by Paul "Dr. Pauly" McGuire
I once played online poker every single day for a hundred days in a row. I skirted the fine line between passion and addiction as online poker became a major driving force in my life. Obviously, it’s been a long and frustrating ten months since I last fired up my favorite online poker site and played pot-limit Omaha late into the night. Online poker was my biggest passion outside of writing. A day would not pass when I didn’t think about online poker or hear “alert sounds” rattling around my head.
Over the last seven years, I developed many unusual habits after logging over a half a million hands of online poker. Alas, after Black Friday, I stopped engaging in many quirky things that seemed bizarre to outsiders, yet were the norm for even the casual online poker player. So, here’s a list of five peculiar behaviors of mine that have ceased since the onset of prohibition:
1. I do not shout obscenities at random times. I must have driven my upstairs neighbors insane with my filthy mouth because I sounded like a Tourette’s patient who just smashed his thumb with a hammer. After a vicious bad beat, I’d often snap and detonate a barrage of F-bombs. Without online poker, I’m never on severe monkey tilt, so I swear much less.
2. I haven’t thrown my mouse across the room in a fit of anger after getting sucked out on the river by a two-outer. I learned an expensive lesson the first time I failed to control my temper in the middle of a tournament. I lost my marbles after a suckout and flung my wireless mouse across the room. It splattered against the wall and shattered into a dozen pieces. I scrambled to re-assemble my broken mouse, but sadly, could not revive it. I eventually bubbled off the money and had to drive to Staples to buy a replacement mouse, along with a back-up just in case I lost my cool again. It took a couple of years before curtailing my childish behavior. I finally acted like a professional and absorbed a slew of bad beats like a man, instead of channeling my inner spoiled brat and throwing electronics against the wall during a Hellmuthian tirade.
3. I no longer have to time my bathroom and smoke breaks at the top of the hour. PokerStars instituted a set time for synchronized tournament breaks at 55 minutes past the hour. I used my five minutes to squeeze in a trip to the toilet and run outside my apartment for a quick smoke and a bit of California sunshine before I resumed my tournament. Today without online poker, I can pee with ease and no longer feel compelled to hold it in until five minutes to the top of the hour.
4. I stopped dreaming about online poker. I used to have vivid dreams about playing online poker. Most of them were nightmares, like my internet going out in the middle of a hand, or the controls on my laptops stop working, or I get locked out of my office during the middle of a final table. I actually dream a lot less now because I have chronic insomnia and I used to play online poker to help myself fall asleep.
5. I stopped pestering my girlfriend with bad beat stories. My girlfriend should be sainted by the Pope for dealing with my eccentric behavior. In a post-Black Friday world, she is no longer forced to listen to one of my rants describing the hand in which an Euro-donk called a four-bet out of position and then went runner-runner to snap off my set of cowboys. As the saying goes, nothing is worse than listening to someone else bitch about their bad beat stories. Bless her soul, but my girlfriend has heard enough bad beat stories to fill four hundred and twenty lifetimes.
Paul ‘Dr. Pauly’ McGuire is the author of the upcoming book ‘Lost Vegas’. You can read his poker blog, Tao of Poker, over at www.taopoker.com and on twitter @taopauly
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