Another bad beat, and it's off for the season.

Much like the other recent games I've blown, I played flawlessly this past Saturday, waiting out the right hands, and playing them perfectly. I played AA perfectly to extract money when I otherwise would have gotten nothing, and then played AK with an A and K on the flop flawlessly, pressing hard as well (unfortunately, one opponent took the very foolish route of paying big into a flush draw, and lucked out on the river - nine times out of ten, I clean up in that hand - it remains the right call, even in that one in ten times when fortune flows the other way). That bad beat put me back into a small stack again, and I just don't have it in me to do the painful play of the slow bleed short stack any more, so I pressed with all my chips every time I pictured myself with anything from a guaranteed race to a guaranteed advantage. It won me several hands, but even that only brought me back up to starting stack size and no more, and I eventually lost the coin flip when called on one of those hands when I knew I had a guaranteed race.

It shouldn't bother me. Any good and experienced poker player would still maintain that in a game like that, with those breaks, you just take the loss as an impersonal fortune, and move on to the next game.

But any other good an experienced poker player would expect to play more often than perhaps one more tournament in the next three MONTHS. That remains the deadly part of this for me... you can't ride out bad breaks in a streak when your games are separated by over a month.