Do you sometimes have one of those weeks when you wonder if you are living in some parallel universe where everything is not exactly in the right place? Well my friends I have had one of those and my head feels like a punch bag in Mike Tyson’s gym.
It didn’t start well, I got a call from my Manchester squeeze telling me that my good friend Eddie has only a few weeks to live and if I want to have somewhere to stay when I go to the funeral then I better be nice to her or my squeeze will make my life living hell.
I bit below the belt but it is what I expect from her since she left her husband and expected me to move in with her. It ain’t going to happen because I got things to do and moving into a flat with neurotic women is not on the agenda by a long shot. So I will have to be absent until the death or make other arrangements – it is always good to have a plan B.
Next came the ongoing saga over my broadband which is becoming as bore and will eventually lead me to smashing the damn thing and stuff the bill or more sensibly telling Three and Hewlett Packard to take their crappy machinery and sort it out or I will commit justified homicide on their technicians in India and South Africa and trust me I will fly out to those places and shove my date of birth, postal code and product serial number down their procedural throats. It is maddening while you are short stack with a chance of making it to the payday when your computer just freezes up!
Then came the news that a kid I knew committed suicide! He wasn’t an angel but he was only sixteen and somehow you do think that he deserved better than what he got in his short and tragic life. Some say he was bad news but I can only speak as I find, and, he was never disrespectful to me.
In fact I was having one of my sensible moments when he asked me some advice on why people hated him? I sat down and told him that you cannot expect to upset people one minute and then expect them to like you the next. If you do upset people, expect some comeback in whatever form it comes. This is what happens and when you go down that road, you basically leave a bad feeling. He did listen to me and I truly believe he took it onboard what I said to him, but, I fell out with his grandmother over a promise she made on a business matter and that was the last time I spoke to him.
When you hear bad news like that I find it easier to divert attention to objects rather than feelings, and, I decided to play poker as a ‘horse‘. A horse is a player who plays poker for a backer and gets a percentage of the winnings. My reason for this is that I wanted to get into the mind of a stacked player. The result of this exercise is that my ratings is that of a person on ’Super Tilt’. Never really heard the term before but it basically means you have played 8 tournaments and not won a bean and therefore I am rubbish and should try some other method of investing my money.
I then decided to punt heavily on Birmingham City not to lose to Portsmouth in the English Football Association Cup – which is the oldest soccer competition in the world and I have had a decent bet on Birmingham City winning the competition at 33/1! Now Portsmouth is a club in turmoil and Birmingham are not.
Portsmouth is in administration which means they are nearly bankrupt. They have the remarkable distinction of having a Russian oligarch, and, an Arabian sheik as owners’ who didn’t have any money! Birmingham City on the other hand are financially viable, absolutely sae from relegation and are hard to beat. Therefore I pumped heavily that they would not get beaten – Birmingham City lost 2 – 0!
I again decide to play some more online poker. This time I decided to right the wrong of my stats and definitely make the money. Playing Omaha which means I will play super tight and all was going well when I suddenly found myself in position 25 out of 2000+ people, I am about to make the money position when I get silly for some god forsaken and decided to play up my AA 66 which were both suited I lost to a flush and was booted out. I played Texas Hold Em, being a bit erratic but I am OK. Then my Queens was in a race against AK suited, and, AK suited gets his Ace.
So here I am on a Saturday night with a large glass of whiskey in mental anguish when I suddenly read an article that some Mickey Mouse university in Canada states that online poker relieves stress! McGill University must have some dubious research department to come out with this gem of a concept. Now I have searched everywhere for this paper and I am sure it’s out there but it is well hidden and I am now of the opinion that it was sponsored by internetonlinepoker4you.com!
Not wishing to disparage the scientist but when you hear continuous blurb about its conclusion yet no easy access to the actual research paper, alarm bells ring in my head. If I am wrong and the papers are there for all to see – fair play to them. Put if you spend an hour looking for the paper and it still not available but the headline story is everywhere it makes you think, hmmmmm!
Now that I have had my therapeutic whinge I am about to plunge into the relaxing world of suck outs, lose of money and drunkenness – happy days!