Poker gems, #32

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 158:

Yeah, but about the eighteen [losing sessions] in a row. I didn’t start out trying to break any record. I guess maybe I finished trying to. I mean I remember distinctly one time in the Taj Mahal where I had been playing almost five hours and I was ahead like seventy-five bucks or something and I thought to quit and Morty advised me heavily to quit. It was the same night I had gotten my hair cut for the first time in two years and I’d lost about nine or ten in a row at this point and I just should have gone home and cursed the streak. But maybe I needed to see that doom doesn’t have to have an end and just because the roulette ball has come up black fourteen times in a row, don’t go betting on red again. Just walk away.

And maybe I learned the lesson vividly. Because that was the only end for that streak. Just walk away. Or go broke. Or run through the valley of the shadow of death because you get through the valley quicker that way. Or go home, lock your door, pace the floor, pace the house, flip the channel, grind marijuana stems, listen to every CD, go to the market and construct elaborate huge meals not to eat because everything makes you sick, mumble, talk out loud, put your palm to your forehead, cry out and groan, and want to go back into that poker room but be so scared to do it that in the end I just had to leave town, had to leave the country, in fear of what might happen with me in proximity to my money.