On losing, part 2

I went there with $16k, in three neatly rubber banded wads of 50 hundred dollar bills. At this point the safe in our room has four of these wads in it, and a couple thousand dollar chips, that I carry around and do tricks with. I'm counting out the credit cards I'm going to pay. I'm thinking about the stocks I'm going to buy. I'm deciding if I want a scooter or a real motorcycle. The next day, I get to the table, a bit hungover, a bit tired. I play poorly, get down a few thousand but eventually get a hold of myself and fight back to a $65 tie. My friend is at the final table for a satellite to the $10k main event, and so I leave the game to watch him get through a field of 300 to come in 4^th, he wins $1k, but not a seat. We have a nice steak dinner, drink some wine. I am unstoppable! Even when I play bad, I'm still better than everyone! We are both winning! We are awesome! We are in good moods.
On losing, Part 1

The the amount of to sleep I can get after a game is in pretty direct reverse correlation to the swings I've endured. This is why it's smart of me to take time off between games. But, in AC, especially in the winter, there's not much else to do but gamble. So, I get up the next day, tired, but I still manage a long hard workout, sit in the hot tub for awhile after, take a shower and then go and play. The adrenaline from the workout covered up the fatigue I was feeling, and when I sat down to play the adrenaline of the game covered it up even more.

I start playing decently enough, and am somewhere around even five or six hours in. And then, suddenly the fatigue catches up to me. It was as though I'd completely forgotten what I was doing for a few minutes... I overplay TT, AQ flopping an A, and another hand I can't quite remember. I don't remember the exact hands, I do remember the changes in the pros' faces. Their expressions and body language changed from a kind of timid wondering what I was going to do in previous hands, to a confidence knowing that they had me beat. Six months later, I'm not sure if this is a confabulation, but, either way, I had no instincts, I had no idea where I was at, I had no idea where anyone was at.

When I wake up, I notice I've lost the entire $5k I'd put on the table. I find a deep self-loathing, and tilt. I couldn't process that I'd done anything wrong, I just had the feeling I suspect my friend always has. That all the shit luck in all the world was crashing on my head. But, I found the same self destructive thing I in my brain that I imagine is similar in his. It feels like the numbness and rush of cocaine, and like cocaine it whispers “more, more, more.”

So, I get up from the table, go up to the safe in the room, and take out another $5k band. My traveling companion called sometime during this and I go and meet him for a $250 single table tournament. I'm in rare form, and just kind of pissed and willing to throw away that buyin, as I can't be bothered to fold anything. But, the funny thing about tournament poker is that the donkeys win quite a bit of the time, and I wind up knocing out like the first four dudes on some insane hands, and I roll to an easy first place $1k victory. I get no less than two dudes to curse at me, and my friend to give me the finger as I bust him, I forget the hand, I probably put him all in and hit some retarded gut shot.

Of course this win covers up any notion that the losing was my own fault, and that I needed to take a break. The numb feeling, and the idea that my money would come back to me if I kept going was there. It's somewhat late and my friend goes up to sleep, and I should be tired, but I have no desire to sleep, I only feel the desire for more more more. So I go back to the 10/25 game. They don't have a seat, and so I sit down at the 5/10 game. I lose $2300 in about an hour when I can't fold QQ vs someone's AA, and then I take a nice suckout with my TT vs K8. The act of reaching into my pocket for a rebuy in this game finally breaks my spirit, and I'm depressed enough to quit, down $7150 on the day.

It's way late now, and I can't sleep. After laying in bed for a few minutes I go to the hotel lounge and putz around on the internet. I still have like $15k left in cash in the safe. And I can't believe that after playing perfectly for so many months, that things are now going so wrong now, and how can I make things right? I need to make things right! I will make things right.

I'm only down like $1k on the trip at this point. I'm not sure why the thought of coming home with a loss chapped my ass so badly. If I were home, I would have taken a break, checked myself into the “poker hospital” for at least a week and not played until I didn't feel so bad. But, yeah, like I said, nothing else to do there. When I eventually lie down, I doze in and out for a couple hours at a time, instead of ruminating about my stupidity, my brain fixated on the monomaniacal thought of how I'm going to make it right.

When thinking about this sequence of events, it is this night I think of most. I think of how I could have taken the car we rented and driven a few hours to visit my parents, relax, and in a day or two come back to play the tournaments we'd gone down to play in the first place. But, no, I didn't do that at all...