Cluttered thinking

Last night, I played a massive number of hands -- 154. After most of them, I took the time and trouble to save the hand history. This made for cluttered thinking; I was devoting part of my time and attention to a purely clerical task, stealing CPU cycles from my poker decision-making. Admittedly, this is the way I've been operating for about a year, so I can't blame my recent poor results solely on this practice; nevertheless, I feel like I need to get back to basics, and remove all extraneous distractions. For the foreseeable future, I'll forgo saving the hand histories.

I went up about $11K early in the session, then trended downward the rest of the night. I've noticed that whenever I get up a significant amount, I start feeling a little antsy; I feel more comfortable playing when I'm breaking even on the night or am even slightly down. I think it's good practice to play when you're not feeling comfortable, so you can deal with the feeling to minimize its recurrence in the future.

One hand which really hurt came a little over a third of the way through the session; I was dealt two hearts and made a jack high flush (the jack was one of my hole cards). I lost to a queen high flush. I call this situation losing to an uberflush; it's happened to me at least twice so far in my poker career. One has to expect uberflushes to occur now and then, but they sure do sting!

delta: $-16,400
balance: $878,987