Nothing to complain about

If there's one thing I've learned in all my years of playing poker, it's that you should never complain. Certainly, there will be times when you'll feel hard done by the poker gods. The thing to keep in mind is that it's much easier to remember bad luck than it is to remember good luck. It's all too easy to treat good luck as if it's skill. If you're really honest with yourself, you only ever get into a position to complain heartily about bad luck after you've already been the beneficiary of a lot of good luck.

This is an excerpt from my February 11, 2017 post. In the last tournament I played yesterday, some tremendously bad luck prevented me from making the money. However, the bad luck was only possible due to the tremendously good luck I'd been the recipient of earlier. Here are the details:

The good luck: when I was severely short-stacked and in the big blind, the forced bet caused me to "fall in". Miraculously, every other player at the table folded, so I won the antes and the small blind, and was still alive. The most incredible part of this good luck was that the player in the small blind had a better than average stack, and only needed to call with a very small percentage of his/her remaining chips in order to put me at risk for my tournament life. 99.9% of poker players would call in this scenario. I would call in this scenario every day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

The bad luck: on my final hand of the session, I was dealt a big slick, and shoved. I got one caller, who turned over another big slick. My opponent's big slick was better, since it was suited (hearts) and nine wasn't. I would chop the pot if I could just fade my opponent making a heart flush. I had a 90.67% chance of chopping the pot and a 2.17% chance of actually winning it, meaning I had just a 7.16% chance of losing it. However, lose it I did, when my opponent spiked a heart flush on the river. Had I chopped the pot, I would have made the money.

I'm not complaining, since I have nothing to complain about. That's just poker, and I'm totally fine with it :-)

style flavor    buy_in  entry players entries paid place winnings

MTT   NLHE       44000   6000       9     323   81    32   142000
MTT   NLHE       44000   6000       9     392   99   163        0
MTT   NLHE       44000   6000       9     339   81    84        0

delta: $-8,000
2025 balance: $-943,000
2025 blue distance: $943,000
balance: $15,354,303
MTT NLHE ITM pct: 41.51 (1293 of 3115)