Fatal distraction

Last night's poker session started late, since I'd watched the riveting (and immensely satisfying, to Celtics fans such as me) conclusion of game 4 of the NBA Finals. Doc Rivers made a great coaching decision in keeping the Celtics bench players in the game for the majority of the fourth quarter. It was a masterful application of the adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"!

I decided to try the experiment I mentioned a couple of posts ago, of covering with a yellow sticky note the area of the screen where PokerStars displays the current size of my chip stack. It certainly felt odd not knowing how many chips I had left in the game. I thought I was playing really cautiously, but by the time I couldn't stand the suspense any more and ripped the sticky off the screen, I was surprised to discover I'd lost over a quarter of my stack. I won't be trying that experiment again any time too soon. The sad part is, I don't have the hand history from the portion of the session with the sticky in place, since I knew that if I saved it, I'd either peek at the text showing my stack size or see it by mistake as I was saving.

The killer hand of the night was when I hit a flush on the turn, but was distracted by a question from my wife just at that critical juncture; on poker autopilot, I bet a meager $200 instead of protecting my flush with a much larger bet. Wouldn't you know, the river supplied the fourth card to a flush, and my flush was beaten by a better one.

I need to upgrade my poker autopilot! :-)

delta: $-37,500
balance: $710,290