PhantomMut

The very-short version: the Four Million PSD Curse hit me hard a while back. From topping four M I donked off over half my total bankroll of play chips.

The low I hit was 1.64 M.

It takes a whole lot of bad play in addition to a bit of bad luck to burn that much equity in the course of a couple of days. And that's the time period over which most of the damage occurred.

I turned it around somewhat after dropping off-line for about a week, getting back up to 3.2 M before having another couple of hard-luck (but not terribly played) evenings, and I'm currently sitting on 2.8 million.

Nothing new to report really about how I sunk so low; a run of bad beats got into my head and I went into extreme tilt mode. I just happened to stay there over three longish sessions.

Well, maybe something new to report, or at least to acknowledge; I get angry when the universe decides to turn my lemons into lemonade. (To be less subtle, when it decides to crush my testicles until the juice runs down my leg. And just show I'm not just being crude and disgusting, that's an allusion to some fine musical history right there.)

Maybe "tilt"="angry" for everybody; don't know, but from what I've read there's a strong correlation. Whatever. What I do know is that my tilt anger is bad for my game.

But oddly enough, non-tilt anger (for instance, that caused when someone starts insulting a player I like, or making racist remarks, or whatever), seems to be good for my game. (There are some players who've noticed that, I think....) I focus more strongly, and I'm meaner, and a well-focused mean streak is a very fine thing in NLHE.

That's another reason I haven't been writing; I've got plenty of reason to be angry in my life outside of poker (my employer is still behind on payroll, and our internet service was suspended for a day last week) and there is spillover. But that stuff is actually a reason for me to be writing. So expect more content from me in the next few weeks.

One final note: I've just discovered the joys of PokerStars' Instant Hand History. (Yeah, and I'm supposed to be a nerd, too....) So if nothing else, I can start posting some of the gloriously bad beats that come my way. And if it's really bad, I promise to leave the screen name of the perpetrator unaltered as a service to my hypothetical readership.