high only. I certainly don"t intend reverting to being predominantly a hold"em player, I"ve done too well recently for that to be an option, but do have some thinking to do.
So on to the precise details of my fiendishly difficult to execute master plan and if anyone ever tells me they know exactly what I"m about to type, you are a liar. My plan starts with immersing myself in the aforementioned "Super systems 2". I will also make use of Stox"s resources and here comes the radical bit..............Once I shut down my computer tonight, I will not play a single hand of online poker of any form until next Sunday. You may care to read that last sentence a second time. My reason for coming to this conclusion is that I believe that playing hour after hour of poker without time for review can be as much of a hindrance as a help. I think the time has come for me and poker to have a bit of time away from each other in order to rekindle our enthusiasm for each other.
Will I manage to hold out for seven days? Mmm, we'll see. Watch this space.
