Last night after coming home from the bar, I lost the biggest pot of my poker 'career'. While many bloggers can swing a couple thousand dollars in any given session, this beat left me frustrated and slightly(read:monumentally) pissed even after I woke up this morning. After checking the hand history this morning, it just got worse. I think I've shaken it off well since then, but for fuck's sake, how many babies did I kick in another life to deserve this sort of karmic bitchslap?

One more than necessary, I guess.

And before you say that I shouldn't be playing while drunk--which is the truth--I will say that I didn't fuck up this hand. I played the only way I could. Poker Savvy's Bad Beat-o-Meter tells me that I was a 77% favorite on the flop, and that my beat was 'soul-crushing'. Silly fuckers assume that I had a soul to begin with. I don't know about crushing my soul, but I do know that it twisted the knife a little farther than any beat had before it.

It was close to 3am, and I made the mistake of telling myself "just one more hand". As a snowboarder growing up, I knew better than to say it. If you ever ended day of snowboarding at one of Minnesota's ginormous mountains with "just one last run", you were sure to get hurt. It never failed. The last time I made this faux pas, I ended up in the emergency room at 4am with the head of bone sticking out of my palm. I'm missing a knuckle because of it. Seriously. Bad JuJu, man. You don't fuck with the Just One More Demon.

Immediately after my drunken mouth uttered these four fatal words, I cringed and hoped for the best. The best was pocket 6's in the BB. The best got even better(yeah, I know that goes against the concept of 'best') as the flop came out J-6-J. Sweet fucking full house, man. I'll bet this here, take down the pot and go to bed on a note akin to Tiny Tim's highest falsetto.

As an aside, I was priveleged enough to see Tiny Tim in concert a few months before he died. He was just as weird looking in person. That's not important to this story at all, I've always wanted to tell someone, anyone that I met Tiny Tim. Anyhow...

I didn't take down the pot, though. The button raised my bet. By a lot. Could he really be playing J-6 on the button? No fucking way. Jacks? No, he would've raised preflop. Well, considering the shit play I've seen lately, anything is possible. But, what are the chances he'd flop the better full house? If it had been Drizz or Joespeaker playing this hand, he definitely would've been holding J-6. But, I'm not them, so I thought I was pretty safe.

And safe I was, because right after I pushed and he called, I saw that he was holding jack...nine? Really? You're shitting me, right? Why would he put $250 in the center of the table with a nine kicker? Outside of the fact that he's a mongoloid, he put his entire stack at risk because he knew that a nine was coming on the turn. Duh. Of course it came on the turn. There's no reason to delay the soul-crushing until the river, right? I mean, after the nine fell, I still had out. An out. One.

No 6 on the river, and IGTBN, drunk, pissed, and my bankroll $250 lighter than it should've been.

I woke up this morning and was all like, man, losing that huge pot with set over set blew donkeys. I felt I was owed that pot. But, this'll learn me for checking the hand history after being too drunk to remember how awful that turn was. Rehashing it just made things worse.

Like I said, I've taken worse beats before, for roughly the same amounts of money. I mean, I still have a decent enough bankroll to work with, and I've definitely had to maneuver with much, much less. Then, why the pissed-offedness?

It took me a few hours to realize why it affected me more than the others. The past few weeks, I've been building my bankroll with the intention of buying a pretty new laptop. The one I currently own shuts off if you bump it slightly against a brick wall, and runs painfully slow. So, I'm in need of a new one.

I equated that one lost pot with a huge step back in reaching that goal of being able to purchase, which is quite possibly the worst mindest to have as a poker player. One endless session blahblahblah. Being short term goal oriented will result in a kick to my mangina with each and every sizable pot I lose, leaving me a bitter person. Nope, can't do it.

Which leads me to question how a "professional" poker player does it. Now, I'm not talking about those that makes mounds(heh, I said mounds) upon wads of cash. I mean those pros that depend on good results to pay the rent, child support, etc. How can you detach emotion to something as important as a decent life? I don't have an answer to that. Do you?

So, I still want a frickin' new laptop--and I will get there--but it will take a little longer than I had planned, but it's not at the forefront of my brain-type-thing .

And oooh, looky: I just won a good pot when my aces held up against queens. Back on the horse, I am.

Ha, I said 'pot'.