It’s been a long time since I updated Poker Notes, but I may have to officially bring it out of retirement. As I said elsewhere I suffered a crushing loss that made me think I had no business giving anyone any advice about how to play poker. I had been on a winning streak, despite what Mr. Gabbard would have you believe, but was still playing with limited cash. As such, and since my friends agreed we should play on credit, all of us, I didn’t feel too bad about the first re-buy. Unfortunately I got drunk. I wasn’t drunk enough to be unable to think about the game, just drunk enough not to realize exactly what effect it was having on me. I began to feel hopeless. Many re-buys later I found myself with a huge gambling debt (maybe not huge by some people’s standards, but huge by my own).

Of course it was understood that I could take as long as needed to cover this debt. It certainly wasn’t the first time we had come to such an arrangement, one of us owing the other a couple hundred this way or that, while occasionally uncomfortable, was fairly common. This amount was large enough that I didn’t feel capable of gradually winning it back over time, as I had done in the past. Therefore on a couple occasions, I took the opportunity to pass a couple twenties or to help out in a pinch with an odd job here or there, and probably paid back about a hundred dollars or so of it in that fashion.

After a while, I began to get impatient, and wanted to play again. I insisted on playing for cash, and it was understood that when we played for cash, part of my winnings would go toward paying off the debt and part would go in my pocket. It was understood by me, anyway. It was necessary to keep my head in the game; otherwise I would lose money when I lost, and psychologically break even when I won, and it’s hard to enjoy poker that way. Over the next three or four months (this last three or four months) I proceeded to win significantly every time I sat in a game. Each time I won, I thought to myself, “Well, I can pay back this amount, and that will be that much I won’t have to pay in cash later.” At first I won about three hundred and paid back two, then won a hundred and fifty and paid back another hundred, then I’d win forty or fifty a few times and pay back twenty.

This continued until about a month ago, but then the next time we played we switched venues. At that first game at the new place I made quite a nice win, going on two separate runs of moderate to good cards, from which I profited mightily. I walked away up two hundred thirty dollars. I meant to pay down the debt, even pay it off, but I got stingy and took it all home, where my wife, my children, and I promptly spent it. I may have given myself permission to do this because my creditor recently told me how well he had been doing poker-wise lately, which was even better than I had been doing by a factor of about three. In any case, I went to the next game with the intention of paying some back if I won.

The creditor got in some early trouble and asked me if I could cover his next buy-in, which I did. I didn’t worry much. He was taking my second and only remaining buy-in out of my wallet but I was up enough by that point that I would have preferred to pay on the debt than re-buy anyway, had I lost my whole stack. I had almost two hundred in front of me. He went broke again and pulled fifty out of his own wallet. This was a message that he either sensed that I was out of cash, or else that he had taken the fifty dollars from me to make sure part of the debt did get paid off by the run I was on. The next time he went broke, before he mentioned it I requested the other players let me give him fifty in chips, to which they agreed. For some reason this made it very hard for me to calculate my ups and downs, but at the end of the night I was handed 180 dollars from the cashbox, and was thus able to calculate very easily that I had already paid off one hundred dollars of debt, with forty left to go. I handed him two twenties, stuck a forty dollar profit in my pocket, and smiled all the way home.

More about the particulars of that game and the one before very soon.