Dis-custard with myself

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been throwing my toys out of the pram again and going on tilt over things that really don’t matter. This blog post starts off with the story behind my latest childlike tantrum but if you read on past that you’ll see some far more important stuff later in the post.

As a relatively intelligent individual I’ve always known it’s not important in the grand scheme of things if you take a bad beat in a £30 MTT but it still doesn’t stop me momentarily losing the plot.

Even worse, this week I’ve gone on tilt over some custard which is a new low even for me. (Hence the daft title of this post)

The build up to the dummy spitting episode was the slightly annoying fact that of all the places I play live poker at it’s the place that I visit the most (G Coventry) that I seem to run the worst at.

At G Hill Street in Birmingham I seem to do reasonably well, not so long ago I cashed 4 times out of 4 in their monthly £50 comp and only last Friday I made the FT there and was still in at the end when an equal chop was agreed.

If you look at my results at Star City it’s insane that I ever play anywhere else. I’ve only ever played there 4 or 5 times since the place opened and yet I’ve chopped it twice there! One of those was the last time I was there just over a month ago.

DTD, a place I don’t like going to, is another venue where I’ve made a decent number of cashes/final tables considering the low amount of times I’ve actually played there.

So last Sunday I went to the G Cov (I’ve stopped going on Friday nights as I hate the 15 min Turbo) and was doing really well early on. Then I lost a couple of pots and got moved to a new table with three very good players on it. At this point I was sandwiched between two of them (student types) and the one on my left was the CL (He eventually won the comp).

I played a couple of pots versus the three of them and did really well to identify when they were opening light and I successfully 3 bet them in good spots to pick up a lot of chips.

I moved from a short stack to one of the CL’s inside 30 minutes and was going great till I got moved tables again.

Now after really enjoying the chance to play against some good players I find myself on a table surrounded by the terminally bewildered. At this point with a huge chip stack I let over confidence get the better of me and I order some food.

Usually I’m reluctant to order food after the re-entry point has past as I often seem to bust before it arrives.

Anyway I wanted the Chicken Linguine but I can’t see it on the menu as a separate item so I order it as part of the “2 courses for £9.95” deal.

I don’t actually want a pudding as I’m not keen on any of the options they have but when I do this I just order something that comes with custard, which I love, and eat that.

Anyway I give the valet a £20 note and ask if she could request that the chef puts some extra custard on the pudding for me and off she goes.

When she comes back instead of giving me £10.05 she gives me less. When I ask how much it was she said they’d charged me 50p for the extra custard!

I thought that was a total piss take to be honest, especially bearing in mind how much money I’ve spent in there in recent years. It’s not like I said put a portion of chips or bacon on my pasta I just wanted an extra splosh of custard which would have cost them about 2p.

So I was slightly miffed about it but let it go as I didn’t want to get into an argument over 50p. So I eat the linguine which was pretty good and then it all goes wrong.

I lose 3 hands in quick succession and bust out from hero to zero in no time at all. In simple terms I lost AdQd to Q9 off, then 55 to A5 and finally Q9 to 10,9.

I’ve had worse beats than that of course but the pain was caused by the fact that bad play was rewarded on the first two hands IMO.

At 1k/2k/200 there are 5 limpers when it gets to me so I make it 12.5k (AdQd) expecting to just pick up the pot then and there.

However someone who limped with Q,9 off with ¾ of the table behind them then decides to call the raise of 10.5k extra out of a 30k stack.

The flop comes 9 high with 2 diamonds and he ships all in. I can’t fold 2 overs and a nut flush draw in that spot so I have to call and it bricks twice.

As I’ve said many times if a short stack shoves in to steal the blinds with garbage is called by a dominating hand and gets “lucky” I have no problem with that. In my view they’ve done nothing wrong, it’s when people make questionable calls or just down right bad plays and get lucky that’s what tilts me.

So at this point my temper was simmering nicely though I’d held it together and even managed to tap the table a give him a “nice hand Sir”.

At this point my pudding arrives. It’s the wrong pudding and has no custard on it at all!

