Reversal of fortune?

I rarely mention how I've been running because (1) it's nobody's business, (2) I don't think anybody cares, outside of my family and closest friends, (3) it's not very interesting, (4) I'd like to think that I have interesting stories and commentary independent of whether I've been winning or losing lately, (5) when I'm winning, saying so feels like bragging, and when I'm losing, saying so feels like whining. So I mostly just shut up about the whole subject.

But I can't tell you about tonight without the recent background. August has been, well, horrible. Terrible. Awful. Painful. Grotesque. Unfathomable. Disastrous. Get the picture? I've lost more in the first half of August than in any full month since I started playing poker. Before tonight, 10 of my last 11 and 12 of my last 15 sessions had been losers, a streak unlike any I've ever had before. The downward skid in my cumulative-results graph is shocking; it looks like I've fallen off a cliff. It has been apocalyptically bad.

(This doesn't include online play. As I mentioned recently, until a couple of weeks ago, online poker has been just a few tens of dollars here and there, not even enough to bother cashing out, let alone set up a detailed accounting system for. But even though the online income is picking up, it's like a bucketful of water on what has been a house burning down.)

Everything has gone wrong. Bluffs get picked off. Strong hands get called and sucked out on. I read opponents wrong, folding when I should call or raise and vice-versa. I get second nuts beaten by the nuts time after time after time.

Lemme tell ya, this sort of streak does things to even the soundest of minds. I started sessions thinking that I shouldn't even waste time playing, because I could get the same outcome in a lot less time by just handing a few C-notes to randomly selected strangers sitting in the poker room and go home. And, of course, once you start thinking fatalistically like that, it utterly saps the self-confidence, and adversely affects the decision-making process, causing a cascading effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a downward spiral out of control. You begin to believe that you know absolutely nothing about this stupid game, and then you start playing in a way that proves it.

I've always taken a day off anytime I have two losing days in a row, in order to sort of reset myself mentally and emotionally, and feel like that bit of nastiness is well behind me before I start afresh. That hasn't worked here.

It feels like hell. It feels like being in a war zone with no escape. It feels like being unable to wake up from a nightmare. It's Kafkaesque.

If you've never read Larry Phillips's wonderful description of a bad losing streak that I posted here as my first-ever "Poker Gem," please go do so now. It is spot-on. I'm sure nobody has ever penned a more true-to-life portrayal of how thoroughly it corrodes one's mind and poker skills.

But he's leaving something out. He's neglecting the added level of sheer panic that begins to set in when you have to win in order to buy groceries, pay the rent, keep the car running, etc. The spectre of homelessness and hunger adds a depth of crushing fear that I don't think you can appreciate unless you've experienced it.

Yeah, I have enough $ in reserve by now that this downswing hasn't bankrupted me. But if I were to continue to spew this badly for the rest of the month, the needle would be into the red zone, with no gas station for miles around, and I would be in deep doo-doo. I had to snap the bad streak. But paradoxically, the more that one feels that one must win, the more one tends to force situations, to try to wrest a victory when it is not to be. Panic and desperation kill the kind of relaxed "flow" without which poker simply cannot be played well.

So I set out for the Venetian tonight with dread and foreboding. I even had to stop at the ATM on the way there to pick up cash with which to play. I hate that. It's the walk of shame, the most concrete proof of failure. I could not completely dismiss the thought that I was taking this money out of the bank and was just going to give it away across a poker table, and how stupid that was, and how I would be better off just staying home and watching TV for the next, oh, year or two.

Like I said, this sort of streak does crazy things to the mind. I've even found myself entertaining thoughts that maybe this new PokerStars sweatshirt I've been wearing is what's bringing me bad luck, because it was right around the time it arrived in the mail that I started losing. It's the sort of silly, superstitious thought that I would normally laugh off the instant it occurred to me. But desperation sometimes trumps rationality, and I can't easily shrug off even the most far-out ideas that offer to make understandable what is otherwise beyond comprehension.

Something peculiar happened when I got to the Venetian. The parking spot I found was between two Honda Fits. Just about as soon as Honda released the Fit to the U.S. market a couple of years ago, I decided that that's probably what my next car will be, when my current one finally collapses into a pile of shards, like Oliver Wendall Holmes's Wonderful One-Hoss Shay. They're great little cars, just right for my needs. But demand for them has vastly exceeded Honda's initial projections, so they haven't been making enough of them, and it's still quite uncommon to see them on the streets.

With the way my thinking has been warped and distorted and made vulnerable to all manner of loopy ideas by this losing streak, something in my head clicked about this fortuitous parking spot. It's a sign of some sort--an affirmation that, yes, things will turn around and I'll be able to afford a new car when I need one. No, I don't seriously believe deep down that the universe caused these two cars to be where they were just as a personal manifestation to me, but my ability to banish such absurdities has been mightily compromised.

