Its Not the Destination, Its the Journey

$2.31 will buy you the following...

- Enough for two junior bacon cheeseburgers and a small donation to The Dave Thomas Foundation.

- A pack of titanium-infused Yu-Gi-Oh cards (what happened to my 25 cent pack of Donruss cards with hopes of getting a Ryne Sandberg Diamond Kings card???). At least the porn has improved at Shinders but you still feel like pervert going through the squeaky saloon styled swing doors on the way to viewing esteemed periodicals such as Juggs, Hustler, and Score.

- A Red Bull sans vodka and a local paper with tips on the health effects of colonic cleaning at the local Superamerica. Complete with a smile from the cute geek girl behind the counter.

- Package of baby wipes for excessive use the next time your spouse fails to mention she fed the spawn prunes the previous day and you wondered where that smell was coming from on your day off with the kids.

- A Minnesota Twins 2006 Division Champs T-shirt.

I’m 101% sure if you were to pull my Pokerdb.com stats they would give you the gory details of how much I’ve lost playing tournaments. I enjoy the cash games despite the bottomless variance swings, as the only stop-loss device for the cash game player is not reloading. Tourney players don’t score as often, much like a bench player in the NBA, but when they do you can be fairly sure that their leggy conquest is greater then a nightly win for the cash game specialist. Sure you’ll see the occasional 10 buy-in win from someone playing on a rockin table and getting slapped upside the head with the deck, but when you win a tourney you’re usually pulling in 20X-100X your original buy-in.

You could make the argument of the tortoise and the hare in that they both reach the finish line around the same time but do so in different ways. Read some of the archives on the blogs out there, and you can see the difference in relaying the results of their advancement in this sadistic game we play. Look beyond the narrative, and focus on how they describe their feelings on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Granted with writers like Speaker and Otis you’ll want to stop to smell the flowers, and by all means the Gardenias will send your olfactory senses into bliss. But, look beyond the carefully crafted words and see the highs and lows play out before you give up because the coin flips haven’t gone your way (*raises hand* very guilty) or those darn Aces didn’t make it to the finish line when the tortoise hit his gutshot straight draw.

If you’re a tourney specialist, realize you’re not going to win every night and will generally have a batting average and strikeout total near someone like Rob Deer or Cecil Fielder. But when you hit that ball, its going a long way and usually worthy of a Cristal bath, a Playboy playmate or two feeding you a plate of caramelized bacon and weenie wraps. The cash game specialist is going to emulate a Pete Rose or Tony Gwynn putting the bat on ball several times a game getting several singles, maybe throw in the occasional gapper for a double or triple. They also go through streaks of broken bats and Ozzie Smith-like defensive plays that rob those wins, but those streaks generally do not last as long.

I’m certainly guilty of not handling my swings well enough to be considered emotional stable toward this card game. Then again, I seriously question the emotional stability of anyone who takes this game with more then a grain of salt. If I told Mark Kennedy of the Minnesota Senate race he had a 81% chance to win on Tuesday at 7pm and suddenly when the polls closed at 8pm Amy Klobuchar won based on poker players flooding the ballot boxes when they found out Kennedy endorsed the original House bill on banning online gambling, do you think he’d continue in politics? Let’s hope not, closed mindedness towards evolving something that could benefit many states, instead of taxing the banking and financial resources necessary to enforce such laws shouldn’t be tolerated.

Over time the “beats” don’t seem like “beats”, just variance rearing up or not looking at how the money got into the middle before launching a Parental Advisory sticker worthy rant. I was down for the evening last night as my granite-like PLO8 table could barely make the pot big enough to rake (I even tried raising preflop three times in a row with crap cards and they still folded their way into a poker coma), and some Razz hands were just uneventful versus losing big to bad draws by myself.

All that was left was The Mookie which I managed to carve out a fifth place finish despite a momentary lapse in judgment at the end. According to my spreadsheet, I haven’t cashed in my last 12 MTTs and a nice 4.5X buy in pull, helped to erase some of that red ink. Granted I’d rather win 4.5X my buy in at PLO8, but throw in the fun of the bloggers and blogger railbirds and you get something back that won’t show up on your ledger.

And it’s probably worth more then the $2.31 that I won last night.

Thanks for dropping by, now please get up to the plate and knock one out. I love reading about things like Smokkee’s latest running over the live tables with sizable wins or Daddy knocking one out to biker chicks.