A pattern emerges...

It has been a long time since the last post, for several reasons. Perhaps most central and important is that this school year has been a bit of a monster for me, with lots of moving parts (indeed, lots of highlights and successes resulted, but that doesn't change how busy and harrowing it was). The effect of all that is that I've played a lot less poker outside of the Frog Tournaments over the past year. I don't know that I've been to the casino to play since last year, when Pam and I stopped through to cash in some of my video poker winnings from the card to help us get through a rough financial time; similarly I've been spending most of my hobby-available time dealing with the peripheral needs of my regular committments and recovering from such in much more brain-free vegitative methods, so I haven't played many online tournaments at all this year (none at all in 2006 thus far). Very unfortunately, we're heading into a no-income summer after two expensive setbacks (the car accident requiring us to buy a new car and our ferret Taz contracting lymphoma and needing $1,000 surgery), so I'm not optimistic that I'll have much of a chance to play over the summer, either at the casino or online, either.

So, since last summer, it's been pretty much only the Frog Tournaments. As a result, I think my own play has been a bit more erratic, weak, and desperate in those tournaments, and it's shown. When I've got the knowledge to play well but not the composure to weather the whims of the cards in the long term, the result is that I can manage good finishes some of the time, but take bad beats and the associated early exits the other part of the time, rather than hanging on through the dry spells to remain at least in contention.

It's actually emerged as a bit of a pattern, fairly consistently alternating. Observe my collapse (any top 3 finish is cited as a win for the sake of this argument):

W June 2005 (1st)
W July 2005 (2nd)
W August 2005 (3rd)
W September 2005 (3rd)
L October 2005
W November 2005 (2nd)
X December 2005 (no tourney)
W January 2006 (1st)
L February 2006
W March 2006 (2nd)
L April 2006
X May 2006

I haven't had back-to-back months without a win until now (although I'll grant you it's because there is no tourney this month, not because I lost a tourney this month). The real challenge will be this... if the pattern continues, I'm due for a "win" in the last tourney of the season just like last year, but then a "loss" in the annual tournament on July 8th. Since weekends this summer don't look good for the likelyhood that I'll be available when the next tourneys are planned (especially since the pressure will be on to make an August tournament happen later in the month due to the run of the summer Shakespeare play Dustin is directing), it might be a poker-free summer after the annual tournament, so the pressure will really be on to not let the pattern keep it going and thwap me out with a disappointing finish in July. At the same time, of course, I need a win in two weeks in order to fend off Dustin's threat to pull ahead in the regular season standings at the last minute, and it needs to be a win in a higher place than Dustin (even a win one behind him would tie us in the standings).

Too bad I've neither the time nor the bucks to get any practice in!