Not built for poker...

[ElSapo]

These are some thoughts I had last night, after some beats in my weekly home game. They're mostly random musings, but maybe someone will find them interesting...

Is poker my golf?

Everyone loves golf -- not everyone, obviously, but it's sort of "that game" that a ton of people play and a few play very well. It's got this aura of being mystical or spiritual or stress relieving, and yet plenty of people [censored] about slicing balls into the woods and throw clubs and work for years on improving at a game they'll never really play well.

The thing is, as much as I love the game of poker I'm not emotionally wired for it -- I've always been emotional and wear my heart on my sleeve, and the ups and downs kill me. I love the game, but I'm not built for the long-term of it. Which is the reason I've never consistently played higher than 5/10 (despite some tilt-backed trips to 10/20 and 15/30)...

It's not that I'm good at it -- I've just learned how to do it. I have no natural talent for the game, but I've learned how to play it well enough to derive a secondary (or, for the moment, primary) income from it. But that's because one of the biggest things in poker is game selection — in most games, you look for the opportunity to play with good, better or the best players. In poker, I win because I actively look for people who suck so bad they can't help but lose money.

In some ways, I'm exaggerating. If you could list all the poker players in the world, I'm probably better than many of them. But that's not saying much.

Who knows. I'm rambling for no reason. I hate that I get frustrated by the game, that I'll probably never play even medium stakes, that I devote so much time to something which I'll never probably master and which, emotionally, owns me.

Blah. A 3-outer stung last night, even though I get 3-outed every single day. Every day, and I'm still not accustomed to it. Someone rivered trips and that stung. And twice I made crappy plays that cost me half the pot last night (we play NL and PL, and split games), which mostly doesn't happen in limit poker because it's a different skill set for the most part.

I do love poker, and it has been good to me. It's just a great game. But it frustrates me to no end...