I lose my patience in the crest of a distinctly poor run against Mr. Pink. He’s held over me for six months. Today it’s making trips to bail himself out on the river, then cooling me off with AA versus TPTK. Yet the irritation is not about one grinning opponent’s luck.
I had gone to the game with fewer buy-ins than usual. I am uncomfortable doing this, but convinced myself I would rise to the occasion. I can do various things to mitigate the mental aspect of playing under rolled, such as adding on rather than rebuying. I can play slightly differently without anyone noticing much. And I could just run well and escape my problems, right? Isn’t that what the podcaster keeps begging for, that liberating Sun Run?
Above all I am thinking of Roger’s notorious press conference after losing the 2011 US Open semi to Novak. It is of course widely misinterpreted; tennis and its social media somehow draw out the most passionately confused lunatics. What Federer was saying is that he plays within a certain strategy, limiting his variance, while he found Novak’s decision to gamble a sign of a lack of confidence. Time has proven Novak to have the better strategy, in the same way that football coaches are often criticized for not seeing the expected value of very aggressive decisions. What I mean here is a comparison: it may well benefit me to be more aggressive when the bankroll is getting low because the value of winning is higher. It’s not how I’ve managed my poker life and bankroll for a decade.
Instead, I’ve resisted confronting the problem; instead of Henry, I have been Fabius the Delayer. I have tried freezing time and my bankroll, like the doctors on House did with Dr. Amber. If I stayed very still, I decided, if the days passed without spending or losing money, I might find the answer to my money and life problems. I told myself that I was focusing on other things, such as reading and writing about reading and thinking about reading and writing and writing about thinking about writing. I swam and pretended to feel peaceful. I started walking again; I even looked at my bicycle. It was not unproductive time. However, putting my income on ice only delayed the crisis and the truth: I need to win some paychecks.
None of these wishes or tactics matter, unfortunately, if I just run purely bad. The fish makes a flush when I have trips. He calls down plaintively, as if it were inevitable that his train would reach the stop. I have missed, I think literally, all my aggressively played draws in big pots in 2025-26. At a brief stop at 5/10 I was able to bluff my way out, but at 2/5 and 2/3 getting folds has become a challenge. I’ve slowly accepted that there are players who have no middle strength hands that bet to fold so that even straight flush draws are not always good bluff candidates. Worse, the calling station new girl doesn’t even hesitate to follow my check raise on J89, and when the jack pairs she is even more eager to put the money in with her over-pair. There is a world where I come out fighting and just lose everything.
Which brings us to why I was irritated. I know Mr. Pink won’t bluff river. He constantly checks down the loser; his real skills, aside from running well, are thin value on the turn and a certain preflop dynamism. Here, Mr. Pink is as predictable as dust in the desert. I pay him off because I am frustrated that he’s clearly hit his ten percent, because I am at the top of my range, because I don’t want to believe it happened again.
This is no way to play. I am unsatisfied with this inquiry, though. Finding the answer is good, but there are times when you will find that there are too many problems, that preparation is not enough. Westmoreland wanted the pieces on the board to be favorable before he took action, but what if they are not? What if they never will be?
The sum of all our answer is but this:
We would not seek a battle as we are,
Nor, as we are, we say we will not shun it.
The true man and king deals with what is, as is. While I find some excuses, even this week, and put it off a day, as I have all summer, maybe my whole life, I finally go out to play small and toil in the painful field. I have been dodging this since May. I have been dodging moving down because I’d rather be irritated with sun runners. The world will strip you of pride – all the more if you will not do it yourself.
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