Status update

I played at the Riviera tonight. It's my sixth day of live play since returning to the felt last Friday, and my fifth win in a row, after losing the first day back.

I got only about three hours of sleep last night, what with the all-night online tournaments, so I was extremely sleepy. For that reason, I made it an ultra-short session, about 75 minutes.

During that time I had the following happen:

• My first hand at the table I had pocket queens, raised to $10, got reraised to $20, and five of us saw the flop with a $100 pot. Flop was king-high, but I led out at it anyway, and nobody called.
• Playing suited A-5, flopped wheel draw, got free card, hit my gutshot on the turn, $30 profit.
• Called a raise with suited connectors on the button, flopped a flush draw, bet when it was checked to me, took it down. $50 profit.
• A-10 on button. Flop 10-high with two hearts. Bet, one caller. Turn offsuit ace, for top two pair. I bet pot, another call. River ace of hearts. Boat for me. Bet pot again, called by the flush draw that got there.
• Q-2 of crubs in small blind, unraised pot, so I called. Flop Q-2-2. Bet and got paid all the way by a doofus with Q-J, who thought it was good.

To be sure, it wasn't all perfect. As the saying goes, ya can't win 'em all. I had top pair/top kicker outdrawn by two players with flushes when four diamonds were on the final board, and I had none. I also had a bluff snapped off, though I thought it had been pretty well timed and convincing.

But even with those minor setbacks, it was quite an extraordinary run of good cards and good situations for just over an hour's play.

This session, plus those of the previous several days, make me reasonably confident in saying this: Yea, though I walked through the valley of the shadow of deathly variance, I have emerged into the light.

In short, things seem back to normal in the poker world for me. I seem to have stopped running into invisible brick walls, at least for now. I have also won enough this week that with one more good session tomorrow, I should be able to close out April as a break-even month.

I do realize how pathetic it sounds to be hoping for a break-even month.* But given how April started, making it back to the zero mark would be either a commendable accomplishment or a small miracle, depending on whether you want to attribute it to me or to supernatural forces. Either way, I'll take it, and start afresh in May.

Because of that, I'm going to return to my usual policy of not using this blog to keep running tabs on my results, for all the reasons I've mentioned many times before. But since the ride on the extreme negative end of the bell curve of variance was a pretty big deal to me, and since I talked about it here, I thought I should provide you with the apparent end of the story.

Oh, and one more thing: If you're counting, that's eleven posts in the last slightly over 24 hours. The few of you who whined and complained about me having taken a hiatus from writing? You can bite me.



*It is, of course, utterly irrational to think of one's poker results in terms of specific calendar months, or weeks, or days, or even sessions. If you're a winning playing long-term, then you put in the hours, and you have some sort of average hourly rate of return, and it matters not one bit whether the ups and downs cluster in some particular way over some arbitrary period of time. But c'mon--is there anybody who can really, truly, completely ignore the rhythms by which we measure everything else in our lives when looking at their poker results? You can make a fairly convincing accusation of roboticism against me in many respects, but even I am not a sufficiently pure automaton as to be able to disregard the calendar when tallying my wins and losses.