The perils of blogging too much

So I just wrote the previous post. It's up. I'm proofreading it. It occurs to me that I once heard Mike Sexton make the same mistake (saying "reraise" when it was just a raise). I think that that would make a nice extra touch to add to the post. I start trying to see if I can remember which World Poker Tour event it was where I heard Sexton's gaffe. Then another thought starts creeping into the old noggin: Didn't I write a blog post about that when it happened? A quick search reveals not only that I did, but that I did a whole rant about the "reraise" thing back in May, 2008, in which I detailed the circumstances of his comment.

And now I just repeated myself, except that it probably wasn't as good the second time around.

On Sunday I was in a 14-player home tournament with Cardgrrl. I busted out and joined a cash game on the side, while she kept playing. (She won it, not too surprisingly, though she has so far been too modest to note that fact in her own blog.) I lost the biggest pot of the day (something like $70, which was massive, given that the stakes were $0.10/$0.20!) in one of the most annoying ways possible. Four of us checked it around on the river. I had top two pair, but didn't bet because the river put a fourth heart on the board, and I didn't have one. I showed my cards. Two of the others mucked. The last one made a dejected face and pushed his cards forward a few inches, face down, as if to muck. (This is a player-dealt game, and there was no clearly defined muck area.) Just then, a bozo at the far end of the table, not involved in the hand, said, "Nobody has a heart?" The fourth player, apparently not having noticed the four-flush on the board, then picked up his cards again, discovered that he had the ten of hearts, showed, and took the pot.

Why didn't I write a whiny blog post about this at the time? Because it was virtually identical to an incident I related here (fifth story) about a hand at Bill's, just over a year ago. I thought about recounting Sunday's hand in detail, complete with a rant about how such a stray comment egregiously violates the rule about not talking about the hand in progress, as well as the "one player to a hand" principle. (When you help one player in poker, you almost inevitably hurt another at the same time.) But why bother, when I've already done that post before? At least in that case I managed to remember having told the story before.

So this is one of the problems of having been blogging quite prolifically for a hair under three years now. (My first post was made on October 30, 2006. Happy early anniversary to me!) I have already tackled a hefty percentage of all the things I can think of to talk about. New things happen to me at the poker table with a much lower frequency than when I was first in Vegas. It's not exactly true that I've seen it all and done it all, but I've certainly seen, done, and written about a whole helluva lot more than I had back then. There are fewer novel thoughts and novel experiences to share with readers.

That leaves me the dilemma of repeating myself intentionally (figuring that not everybody has been reading all along), repeating myself unintentionally (as happened earlier today), just putting up pointers to an old post with a note like "this happened to me again," or just letting things go silently. I'm not sure that any of those is the optimal solution, though they'll probably all be deployed once in a while.

If you catch me telling virtually the same story a second--or even third--time, forgive me. It might be deliberate. Or it might be senility setting in.