Things started OK inside the Venetian poker room. I had increased my starting stack by $50 or so in the first hour. I had the strategically best seat at the table, with the loose-passive frequently bluffing bad player on my right, and the ultimate rock on my immediate left.* But when I got pocket kings and got into a raising war with another player, it turned out he had the other two kings, and we just got our money back. (Still, that seemed a vast improvement from how things had been running for me lately.) Then I lost my whole stack to the loose-passive horrible player the one time in the evening he found A-A. Argh! It's happening again! The streak is going to continue!

But I rebought and patiently kept looking for good spots. I built things up slowly again. Finally the moment of truth arrived. Mr. Loose-Passive's wife came to get him. He gave her the "let me play one more hand" line--and it was one too many. He had J-Q to my A-Q, and when a Q hit the flop and another on the turn, his chips became mine. I was up by a net profit of $210, and I took the money and ran, before the poker gods could notice that they had slipped up and let me win.

(By the way, Ron Rose was at the Venetian, two tables away, playing $1-2 no-limit. It seemed very strange to me that he would be playing at that level, when he can and does routinely buy himself into $10,000 tournaments.)

I also left because it was 11:15. The Sahara has an 11:00 p.m. tournament, and catching players on tilt from busting out of that tournament has been one of the most consistently profitable moves for me. I hate the Sahara poker room and nearly everything about it. But it's a cash cow, and has been the way I've broken bad streaks in the past. (My records tell me I've played 12 sessions there, 10 highly profitable and 2 small losses.) I had hopes that it would serve that purpose yet again.

I sat down in Seat 1. This proved to be a fortuitous choice, because the table maniac was in Seat 10, on my immediate right. (I didn't know this at the time, of course.) On my very first hand, I saw A-A, just as I heard Mr. Maniac announce a raise to $10. I reraised to $35. It folded back around to him. He looked at my stack (I had bought in for my usual $100), then said, "Let's get it all in." I replied, "That sounds OK to me." He had K-10. But they were sooted! A flop of A-10-8, with only one of his suit, left him drawing very thin, and a second 8 on the turn gave me an unbeatable aces full. I doubled up on my first hand. (The guy was a very good sport about it. Nothing deterred him from having fun, bless his heart. He quipped, with faux shock and dismay, "That guy cracked my king-ten!")

The very next hand, Mr. Maniac announces before he looks at his cards that if there's a face card, he's going all-in. He peeks, says, "I've got one," and shoves. I have A-K. I am not afraid, especially now that I'm playing with his chips. I call, show my cards, and hit a king on the turn. He mucks without showing, and rebuys.

A few hands later I flop two pair and raise Mr. Maniac's flop bet yet again. This time he seems to have learned his lesson and reluctantly folds top pair. I show. I want this table to be afraid of me. It seems to work. From then on, when I bet or raise, I get only token opposition. Now, this isn't really the best way to build up a stack, because hands end early, before a lot of chips get into the middle. But given recent history, tonight Ill be content with small, safe steps forward.

Finally, after about an hour, and after a dry spell of cards, I decide to throw a curve. I raise from the cutoff position with 7-9 offsuit in a straddled pot. The straddler is my only caller. The flop is J-10-X. Nothing for me there except a gutshot straight draw. My opponent checks. I make the continuation bet. He calls. Uh-oh. Now what do I do? Well, I guess not everything can go my way in a session.

Or maybe it can, because the dealer just put out an unbelievable 8 on the turn, giving me a jack-high straight--the second nuts. I'm only beat if he happened to be playing Q-9, which seems incredibly unlikely. He checks again, and I move all-in. He calls. He has A-J for top pair/top kicker, and is already drawing dead, poor guy. It was sick, sick, sick. But am I giving back the chips? Nooooooooooo.

Soon thereafter, I felted yet another player when I flopped top two pair (K-J) to his flopped top and bottom pair (K-7).

Once again, I got the impression that this was as good as things were going to get, and I should hightail it out of there before the chips started migrating back to where they had come from.

So between the lovely Venetian and the nasty Sahara I managed to erase about a quarter of the deficit I had accumulated thus far in August. For once, I'll be thrilled if I end the month having broken even. Maybe tonight was the first step toward achieving that goal. Whatever happens the rest of the month, tonight was a breathtaking turnaround. All of a sudden, winning was as easy and automatic as losing had been before.

But I'll tell you, next time I set out to play, I'm gonna keep driving around the parking garage until I find two Fits to park between. And I'm leaving that damn unlucky sweatshirt at home.



*This guy was far and away the tightest player I've ever seen. It was astonishing. The first time I saw him voluntarily put chips into the pot I was so startled that I checked the clock. It had been exactly 90 minutes since I sat down. He put in a pre-flop raise. The guy on my right called, then called again on the flop and turn. Mr. Rock had--say it with me, because you all already know--pocket aces, and won. He stayed another 45 minutes, never played another hand except for his blinds, and with them he never once called a raise before the flop or a bet after the flop. He appears to be that rarest of poker life forms: the guy who literally plays only pocket aces. Maybe he changes it up now and then with pocket kings when he's feeling adventurous, but it was still quite amazing.