Road Update

I need to win more at poker. But is that ever going to not be the case? I'm doing well right now, quite well actually. But it's just never enough. I'm living an expensive lifestyle. Hotels just aren't cheap, and even when I'm not in a poker town I'm paying for hotels. I'm not complaining, I just need to make more.

I'm back in Cherokee, NC for this weekend. Last night I paid $89 for the Econo Lodge and I pulled down $333 at the table. Tonight I'll pay the same. The game wasn't as fishy as normal, but as I've said in the past, even the best players in this room are easy to manage. I knew the moment I sat down I'd be profiting when the conversation amongst my foes was about gambling. I listened to the absurdities regarding blackjack and such for a few minutes, silently disagreeing with almost every word, and figured out who I was playing against. The recon continued for several more minutes and the rest became history, a $333 uptick. The battle always begins with recon. These guys tell everything. If they're a regular, they let you know. If they haven't a clue, they let you know. One guy actually tried to figure the odds of hitting his 12 outer after I pushed him off the hand. He said alound that 12 cards would have helped him and 28 wouldn't have, making him a 2.5-1 dog. 40 cards? Where did he come up with 12 + 28 cards? There's 47 cards left pal, but just keep counting. At one point, a regular told another regular to look at all the "sharks" at another table. Though I shouldn't have, I looked right at the guy and said, "That's what I love about this room, that those guys are the sharks." An old guy took offense and asked if I was gonna make fish out of them. I commented no further.

The Tunica trip was fun. I truely enjoyed sitting at the real poker tables. And though I was frustrated and played unfocused for a short period, overall I played the game the way I needed to in order to win. When I started the day saturday, I was down $362. But I found my rhythm that day and plowed through sunday to make a total win of $421. It needed to be better, but I'll take it. After subtracting for the hotels though, my uptick was a mere $93.30. Of course I used gas and ate, so I guess I broke about even. Had I stayed longer, I surely would have pulled out further ahead, but I had more important things to do.

My phone is being a bitch up here in the wilderness and I have a sniffely thing going on, like a sinus infection or something. But aside from that, life is good at the moment. Even my personal life outside of poker is going great. It's not perfect yet, mind you, but the path is open and everything is going to work out. I know that sounds uncharacteristically optomistic coming from me, but it's how it is right now. Even the sinus thing is subsiding. So I think I'll order a second coffee and head over to the poker room and get this thing started for today. I'm looking for about $500, so let's go do work.