This post is not intended as a bad-beat story. I’ve helpfully marked the bad-beat whine with italics, so you can skip that if you’re not interested in what exactly happened. In short, I lost a bunch of money at poker. Boo-frickin’-hoo.

I’ve had a tough week at the tables, losing a little over a third of my bankroll. A large part of it was taking a shot at 10/20 and running really bad, but I had “budgeted” for that, so while unfortunate, I was okay with it. Time to rebuild, and then give it another shot. Then I had a few bad days at 5/10, but nothing out of the ordinary; lost a few more hundred dollars. Unfortunate, but it happens. I was now down a little over $1200 in a few days’ time, but I could live with that.

So Monday night I sit down and play for an hour or so, and leave before dinner maybe $100 up. After dinner, I wonder if I should play more or watch some TV… But I figure that I might as well play more anyway, because there’s nothing good on anyway. I do okay for the first half hour, then I lose a few pots and can’t manage to pick up a hand at all, so I drop a little. At this point, I’m down about $150 which is a swing that is definitely standard for 5/10.

But then something happens, it’s like someone snapped his fingers and removed the floor from underneath my airplane seat. Whoosh. It starts with a hand where I flop a set of queens and find myself capping the turn and river against someone who had 77 and turned a set, and rivered quads. That’s $100 bye-bye.

Not two hands later, but on another table, I find myself with a set of sevens on a Q722 board, capping the turn only to look at a second queen come off on the river. He bets, I call, and he shows his AQ and that I was indeed counter-feited. At the same time on another table, I then hit ANOTHER set, this time a set of nines, and my opponent caps the turn out of position with only a flush draw. Of course, he hits.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Now I’m tilting. I lose a big pot with QQ again, against someone who flopped trips on a T-T-5 board. The pot was 3-way and I didn’t believe his turn checkraise enough to lay my queens down. I wasn’t at a state of mind where I’d let myself risk being bluffed out of a big pot.

I play for another 10 minutes in a sort of a confused haze wondering what is going on. So I get up and leave the tables with a $750 loss. I feel a little bit like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. I spend the rest of the night muttering and watching TV, wishing that I’d done that all night instead. Wishing things had been different is not a healthy activity. My “the world is against me” feeling was magnified by the fact that I had just found out that I need to get my car repaired, and that the stock market had been plummeting. I don’t have a lot of money invested in stocks (in fact, it’s a laughable amount) but at this point, that tiny loss still felt like it was just adding insult to injury.

I don’t know if you bothered reading through my whine, but to really top things off, I come out the next morning only to discover that my car won’t start. The guy who inspected it the day before had forgotten to the turn off the parking lights, so my battery was drained. I felt like going back to bed and returning to the world the next week. But after borrowing a friend’s car to drive Lori to work, I decided to just walk to work.

The sun was shining. It was a few degrees above freezing, and the snow was thawing. And as I walked there, muttering about how ridiculously mean the world was being to me right now, I realized that I was being a whiny little prick. Seriously.

Here I was, walking to the job that I love, being upset about a little money? I had just dropped my fiancée off at her job. My fiancée. I’m getting married in August. And I’m upset about a little money? We’re moving in to our very own house in six weeks’ time, and I’m upset about a little money? I’m a winning poker player who has made more than my share of money off of this game, and I’m upset about the fact that I’ve lost a little of all the money I’ve won?

And I’m walking to work. Not everyone is fortunate to be healthy enough to do even that. And I’m upset about a little money.

I should be fucking ashamed of myself. And I was.

I feel much better now.