I ask the valet “what’s that?” she has no idea, and I say “I don’t either but that definitely isn’t custard”. (it looked like some sort of cheesecake crap with cream on it)

She takes it back.

At this point I’m tilting even more and get 55 UTG+1 and shove my last 12 bigs into the middle. Then a woman to my immediate left who hadn’t played a single hand the entire time I was on this table snap calls.(She has 1k less than me) I figure she must have AA.

It turns out she has A5. I’m staggered she made the call in that spot after playing so tight for so long, but I’m happy to see what she has and figured I’d double up and be back in the game. She rivers the Ace and I have less than one bb left.

So next hand I make “Custards last stand” and shove in with Q9 and lose to 10,9 to bust out.

I leave the table but have to wait in the card room for my custard to arrive which is why I don’t normally order food whilst still playing. If I want to spit my dummy out I find that going out into the casino for 5 minutes calms me down best.

At this point my pudding arrives and I’m REALLY annoyed as there is not in my opinion “extra” custard on it. It just looked like a normal amount and I was at this point so steaming that I couldn’t have been more annoyed unless I’d put my knob in it and been F**king Dis-custard.

In a childlike temper I tell her I don’t want it and make her take it back. I even embarrass myself at times.

A philosophy professor once stood before his class with some items on the table in front of him.

Without saying anything he picked up a very large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks, about 2″ in diameter.

He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

So he then picked up a box of small pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly so the pebbles rolled into the open spaces between the rocks. He then asked again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

He then picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else.

“Now,” said the professor, “I want you to recognise that this jar represents your life. The rocks are the important things - your family and friends, your partner, your health, and your children - things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter less - like your hobbies, job, house, car etc.

The sand is everything else, the small stuff, the parts of your life that don’t really matter at all.

Just under 2 weeks ago Maz (a great guy who is a regular at G Coventry) suffered the tragic loss of his beautiful wife, killed in a car crash on her way home from work.

On the night when the custard episode left a bad taste in my mouth (sorry) I bumped into Steve Owen who told me about a collection they were making to help Maz get over to Zimbabwe as his wife was being buried there.

After the tournament exit and custard episode I’d played some cash which was fun and splashed a bit of cash on the roulette so I just had £15 (3 x £5 chips) left when I bumped into Steve, so I gave him those. I felt bad and wished I hadn’t just wasted £25 on roulette, and its times like this that you realise how unimportant it is to take a bad beat in some low buy-in comp.

I’m guessing Kelly is about my daughters’ age, and in May last year she was really badly injured in a car crash suffering awful burns and she also needed to have her right leg amputated above the knee. Read all about it here on her blog here. 

I’ve never met Kelly but have been reading her blog for a while and for those of you who’ve not heard of her she is Paul “Action” Jackson’s daughter.  I only know Paul on nodding terms but like most West Midlands poker players I’ve been on his table a few times over the years. I used to play at G Walsall and the Broadway about 10 years ago and Paul was always a big winner there.

I can’t imagine how I’d feel if anything like this happened to either of my daughters but all credit to Kelly she has not let this get the better of her.

She has recently started a website called www.kellyssmile.comwhich is aimed at supporting other amputees and burn survivors by creating friendships. It’s still in its infancy but I’m fairly sure she will drive it forward to bigger and better things.

To help promote her website she’s getting people to take a photo with the website name in all sorts of odd places. See below. If you could do that for her I think she’d be grateful and it’s certainly a worthwhile website to promote. I wish her well with it.

When it comes to filling your “life jar” if you put the sand in first there is no room for the pebbles or the rocks. So don’t sweat the small stuff, be glad that those nearest to you are happy and healthy. Spend time playing with your kids, or in my case grandchildren. Tell the person you love most in the world that you love them.

There will always be time to go to work, do housework, pay bills, mow the lawn or fix that leaky tap. Take care of the rocks first - the things that really matter.

I’m so lucky to have two happy and healthy daughters I can be proud of, two fantastic grandchildren and I take pleasure from the fact that my parents who are both about 85 are still happily married after 60 years together.

Set your priorities straight, as the rest is just sand… or in my case custard.