There was a thread recently on here - somebody had been through a long downswing, and ended up coming back on their birthday. Well, same thing's just happened to me.
I'd describe myself as a lowish stakes recreational player with dreams of greatness
. Been playing online for about 2.5 years, Party for 1, then Stars for last 1.5 after PP kicked the yanks off. Pretty much exclusively play $10-$30 STT/MTT and up until 6 months ago was pretty much breaking even, and having enough fun to make it money well spent. Last six months have been fairly horrendous - 2 long streaks of nothing, down about $1k, but it's the demoralisation that's been getting to me. Seems I was getting bad beats at the worst possible times over and over, confidence was well down, which I'll freely admit made my play worse.
It's my birthday today, so as I'm out with SWMBO tonight, thought I'd have a "birthday" session last night. Signed up for a $30/$3 3 table SNG and it turned into one of the weirdest tournaments I've played in. To give you an idea, in the whole thing, I had 6 pocket pairs. 5 of those were QQ, including 3 in 4 hands! And it seemed like the best hand just could not win. 90% of the time there was an allin, there was an unlikely outcome. Abig against Asmall was getting slaughtered. 22 won against JJ when he turned the wheel. AJ against AJ got flushed, etc etc etc. At one point I chatted that if I got 7-2 I'd get it all in, as it was guaranteed to win. Very next hand I got 6-2, chickened out, only to see 22A on the flop and 2 other players getting it all in with an A each! The chat on the final table was a repeating chorus of "OMG". Fortunately I was either out the way, or on the good side of most of these beats. My final winning hand was A10 against AQ when I spiked the 10 on the turn. So $300 win, which is the biggest I'd had for quite some time, and I was well chuffed.
Then I played a $10/$1 HORSE, which I've had a go in a few times. 168 players, was chip leader from 100 left to about 30, and I felt it was pretty much through good play rather than just getting lucky. There's a lot of dead money in these though, and I hoovered up quite a few chips early on from the limit cally-wallys. With 30 players left, I'd got 33000 chips to an average of 7000, 2nd place had 22000. Bubble was 24, which I sailed through. By this point it was around 750/1500/150, so even 30000 was only 20 big bets. Unfortunately got hurt against another big stack on a razz hand where I'd made a 7432A by fifth street only to see him make a 65432 on the end, which cost me about half my chips. Went through the entire Stud session without managing to play anything or steal anything while the antes were hoovered off me, and finally donked out in 18th getting it in on StudHL with A23 suited and not hitting anything, which was annoying, but made me a marvellous $3 profit
. Anyway, it was another CASH, I was 2 for 2, and I am a happy man again
.
So, sorry for the ramble (as my debut non-Lounge post!), but it's my birthday and I'll ramble if I want to!
Play on your birthday! Guaranteed to work!
Andrew
Author