The Poker Diaries: Welcome To The Illness

There Is No Cure

The less said about the tournament in last night's home game, the better for me, as I might have had the worst performance in 5 years. (I semi-bluffed on a draw into multiple made hands for a rebuy, then caught a cooler hand of trip queens with a king kicker against trip queens with an ace kicker. Not advisable.) But that kind of thing happens, and you kind of know the night is not going your way after you don't call in the big blind with crap cards against multiple raisers, then see it flop a boat... several times. Oh, and I was fighting off some bug that made me cough and sneeze, and have a sports injury that makes coughing and sneezing painful in a way that it should never be painful. Let's just move on.

In the cash game, we had the son of one of my regulars, a guy who i in his first few months of play at the tables. He hasn't cashed in the tournament before, and is a quiet kid... and then the deck starts hitting him like a bag of hammers. I paid him off big in Omaha when he caught a bigger boat (Kings over Jacks vs. Kings over Nines) on the river, and it just kept coming, for the better part of two hours.

The funny part about this was the reaction of the guys who kept giving this kid their money. There was none of the momentary ill will and irritation that usually greets such things; instead, just kind of dazed amazement, and eventually, rueful observations of how we were, in all likelihood, setting him up for a lifetime of chasing this first and great feeling. Because, well, we've all had it: that game where the deck catches us perfect, where the cooler hands are happening to everyone but us, when the goods always get called out and the bluffs are missed.

When the smoke cleared and we cashed out, it was the biggest payday in the history of the game, and more than 2X of the usual top winner. And if the kid was truly smart, he'd play smash and grab, and never return. But he will come back, of course, because that's not how humans are wired...