[The Goober]

thanks, it was surprisingly cathartic to write it all out (it's nice to have a forum dedicated to crap like this). I've gotten in the habit of not really talking about my losses, since most of my friends and family either don't play or play very small stakes, so the numbers often freak them out.

The hardest part about a night like that is balancing between putting it behind me and learning from my mistakes. I still don't know whether I was outclassed or not - it's awfully hard to tell when you are running bad. I mean, you raise PF with big cards, miss, and a guy calls you down with bottom pair despite some scary cards on the board. Did he make a good read, or is he just a calling station? Next hand I actually hit the board and he folds - again, good read or did he just miss this time? Every time my AJ loses to A3s, I wonder if the would have paid me off the whole way if an A fell, or if he was too smart for that?

The whole thing reminds me a bit of the drunk driving dilemma. You go out and say to yourself that you'll take a cab home if you get drunk. But when the end of the night comes, if you're drunk then your judgement is too impaired to realize how drunk you are. When I'm getting spanked badly at a table (either bad luck or bad play) I tilt too much to be able to judge whether or not I still have a positive expectation. I need a tilt breathalyzer - until then I think I'm going to have to reinstate my silly stop-loss rule.