post-mortem, cont.

As you may or may not know, I have been "laid up" as they say with "the gout". It has, as they say, sucked. As I struggle into day 8 of this affliction, I find myself, yes, spinning the old poker wheel once or twice, because there is really only so much you can do from the bed. And I have come to some final final conclusions:

1) I HATE this game. It is so brutally masochistic, I can't imagine what kind of temperament is necessary to spend your life doing it the way some people do. You can practice and study and learn and gain allllll the experience in the whole wide whorl, but if the cards aren't running your way that day, there is literally nothing you can do about it. It would be like playing football in the ocean, but less dangerous. Just to have so much of your success depend on blind luck while managing to maintain the illusion that with enough skill you can control things, it's just torture.

2) Q-Q is possibly the most doomed, damned hand in all of poker. I'm sure at a certain point you go through a phase where you say "I'm just not ever going to play it again" because you get burned so many times, and so gratuitously.

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