Punishment is due

Hey,

I'm pretty pissed with myself from last night. Yesterday I went to the Venetian for the $330 and was playing good poker but feel like I spewed pretty badly on my bust-out hand. I mean it's by far from awful but it's one of those pushing the tiniest of edges which simply isn't necessary in a deepstack tournament.

I had just moved to a new table for a few hands and was dealt TT in the cut-off. From what I had seen a few times the bloke in the hijack seemed really fishy and had limped about 60% of hands at 150/300/25. He did so again and I isolated to 1000.

The button was the only youngish looking guy on the table, he seemed like an internet kid with the overly large headphones and semi-professional chip shuffling moves. Anyway he 3bet me to 2600 when I had about 18,000 and he had about the same. It folded back to me and I figured he knew I would be iso'ing the fish pretty light and I was probably competent enough to be able to iso/fold blah blah blah. Anyway I slapped in the 4bet and called to find he had Kings. Maybe it wasn't too bad and I would probably have found it very hard to get away from on the flop but whatever.

I then headed over to caesers to play the 4pm $230 turbo which is a sick little tournament that I hope to play more of if I bust my midday afternoon comp. You start with 30,000 chips at 25/50 with 20 minute levels. 600 big blinds and people still can't fold top pair. It's lovely :). I raised my stack to about 120,000 then ran my kings into aces practically bubbling. Sweeeeeeet!

Pretty pissed with that so I headed to our bar; money plays where several yards of beer were consumed with my equally pissed off house mates that had bust the $2500 6-max WSOP event. The other house mate Zach just lost a couple of buyins playing high-stakes PLO online (his main game). We drank, played shuffleboard, played chinese poker, whined about our various bad-beat storys and how everyone is shit apart from us but we just run bad. You know the usual :).

5 hours in and with quite a hefty bar-tab and feeling more and more as if I was on a boat at sea, somehow the thought of hitting the casinos came to mind and everyone thought it was a good idea. Fuck!

You see, in Vegas casinos, the cocktail waitresses come round and give free alcohol. Several more beers and yagerbombs later I find myself stumbling home with the other $500 lighter. I know $500 isn't going to bankrupt me etc. But it is a lot of money to waste pit-gambling. It's pretty funny really, I don't even give a crap if I bust a $500 tournament live as I feel when entering it that I'm +ev over the field. But no matter how you look at it, playing the pit games you will lose in the end. What's worse was I was up $500 at some point. Blahh, pretty disappointed with myself for wasting so much money yesterday!

As punishment for being a pit-degen I'm taking the day-off poker today and I'm going to work on my game an hour for every $100 I spewed in the pit. Probably watch some poker videos, go through some hand histories and discuss hands with friends to see if I can spot any leaks in my thought processes. I feel that if I played today I'll still be on subliminal tilt from last night and won't bring my A-game. And if I'm spewing and not bringing my A-game, then I may as well just be gambling in the pit anyway.

Tomorrow I'll get back on the grind and see if I can make some money again!