Slump

Poker is like a roller coaster. Like a sine wave. Like the ocean. That quality of rising and falling, ups and downs, ecstasy to joy, pleasure to pain pervades the game on every level. A single hand is just like a session, which is just like a year, which is just like a career. From the flop until the river, depending on how the cards are dealt and what your opponents do, you can experience the full range of emotions – from pure joy to pure anguish within a matter of minutes. You can go from the trapper to the trapped, from shark to donk, from master to student. The same can be said for a session of poker, for a week of poker, and on and on. You can be on top of the poker world one moment and in the doldrums the next.

As you can guess by the title of this little number, I’m currently experiencing one of poker’s dreaded downswings. It’s lasted a few months. Granted, I haven’t been fully rounding since January, but when I do get the time to play, for the most part it hasn’t been pretty. I’m struggling even to win heads up matches, which has been a specialty of mine for quite a while. I can’t beat Billy in a series to save my life. I can’t even cash in Connor’s game, which I used to friggin’ dominate. It’s getting alarming, in a way. Is everyone else really getting that much better? Or is my poker game simply growing stagnant? Or both?

I’m not really sure what’s going on with me. Maybe I just haven’t worked on my game enough or something. At any rate, I find this troubling, so I’m going to rededicate myself to reading literature and keeping up with the evolutions of the various games and how they’re being played. Because right now I feel like I’m on that first drop of a huge roller coaster … only the drop keeps going, and going, and going …

It’s about time that the train swings back up a little bit. I want to hear that click-click-click as the coaster gets ready for another peak. It’s time to turn this baby around.

It’s time to win again.