Double whammy

Last night was a bad one, poker-wise; I lost my full starting stack of $40k at both tables I joined. Thus, the name of this post. This $80k loss wasn't as big as the loss I detailed in the "Massive loss" post of last month, but it was plenty big. The aforementioned loss was $96,600, which represented 21% of my balance at the time. Last night's loss represented 12% of my balance -- a mere bagatelle in comparison!

Although the end result was the same, the path my stack took to the felt was very different at the two tables. At the first table, it took a slow but steady elevator downwards; I only won one hand, and that didn't help much, since it was a split pot. At the second table, my stack bounced around for a while, then rode up to $62k on a mini hot streak. Then it took a devastating body blow which took it down $33k in one fell swoop. Here are the gory details: I had the button, and was dealt Ks 3s. The flop came 8s Js Jd. I made my flush on the turn (2s), and raised to $1600. Two players stayed in the hand, one of them eventually reraising to $10k; I decided to stop reraising and just call. The river card was an innocuous 5d. The player who'd reraised to $10k on the turn bet $21,700 on the river. I thought about it for a while, then called. I just couldn't lay down my flush. It lost to jacks full of eights. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and reviewing this hand today, it seems obvious that the big bettor had hit a full house. I had a nagging suspicion of this at the time, but ignored it.

After that blow, I hit the felt pretty quick; I was basically on tilt. I have yet to learn to lay down monster hands when an opponent's more monstrous monster is in the offing. That's what really separates the professionals from the amateurs.

delta: $-80,000
balance: $572,514