And I love this game WHY?

It's actually been a long time since I entered an online multitable NLHE tournament (EDIT: I guess that's not quite true. I forgot about the Doyles Room bounty tourney last week), but the one being held tonight on PokerStars in honor of Dr. Pauly's five years of poker blogging (on which, BTW, mad props, dude) seemed like one I should participate in.

Started out quite badly, chased for too many chips when it wasn't really warranted. Then I got lucky and pushed all in with A-J against two opponents, one of whom had 9-9 and the other A-K. I sucked out a jack on the turn to knock out both shorter stacks and nearly triple up. Had another huge all-in with my K-K against another guy's Q-Q and nearly doubled again, pushing me into 5th place. (See screen shot of tourney lobby below. I snapped it because, well, I know from experience that these things tend not to last.)



Held about there for quite a while. Then... disaster. See below.



I was sitting in 8th place in this large field, with one of just a handful of people with enough chips to bust me sitting on my immediate right, and acting like a bully. Mr. "Whaaaaaa?" and I got it all in before the flop, with me putting in the fourth raise and him calling. That 10 on the turn was the ugliest card I've seen in a long time. Would have been at the top of the leader board if not for that lousy 10.

A purely rational person would shrug, say "Easy come, easy go," figure that the highly unlucky card here pretty much compensates for the highly lucky card I caught earlier, tell himself that he deserved to go broke (or, to be more precise, be down to just a few chips, then probably go broke soon thereafter) an hour before, in the A-J vx. A-K vs. 9-9 hand, so there's really no harm done.

But it doesn't feel that way, man. It just stings like a son of a gun.

So I'm doing something that is pretty rare for me--maybe even unprecedented: Using my blog to whine about a bad beat.