On losing, part 4

By the time I've registered what's happened, the dealer has put the river card out. When I finally look at it, I'm praying it's a club. It's not. It wouldn't have helped me anyway. A few seconds later, I come to my sense and say, “I missed, jack high,” he turns over Q4 of clubs. As I'm pushing my chips, all of my chips, towards the pot, I say “good call.” Brown just nods in response to this without looking at me, as he takes the pot in. The guy next to me, is astonished and says “how did he call that?” Well, I guess, because you don't get to be player of the year for nothing. I reach into my pocket and put the other $5k on the table...
- On losing, part 3
Part 1 Part 2


Now, not only did I have the desire to make things right from the $7k loss from the day before, it was compounded with Brown so completely owning me. I wound up winning a few hands gambling gambling, and shorty after I put the last $5k on the table, I'd worked it up to about $8k. But, I was still on tilt, I was still counting how I was down $11k for the trip. I had no desire to leave, my only thought, looking at the $8k in front of me, was “make it $20k, and you're even.”

I would have had better odds putting the money on the roulette wheel, a craps table, lottery tickets.

But the table is mostly pros, and they can see my tilt a mile away. So I die a slow death of bluffs, of bad calls, of looking at any starting hand and thinking how this could be the hand that I bust someone with.

Eventually, with $1500 in front of me, and I go all in on a straight draw which turned out I was drawing to a chop as the dude had flopped it.

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On returning home I told people that I was down sixteen-thousand dollars. But, I kept seeing that safe full of twenty-two thousand, three neat $5k bands, a bunch of thousand dollar chips, plus change. Twenty two thousand dollars. All my credit cards paid. A nice stock portfolio. Half of a down payment on a decent apartment.

I took a week off, I worked out every day. I got drunk a lot. I watched a lot of television. I watched a lot of porn.

When I started playing again, I had to step down to the smaller stakes home games that I was playing in before. I had no patience. I was just playing with Chad Brown! I just put out a $5k bluff! Who any of these people to be sitting at my table??!!

I am on tilt from the moment I sit down, to the moment I leave. I lose the next five straight for another $8k.

My notes on my spreadsheet during this run are about the bad beats I took, about my shit luck, about how the universe had conspired against me.

I take another week off. Ten days. I watch more movies. I stop drinking, I stop jerking off, I stop talking to people for the most part. I workout everyday, sprinting on the treadmill at the end of the session until my heart feels as though it's going to pound through my chest.

I watch more movies. One of which is an early Kurosawa / Mifune film, “Stray Dog.” It's the story about a young cop who has his gun stolen by a pickpocket. He goes on through the movie cursing his fate about how the Gods are laughing at him, how this one mistake will ruin his career. He becomes monomaniacal, focused on getting his pistol back, going crazy with frustration. While I found the Mifune character's take on his luck and spiral into depression and insanity pertinent to me, there is a line that sums it up perfectly: “bad luck can either destroy or make a man.”

And all of a sudden it was as simple as that.