Five hammers

I recently learned some more poker lingo -- "the hammer" is slang for 7 2 offsuit. The nickname is ironic, since that's actually the worst poker hand you can have. The hand is actually a feather, not a hammer. As it turns out, a lot of online players like to play it for fun, instead of folding. If they manage to win with it, which for all practical purposes means without a showdown, they then show the hand for free and exclaim "Hammer!" in the chat box. Folks not in on the joke can get pretty riled up at this, but that's partly what the hammerers are looking for.

It always seems that when you first learn something new, it starts cropping up in your daily life with incredible frequency. That could just be due to a heightened sensitivity to the new thing, or it could be due to the strange workings of the universe. For whatever reason, in my session last night, I had no less than five hammers! Actually, 3 of the 5 were suited, so technically I guess you could call them "suited hammers", but still, 5 is an astonishing number to have in one session. Needless to say, I didn't waste much money on them.

I went up and down a lot. Once again, there was a point where I should have quit while I was ahead, since I'd already had a Lazarus-like resurrection from the first poker death spiral of the session, but I was having too much fun playing. The second time I went into a death spiral, I couldn't implement my strategy to exit before hitting the felt to save some chips. My last hand of the night, I went all in before the flop with an ace ten; I paired my ace on the flop, but lost to a set of queens. C'est la vie!

delta: -$2,000
balance: $280,903