Desperately seeking something…

It’s depressing that my very first blog for On The Rail is such a negative one, but I feel like I really need to put my feelings down on paper (well, a screen at least anyway) and get some stuff out of my system. Over the last few months I have become totally disillusioned with poker. The main root of my pain is that I’ve been running bad – so bad it makes me feel sick. This is easily the worst few months of my four years playing poker, and I don’t know how to emerge from the funk.

I’ve tried giving it a break (I barely played during April), mixing up my games between SNGs (my usual fix), MTTs and cash, and even changing poker sites (from my beloved PokerStars – damn you doom switch!!). But even a foray on iPoker, which is by the way so soft it’s not true, has not brought about a change in fortunes. I somehow managed to come fourth in a $55 tourney for a little over $600 on Saturday night, but even my exit hand was a joke. I set a guy perfectly to come over the top of my c-bet on a Q-high board, he obliged with his A-J, and I snapped him with K-K. So it was just perfect that the turn and river were both Jacks. FML.

I thought maybe I’d turned the corner though….. until I sat down for a session on Sunday. It was just one long day of bad beats. I mean, it’s sickening to think of how amazing my SNG ROI would be if I’d had even half decent fortune. And it’d be off the scale if I was on a heater.

So where do I go from here? Well, I’m on deadline this week and I go on holiday to Italy this coming Friday. So it’s going to be another couple of weeks before I’m able to get back in the game again properly. Time enough to reflect on exactly what I want from the game, how I intend to get there, reinvigorate my ethusiasm, and (hopefully) see a turnaround in my fortunes. One thing’s for sure, it can’t get any worse…