Stricken, smitten, and afflicted
22 Apr 2006 
in mid-afternoon 
Matt Winckler
True, I did not suffer as did the Man of Sorrows, but last night’s little poker outing was a sore beating to this man’s ego, pride, morale, and (most especially) wallet. I’ll just come out with it: I believe I set a new record in our little group by losing all of $15 at cards over the course of six and a half hours. It was incredible. This is in a group where if someone is down half that much, it’s a pretty bad night for them. I simply had nothing at all to work with. I was thinking about it this morning, and I think that maybe once - possibly twice - in the entire evening, I got a straight. This, in games where the winner was regularly winning with a flush, or full house, or possibly four of a kind. It was unbelievable. As I told the others afterwards, it wasn’t even really a case of me just making bad decisions, either - we played a lot of hold ‘em and Omaha, and I’d have to fold early on, but I’d watch the board, and I can’t think of a single time that I folded and then wished I’d stayed in. If anything, all my bad decisions were holding onto hands I should have gotten rid of. In other words, near-optimal play for me probably would have been to ante up for each game and then promptly fold. I’d have certainly lost less money that way.
On top of that, I went to Yoke’s before heading to Walla Walla (where this month’s festivities were held) with the intention of buying a Wee Heavy, but I was fatally distracted by a different beer - it was called “Ommegang”, came from Belgium, and was made by Duvel. But its most surpassing quality was that it was literally the size of a wine bottle - 750ml of beer. Liking the description of the flavor on the side, I shelled out the necessary $6.19 +taxes for the beast, looking forward to discovering another fine beer. Problem was, the stuff tasted like drinking a batch of yeasty bread dough. It wasn’t really bad, but it definitely was not good. So that started turning the screws on me early on, followed by a continuous streak of losing.
But of course it wouldn’t stop there. Past experience has shown me that I generally either play on a “mountain” or a “valley” pattern over the course of one of our evenings. That is to say, I might start off great and then slowly lose all my gains, or I might lose a bunch and then make it all back. Either way, I typically wind up close to even. And so I was convinced that time, the great healer, would also heal this losing streak. Well, we stayed in Walla Walla until 0200 this morning trying that theory out, and that’s what brought me to -$15 instead of something more reasonable like -$10. So much for that. I finally got to sleep about 0400 this morning for a healthy 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep.
I will say that the food provided for us by the worthy Mrs. Price surpassed all excellence and was unquestionably the best part of the evening. As for the rest of it, the experience was aptly described today by one of the players as “an encounter involving a pack of savage jackals and a solitary moose.” Everyone else besides me was in the black, thanks to my overt generosity. It seemed to me that by the end of the evening, the jackals, having ravaged nigh all the meat, were gnawing on the moose’s bones and devising banjos out of its guts. Next time. Next time! Next time the moose intends to be packing heat.