This Wednesday I got home from school early and got in a few afternoon tourneys on stars. The first two I was in went by so fast that I’m not sure I even played. In the NLHE, my flopped top two pair lost to a flopped bottom set on the third hand of the game. In the PLO, I flopped the nut straight with a royal flush draw and lost to a guy who flopped middle set and then filled on the river. In other words, just a normal start to a normal day of poker. <READMORE>I had already regged for the next NLHE tourney by that time, and the first hand I got was pocket aces in my big blind. I patiently waited for one of the usual first hand all in maniacs to raise, but everyone folded to me, and I collected the small blind’s 10 chips. Five minutes later, I got aces again, and this time I raised it up to 90 chips UTG. The guy next to me bumped it again to 250, and the button went all in! “Here we go,” I said aloud to nobody as I called and then watched the guy next to me call as well. The button turned over AK off, and the guy next to me flipped the mighty 58 hearts. Right on the flop there came J55, and no help for me ended this tourney fast.
My calm veneer started to crack a bit as I jumped into the next rebuy NLHE. Meanwhile, I had built up a decent stack in the PLO8 and was sitting 26/129. I calmed myself down and resolved to play my best poker and at least cash in one of these.
Well, in my experience, you can resolve all you want, but when fate has it in for you, there is nothing you can do but grin and bear it. Thirty minutes later after three or four failed attempts to flop a hand, I find AA24 double suited on the button. The action was already big by my turn to act, and since I would be committing more than a third of my stack to the pot with just a call, I pushed all in. We saw the flop six handed with enough chips at stake to put a single winner near the top of the leader board. The flop was beautiful too, A3Q with one of each of my suits. The turn was a jack that matched the queen in diamonds, giving me the nut flush draw. When the king of diamonds fell on the river, I jumped (ok, more like waddled) out of my chair and pumped (ok, more like raised) my fist. Only when all those lovely chips went elsewhere did I notice that one of my brilliant opponents had gone all in with a 789T double suited, and his 9T of diamonds had made a straight flush.
Those folks with some PLO8 knowledge can attest to the level of donkiness of this play. While 789T is a valid rundown hand in Omaha high, the fact that any nut straight you make using three board cards lower than a 9 makes somebody else a low, makes this less than an ideal PLO8 hand. The general rule of thumb is that middle cards are death in PLO8. The sad part was that this time, they had been my death.
I like to say that I never go on tilt and that I have learned to take my beats in stride. But as I straddled the couch, flailing away at its oversized pillows and cursing in two or three languages, for some reason the voice of the Gecko from the Geico ads, or maybe Joe Hachem, was in my head. “Never go on tilt, eh?” it/he was saying. “Take those beats in stride, do we?”
I sunk back into my black leather executive chair and proceeded to steam off five or six buy ins in the rebuy NLHE when my wife called. Without pausing for breath, she said, “What a terrible commute. Getting out of the city was bad enough, but then the turnpike was closed, and 1 and 9 were so backed up that we ended up going through Staten Island. Then I finally get in, and now I can’t even get home. They blocked off the whole road, and there’s a ton of traffic. I think there was an accident. Why don’t you go online and check?”
I was still mumbling to myself about my own rotten luck as I logged into the local newspaper website. The headline brought my mumbling to an abrupt stop. There was indeed an accident about a mile or two from my house, and now four local kids were dead. As I read on, I discovered that we knew two of them, and that one had a brother in my son’s class.
When my wife finally arrived, we got on the phones and started calling to see if anyone needed anything and what we could do to help. All thoughts of traffic, poker, and other trivial annoyances melted away beneath the burning glare of real tragedy, and we spent the rest of the night comforting our friends and hugging our kids.
Sometimes it takes a kick in the pants to wake us out of our self-absorbed dramas. Traffic jams and bad beats in poker are irksome to be sure, but when we whine about them like they are life and death, we are truly missing the big picture. If the worst thing that happens to me today is that I get one outered in a NLHE tourney and bubble the FT, then I am a lucky man. I hope I don’t forget that anytime soon.
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