I'm broke.

There, with that out of the way...wait, what do you mean "explain"? Awh, do I have to? Poop.

November was one of my best poker months, and it came at a great time, right before the WPBT at the Imperial Palace. I cashed out my online 'bankroll'--if you can call it that--a week before leaving, and it allowed me the opportunity to play in games higher than I'd played before. That, my friends, was a good feeling.

I basically broke even that weekend, poker-wise, but when I returned back home, I didn't re-deposit all that Vegas money back in my account. A large portion of it, sure, but looking back, it definitely wasn't enough. Since that time, I've been on what basically amounts to a -650bb downswing. 2 1/2 months of losing. The amount of money shipped to the other side of the table isn't the most important part, because it's technically not a large amount of money comparatively.

The -650bb lost is what stings. Poker is a huge, masochistic mindfuck. Looking at my graph of the last two months, and all the awful red columns in my PT database, well, that rips the shiv out forcefully, and in it's place, jams in Paul Bunyan's axe.

That's a Minnesota reference, people. No, 'axe' is not a euphamism for 'wang'. Not in this instance at least.

I was playing on Full Tilt this Sunday, when it finally happened; I went on tilt. I never go on tilt. I'm pretty good at leaving a table if I've just suffered a bad beat and steaming, but go on tilt I did. And the result?

Pissing away what was left of my already decimated bankroll. AA is cracked by QQ happens every damn day. Hell, just the week before I cracked AA with my QQ, and laughed when the opponent called me a 'lucky $%#@*&'. After finding Otis' post on different forms of tilt, I realized the tilt I suffered from wasn't outlined.

Sure, it could be called 'variance tilt', incurred from months of getting kicked in the taint, but I don't think that adequately described my play. I think a better way to describe it, for me at least, would be 'apathy tilt'.

Apathy tilt-The version of tilt incurred by the false mindset that, regardless of what you do, what cards you're dealt, or how well you play those cards, it just doesn't matter. It's the feeling I had that I couldn't control the outcome; that no matter what I did, I couldn't win. So, I spewed chips when I was way behind, and if you've ever played against me at all, you know it's tough to take me for a whole stack unless you suck out on me, hardcore. I'm not much of a donater. Or, at least I wasn't until last week.

The last $25 of my online bankroll went away thusly; I'm sitting on a 6-max table on the button with 10d-Jd. It's folded around and I raise it to 4x bb and am called by only the big blind. The flop comes out J-7-6, two spades. The opponent checks, I fire a continuation bet, and he decides to check raise me all in. Without even thinking about what he might have, I called his $19 check raise. With a pair of jacks with a 10 kicker.

I knew I was beat, and it wasn't even a close decision. And I still called! All I could think was, well, he's gotta have me beat, but rather than make the right choice and fold, I'll call because I'm just going to lose this money eventually, and I might as well let it happen sooner, rather than later. Spewage.

Right now, sitting in various online poker accounts, there's a total of 1 cent. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. Where in the fuck am I supposed to go from here? It's not like Full Tilt plans on starting quarter-penny tournaments, right?

Right.

I have money that I could deposit, but I can't say that I really want to at this time. It wouldn't be very wise of me to do that. Not that it's stopped me before, I'm just saying. For the time being, the only poker I will be playing is 500 FT point token tourneys. When I exhaust all of those points, I'm not sure what I'll do. Not quit, that's for sure, but it's obvious that my plan of attack--or lack thereof--failed, and miserably at that. I need goals. I need something to strive for. I need to hire someone to shock me in the balls when I do stupid things with my bankroll, not because I particularly enjoy being shocked in the balls(not that I know of, anyway), but because I deserve it.

I've always believed that I'm not a drool-cup-wearing mongoloid, but my track record hasn't exactly proven my theory, either.