Chris Halverson’s Blog

Monday night was shaping up to be a night where I would be able to play a decent amount of poker. Of course, things change and I didn’t really play that much.

It started out innocently enough, I had about 45 minutes worth of table time to clear at UKBetting, so I sat down with my leftover lunch and pull it up. Of course, this is about the time Mrs. H decided to come up for dinner too (we were winging it last night, my son was gone and we were just on our own). OK, put off poker until she goes back downstairs. Thirty minutes later she goes down to work on her Second Life stuff and I pull up the poker. I decide to throw caution to the wind and pull up two tables. Whoa tiger! Two crypto tables? At one time? That’s right, I wanted to use up the time quickly so I could get on to greener pastures. Sometimes the Crypto software lets me have 2 tables with no problems, other times, it’s unusable and times me out all while the “Poker.exe” is chewing 99% of my CPU.

This was one of those nights.

How did I realize that? Well, beside the fact that my computer was totally unresponsive, the worst of it came when I got dealt JJ in early position and popped it. It took about 20 seconds for my raise to show up. Not good. I get one caller and see the flop take about 30 seconds to show, literally one card at a time. I was excited because it was JAx and figured the ace had to help the guy. I sat there waiting for my buttons to show up when suddenly the pot is being pushed to the other guy and I’m sitting out. Frack!

I logged off and actually had enough time to get the final £5 bonus and got the hell out of dodge, still frustrated as I had to post yet another in the long line of small (2-3BB) losses at a Crypto site.

I then decide to pull up a chair to Gaming Club and Paradise. I decided on two different sites instead of maximizing my return on TGC because I have not been able to get their waiting lists to reliably get me on two tables. Whatever, I can start clearing my waiting Paradise bonuses.

I soon get on tables at both and start to get on a little rush, I’m quickly up 10BB on both tables. Then my son comes up and wants to know if I want to watch TV with him.

Now when your 16 year old voluntarily asks to spend time with you, you better damn well do it. So I agreed and started to log off of the tables.

My son decides he’s hungry and starts looking through the kitchen for food. I then hear, “Do we have anything to eat?” Evidently the 12 pounds of turkey and 5 pounds of ham that we have leftover from Christmas isn’t “anything to eat”. He heads to his grandparent’s house (around the block) for “something to eat”, which turns out to be Easy-Mac. He then comes back and decides he doesn’t want to watch TV anymore. *grr*

Back to the games. I couldn’t get onto TGC since evidently 3 1/2 full ring tables is enough, after all 20 person long wait lines is good, right? I quickly get onto a Paradise table and go on another little rush.

No more than 30 minutes later, Mrs. H comes up and asks if I want to watch a movie with her. Oy! I find out she wants to watch a movie we’ve both seen before (Gothika, which is a good flick IMHO, not scary, but kinda freaky, plus it’s got Halle Berry) so I beg off for a few mins. I continue to run well and when the movie is about halfway done I shutdown. After the movie I caught some of the National Arm Wrestling Championship on ESPN. Good stuff.

For the first time in weeks I posted winning sessions on every table (save the UKBetting which was hosed and only cost me 1-2BB), despite the interruptions. Now my losses have generally been in the 2-3BB range, so it’s not like I’m getting destroyed, but there is just a lot of red showing in my spreadsheet. In addition, a bunch of small losses add up over time, so this night was a good one.

This afternoon (Tuesday) I’m heading back to Canterbury. This will be a “blow off steam” poker session. Lately I’ve been playing too seriously and that just makes poker a grind, especially when you’re in a downswing. Many of you blow off steam by playing in the blogger’s NL table. Even if you don’t realize it, your wild play and such while on that table probably helps you in the long run, even if you end up dropping a buyin at that table. I haven’t done anything “fun” poker-wise for a long time, so today is going to be a fun afternoon at the casino.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 28th, 2004 at 8:48 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.