Broken
"Ibit bimnit?"
"Excuse me?"
"Ithit pumanent?"
Somebody knocked on the ambulance door and the paramedic opened it. My friend Steve was standing in the street with a hotel towel.
"Holy shit Mike!"
After walking him and his wife back to their hotel I had quickly fallen off my bicycle and smashed my face into a curb. While bleeding all over 9th and Hennepin I had called him to ask for a towel.
"Thankth." I covered my face with the towel.
I really did not want to go to the ER. But it felt like I had two lower lips. So okay.
I spent 18 hours in the HCMC Emergency Department. They stitched up the inside of my lip. They injected me with pain meds and gave me x-rays and an MRI. Mostly though I just hung out on a hospital bed annoyed that everything took so long.
In the morning they let me retrieve my laptop so I spent most of the day watching YouTube. I even attended a Chip Leader coaching call.
The doctors eventually concluded that my face was broken every which way but I wasn't in danger of immediate blindness. So we would hold off on surgery. Steve picked me up from the ER and drove me the two blocks home to my condo.
After ten miserable days on the couch eating a liquid diet I was finally off of painkillers and feeling like I could operate a vehicle again. So I drove out to the middle of Minnesota to play the last flight of a Roughrider Poker Tour $640 tournament.
I still had two black eyes and a puffy face. But I had graduated from tomato soup to chili and other soft foods. I felt like I was functional enough to sit at a poker table again.
I spun up a big stack on my first bullet. Some time after late reg though I made a beginner mistake that brought me down to average chips:
I busted a couple levels later in a standard spot and was kind of relieved to not have to figure out breakfast in Morton.
A couple days later I walked to my followup ENT appointment.
"Can you breathe out of your nose?"
"Yep!"
"Both nostrils?"
"Hm let me check. Nope."
The doctor showed me imaging of my smashed nose. She recommended immediate surgery. The sweet spot for surgery is apparently after the swelling goes down but before the bones get too comfortable.
So instead of returning to the MSPT circuit I went in for facial reconstruction surgery. A smooth operation but I was once again sentenced to the couch.
The recovery from surgery was worse than the initial injury. I spent another month on the couch drafting NFL best ball teams and watching YouTube.
I also fired a couple bullets online in the ACR $2650 Venom and many more bullets in satties. I definitely didn't feel like I had my "A" game. Head trauma and oxycodone probably aren't the keys to winning at poker.
I had been feeling confident about my poker game coming out of the World Series. After a big downswing on ACR where I spewed off stacks with bad 4b jams and worse hero calls I wasn't even sure I was winning on there anymore.
I didn't make my return to live poker until a month after surgery when I drove out to the Wednesday $250 nightly at Canterbury Park. I fired 4 bullets and busted immediately after late reg closed. Which is just about the worst you can do in a tournament that only has 2 hours of late reg.
But never mind the poker results - I was able to eat a casino hot dog! If I could eat fast food again, I was ready to get back on the road. So the next day I drove 9 hours to St. Louis and hopped in the first flight of the MSPT $1110 Main Event.
On my 3rd bullet I found myself at a table with a rec who was on fire and had a massive chip lead. I started with 30k to his 500k but received an early double from him and from there we battled all night. On the stone bubble we played a huge pot that vaulted me into the 1A chip lead:
I gave back a bit but I still ended the night with heaps. It felt good to put chips in a bag again.
On my days off in St. Louis I didn't get up to much. Highlights were going out to eat with the Reichard crew for Ashley's birthday and reconnecting with my long lost cousins at an arcade bar. Pretty normal human stuff. I rolled into Day 2 in decent spirits feeling like a mostly functional adult with a mostly working face.
I thought I played well the majority of Day 2. I found some spots and was one of the chip leaders when we redrew seats at 3 tables. Here is a savage bluff that sent me on my way:
But with 22 players remaining in a hand against my buddy Jakey I made my first big mistake:
The tough reality of tournament poker is that it only takes a mistake or two to send you home disappointed. I made a couple poor decisions then busted in a standard spot to exit in 19th place.
As I was driving back to Minneapolis I would periodically stop and check tournament updates online. Jake was hanging around. Jake was at the final table. Jake was heads up. Jake won! His first MSPT title!
One thing I didn't do a whole lot of during my 6 weeks on the couch was study poker. I was in pain and grogged up with painkillers. Turns out that studying poker effectively is actually a lot of mental work.
The core of my study routine this past year has been reviewing my live hand histories. Running them through a solver is easy but not all that useful by itself. You really need to put a lot of thought into it to extract the useful heuristics. When I'm in a groove I'll review my hands from a tournament series and then come up with "lessons of the week" that I try to focus on to make sure I internalize them.
After I returned from St. Louis I finally got off the couch and back to my work desk. I went over my hands from the tournament I had just played. Mixed reviews to be sure. Some of my mistakes were just rustiness and things I should already have known. But I found some new lessons of the week from those hands too.
I had been leading the MSPT Player of the Year race after my summer in Vegas, but while I was out on injured reserve Josh Reichard had done Josh Reichard things scoring 1st and 2nd place finishes in back to back MSPTs to take a commanding lead. So I didn't feel too obligated to fly to Vegas for the next MSPT and instead I stayed home and played a $400 multi-day Monster Stack at my local card club.
I didn't write down many hands from 1A of this one until the end of the night when I had heaps and butchered a big one related to a subsequent lesson of the week:
Instead of bagging the chip lead I bagged a bit below average. But I guess I learned something.
When I came back on Day 2 I brought my IPad and headphones. It was the first Sunday of the NFL season and I wanted to watch Red Zone. I did not have high expectations for the tournament.
My day started off rough. I raise-folded to jams a few times to get down under 20bb and I stayed that way pretty much all day.
But despite being short stacked I was able to find spots against the weaker players at my tables to get bluffs through. This bluff took me to an above average 21bb about midway through the day:
And somehow I rode my short stack all the way to the final table!
For the final table of a $400 tournament this one was tough. Gene Boyer is the leader for Minnesota Player of the Year by several miles. John Reading is a strong pro. Nobody at the table was an obvious spot.
I battled my best but came up short in 4th place. I lost some pots to the runner up Joey Junior and the eventual winner Chris Potenza where they may have outplayed me. That's okay though. Maybe I will find some new lessons of the week from those hands.
It felt good to be back at a final table. I know I'm not operating at full steam but I'm close enough. Game on!
Comments