Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Horror immigration

Never had I been through a rough patch like this at the tables over the past month.. it just has been sickening and it seemed like it was a never ending downwards spiral, how many times did I not ask myself. Why the hell am I doing this to myself? Why can't I catch a break and just run normal once. Thoughts of quitting went so many times through my mind. So I cleared up everything and moved to Thailand to hibernate, get back to my zen status and hopefully things would be normal again.

I flew over, visited Chiang Rai, then drove all the way to the border and enter Myanmar for a lot of shopping. Basically I did everything that didn't have to do with poker :) I enjoyed it a lot.

Then came the day of return to Singapore.. everything seemed to be fine, but then at the immigration I got stopped by the police and told me to go to interrogation room. I followed along and then I got dumped in this 'waiting room'. You can't call it a waiting room, it's a prison cell, small, no windows, and no communication allowed, with a camera over your head. I had to wait there for 2 hours before they picked me up. I was ofcourse pissed as hell. In my mind I just was thinking, gosh, when it rains it just pours, I'm just soooo unlucky in everything lately. Then I got this officer who was just blatantly rude, and told me to put my thumb on the machine for a fingerprint. I put my finger on it, and she was saying, no, not like that and grabbed and pulled it onto the machine. I was like wtf, take it easy, did I kill someone or what? Then without any words, I got thrown back into the 'prison cell' ... waiting, then another officer picked me up and I was allowed outside. The outside officer told me that everything is ok and I could go. I was like, can you people be any more rude? this is like you treat a criminal not a passenger. He said, I'm sorry we are only doing our job. I was like, so???? you can do your job in a normal and respectful fashion also! then he said, but we have to treat everybody as a suspect and be careful, then I just replied, you are innocent until proven, that's how the world works, and not otherwise. Pissed as hell I just left and grabbed my bags, talking about a nice welcome back to Singapore eh?

Anyways, the break apparently did do very well to my brain, I dropped down to lower stakes and things have been running.. well not normal, still not that good, but at least it's not insane like before and I'm very confident I'll be clocking my first winning week, since.. well 2 months or so. A sigh of relief will definitely going through my mind for sure, when I see my bankroll go in the right direction again. And I can save up some monies for the future.

While I was away, my student performed very good, diligently worked a lot of hours and crushed the NL200 stakes and shipped almost 6K$ while I was away, and even more important, now not just one but like multiple people are congratulating him for improving his game so fast in such a short time. Although he still has quite a lot of leaks in his postflop game (which is normal, you can't learn that in a few months), he's becoming a lot more stable as a professional poker player. And after improving his postflop a bit more, I'm sure his winrate will be increasing more, and variance dropping down. I still can remember the day he saw me 12 table on two screens and just stood there amazed and said, wow, it goes so fast! how can you keep up? and now .. well he basically is doing it himself :D little things, little changes can make such a huge impact on life. I guess there is some truth in the chaos theory.

While being in Thailand, I was thinking about my future, so I think I'll be going back in a few months and stay in Thailand again. The thing is, my expenses are lower, there is so much more entertainment and it's such an easygoing life over there. Plus also the fact that some of my best friends are coming back also for a longer period. So I think I'll try to help Jon with some postflop coaching and then make a trip back home to Belgium to visit everyone and then return for a longer period in Thailand. Just grind it out there, make some monies and take it from there. Wish you all good luck and enjoy the good life :)

Ryu Dang

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