Monitor or watch?

Hmmm now I have just about got over this hand I am able to write it down. Its amusing because if i have a good night i normally write about it the next day but the bad nights take a bit longer for me to write down. ;-)

I sat down in the £5/£10 NL Holdem last Friday night on Betfair with £1000. I flopped the nuts straight early on when I held QK and someone made a set of Jacks and doubled me up. I then lost a few hands which put me down to £1700 and then this hand happened. I am on the button and find AA. This is a 6 handed table. Under the gun raises £40 to play and then an aggressive player who has raised a lot of pots reraises it to £150 to play. I decide to call and the UTG player passes. Flop 334. He bets £400. Now there is no way in my opinion he can have a 3 after the initial reraise and I have got to be very unlucky if he has 44. I don’t want to scare him out of this pot so I go into the think tank and just call. At this point I have put him on either JJ, QQ or KK. The turn brings another 3 so I now have a full house. He immediately goes all in which has me covered for about another £1150. I call straight away and he has TT. The river brought a dreaded T. Something had to be thrown at that point to vent my frustration and it was either my monitor or my watch. Well my watch got the worst of it and went flying across the room. That damn T cost me a £2700 pot.

After that I was on tilt big style. It really is something that I don’t seem to be able to control online. I don’t play terrible poker on tilt I am just super aggressive and will gamble large amounts on coin flips rather than waiting for a bigger edge. I lost another massive pot for £1300 when I had AK. Flop K37. I check raise my opponent all in. He has KJ and rivers a J. I lost about £2900 in the end and went to bed feeling pretty sick. Perhaps I was due a bit of bad luck.

I woke up Saturday morning and decided to focus on winning at least some of the £2900 back so I started up another £5/£10 NL Holdem game and a $5/$10 Pot Limit Omaha game on Pokerstars. I played really solid good poker for a few hours and managed to turn £400 on the NL Holdem table into £1800 after one big hand where I hit the Ace flush on the turn and my opponent had a Queen flush. Also on the Omaha game on Pokerstars I turned $600 into $2200.

So overall I lost about £700 but felt like I had won. Until I can learn to take the inevitable bad beats that happen in the big games online and not go on tilt I really should not play in them. I think I am gambling for bigger stakes than necessary so am going to change my strategy for the New Year. I can cope with £500 swings but these £3000 swings are too risky.