Take Two

I’ve already written this post once. The first version, you’ll never see.

I played the Mookie last night for the first time since the last BBT. It looks like the Mookie is slowly going the way of the buffalo – only 17 runners last night. It’s sad to see such low participation in one of the few remaining blogger games, especially the Mookie. I wasn’t blogging during the WWdN days, so for me, the Mookie has been the standard, it has been THE blogger game. And now – there’s only 17 people, and I still recognized barely half the players.

I played a hand badly last night. Well, OK, probably many hands. One hand in particular resulted in a suckout for me and an elimination for jimdniacc. He took his frustration out on me in the chatbox (although, to his credit, he refrained from calling me names), and for some reason it caught me off guard. It was my first Mookie in months, and I was looking for nothing but a friendly $11 game amongst poker bloggers, and instead, I had to listen to another blogger chastising me for my play. This situation was relatively standard under the weight of BBT4, but for some reason, I figured that it would be different given the circumstances and the low turnout (1st place only got $85 – not even a profile these days!). I should have know better.

So I wrote a post about this already, in more detail, expressing my overall disappointment with that situation in particular, and as part of a larger picture, what this community has become. However, since I had some time between when I wrote the post & when I planned on posting it, I decided to take a look at his blog to see if he had anything to say about the situation. I’ve recognized his name from previous games but I honestly don’t know the blogger.

I’m glad I did. After reading his posts, he seems to be a decent guy, just one with a temper problem when it comes to poker. It doesn’t necessarily excuse the comments he made, but it puts them in a better perspective. It also helped me realized that I was probably being more sensitive to his comments because I was already in the midst of a brutal night. Within that same half hour, I had already busted from the PLO tournament (warning: bad beat story) after 3-betting with my AAxx, flopping top set, betting pot for nearly all my stack, yet still going down in flames against QQ82 who had nothing but a Q-high flush draw that got there on the turn. I also took a huge beat in the $28k when TPTK was no match for runner-runner two pair. I couldn’t cash a SNG to save my life. All in all, his negative comments about a suckout I had no business being part of were just a small part of what ended up being a -$200+ night.

Anyway, the day after, with time to reflect on what happened last night, I realized that it is and it isn’t that big of a deal. Yeah, it sucks that I can’t play a friendly $11 blogger game without having to deal with bloggers lamenting just how bad of a poker player I am, but really, it’s par for the course. I’ve been on the opposite end myself, and just as I would hope that similar things I may have said wouldn’t shape someone’s opinion of me, I won’t let it shape of my opinion of him.

Jimdniacc, my condolences on bad beat. If you’re going to be in Vegas in December, first round is on me.