It's been over a month since I last posted. I don't have a reason, just an excuse. There has not been much to write about, but I could have at least posted that information.
Poker has come to an almost complete stop, for reasons beyond my control. I'm working on a transition to playing more live poker, and depending less on the availability of online poker. I will keep you updated on that.
People in church have been wondering where I've been lately. My attendance has been sporadic at best, so I sent my pastor an E-mail explaining what's been going on. Most of what I put in that letter affects poker as well as my church attendance. Names have been replaced by descriptions, for example, "my brother-in-law." Here are portions of that letter:
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Pastor,
I apologize that this is long. I can be verbose, but in this case, there
is a lot to explain.
A couple months ago, [church officer] said that he had not seen me in church
much lately. It was just before the start of church, and I didn't really have
time for a long explanation, but I intended to send him an E-mail, with you
copied in, so that you would know what was going on. In the great tradition of
those of us with Attention Deficit Disorder, I never got around sending that
letter. My wife said that I really should let you know what's going on, so here it
is:
First, we only have one car. A teenage girl with no sign of impairment ran
a red light and totaled my car a few months ago. (My wife thinks that she was
probably texting.) We are working hard on becoming debt free, and we have not
had a car payment for several years. We had some other unexpected financial
"challenges" recently as well (which took care of our emergency fund) and we are
waiting to get a second car until we can pay cash.
Second, my wife has been required to work one weekend a month. That might be
changing soon.
Third, Sunday is prime time for poker. There are more players and more
tournaments online Sundays than any other day. For a time there were Sunday
tournaments with prize pools of over a million dollars on two different online
poker sites.
At first, I would stay home and play poker on the weekends that my wife had to
work. Then both of us became torn. Sometimes she wanted me to go to church
with her, and other times she wanted me to stay home, play poker and make some
money. But she really didn't like going to church by herself.
Fourth, we are in a family rotation to spend time with her 91-year
old mother who has Alzheimer's Disease. We are helping her to stay at home as
long as she can, both because she doesn't want to leave her home, and because it
will save her a lot of money if we can put off assisted living or whatever the
next step is for a little while. This has been going on for a few months, and
that time at home could make the difference in her money lasting the rest of her
life.
I should explain at this point that one of the problems with being a poker
player is that you become Available Guy. I don't have regular work hours, and
everyone knows that. My wife and her brother have 40 hour a week jobs where
they have to go to the workplace. That leaves me and my brother-in-law's wife to cover
most of the hours.
It gets tricky with one car. Usually weekdays I take my wife to work at 5:30
A.M., then I try to get a little more sleep before I go out to see her mother
around 9 A.M. and bring her breakfast. I leave around 2 P.M. and pick up my wife at work at 2:30. Then my wife makes supper and we eat with her mom around 4:30
P.M., watch the evening news, and generally keep her company for a while.
My sleep patterns get very disrupted (I have the kind of insomnia where I
sleep soundly, but have trouble getting to sleep) and I'm often too tired to do
much with poker. My goal of a minimum 40-50 hour work week has turned into
about 15 hours a week. I've done a lot of jobs where the hours were weird, but
with poker, unlike other jobs, I can lose money if I work when I'm
tired. So I don't like to play tired if I can avoid it.
My wife has the opposite problem She gets her 40 hour work week in, starting
at 6 A.M., five days a week. So by the time we get home from taking care of her mother,
she's worn out. There are times when we talk about just one of us doing the
night shift, but which one stays home? I know that she's already worn out by
evening and I don't want her to do it by herself. She knows I'm not getting
much poker time in, so she would rather do it by herself sometimes and let me
stay home and play poker. Usually we just wind up doing it together.
We have a family schedule where my wife and I usually take care of her mom
either Monday through Wednesday, or Thursday through Sunday. When we take 3
days, and my brother-in-law and his wife take 4, and vice versa. So at a minimum we will miss
church half of the time.
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Of course, I'm not just missing church, I'm missing poker. If I play tired, I'll lose money. So many days I just don't play.
I will add to the above that I've been having horrible technical problems trying to play online poker:
Every time I close Americas Cardroom, the next time I want to play I have to uninstall and reinstall it. No error message, it just won't open.
Americas Cardroom is having a nasty problem with servers crashing. It used to happen around once a month, but it's getting much worse. It crashed several times last week, and one of those crashes was when I had been playing in a tournament for about two hours.
In general, nothing about the site works like it should. The mistakes and problems, both big and small, are way too numerous to list. In a tournament I played today, late registration was supposed to end after three hours. Around 30 players registered between the three-hour mark and about 15 minutes later.
I'm having no luck at all getting my poker database program working. I haven't even been able to download it, though with everything else going on, I haven't tried in the last three weeks.
The only good news is that I've started playing live poker in a local charity room that runs a tournament every weeknight, and two or three tournaments on both Saturday and Sunday. With one car, transportation is an issue, but I'm trying to play at least one day a week when I'm not too tried after MIL duty, and when I can get the car. With two cashes in my first three tournaments, I'm starting to build a separate bankroll for live poker, and I hope to play at least twice a week in the near future. It's great to play with real people, and I love not having to deal with all the technical issues. I can just sit down and play. I'm really excited about it, and I'm looking forword to my next outing on Saturday.
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