The Poker Money is Gone
I completed a long project at the office yesterday (a project made much longer by the interruption of the holidays and a bunch of other work), so I split early and went to Hollywood Park to play some poker. It was a make-or-break day; since about halfway through the trip Stacey and I took with her parents to the Mirage last summer, I have not gotten up from a poker table with more money than I sat down with. Yesterday, I put the last hundred bucks of the Poker Fund on the felt and stood up with nothing.
This is not a cause for weeping and gnashing teeth. It doesn't even have a financial impact outside the playing of poker. Ever since I began to play in casinos and card rooms about five years ago, the Poker Fund has been wholly separate from the Funds For General Living and even the Funds For General Amusement. I don't remember from exactly where the Poker Fund originated, but I do recall putting in the hundred bucks or so I got from selling my Magic: The Gathering collection. There was probably some birthday money in there to get it started, too. The Poker Fund's high-water mark was a little over $800, which it hit during the first half of the aforementioned Mirage trip.
I've been trying to objectively determine whether there's some clear explanation for the steady downward slide from the high point, and I think it's a combination of three things. First, I haven't been playing very regularly, and the accumulation of rust isn't good for success. Second, I haven't been playing sparklingly. I haven't been playing badly, but I haven't been paying enough attention to the other players and I haven't been making good table choices. Third, I've been getting some bad cards.
So I have a decision to make. I like to play poker, but the Poker Fund is gone. Playing poker with Funds For General Living is a bad idea, for obvious reasons, and that's right out. On the other hand, attempting to cobble together a new poker stake out of Funds For General Amusement will take a long time, especially if the cobbling occurs while I attempt to continue on with some level of general amusement. (Stacey and I each allow ourselves forty bucks a week to spend on trivial crap like Starbucks, movies, CDs, and eating lunch out.) At the moment, Stacey is trying to cobble together a flat-screen monitor from her forty bucks a week, so perhaps the two of us can support one another in communal thrift: renting movies instead of going out to them, packing lunches instead of eating them out, and so forth. Denial as a gateway to poker makes me feel all family values.
It has also occurred to me that perhaps I just should stop playing poker in casinos and card rooms and go back to playing with friends at home. The chief problem there is that the film school home games have stopped and the players who'd be most interested in starting them back up live on the far side of the Orange Curtain. A regular home game is also at odds with my writing and work schedule; there's only so much time in the week.
So the Poker Fund is gone, and I'm not sure what (if anything) to do about that. Luckily, there's no deadline to decide, and I don't have a serious poker jones on at the moment.
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