Saturday, September 13, 2008

THE KID’S GOT GUTS: And then the surgeon removed his guts.

So it’s been a little over two weeks since my last entry. Is that me being a blogging slacker? Nope, I have a legitimate excuse and no, my dog did not eat my blog entry. Here’s the story:

The night of my last blog entry (Wed Aug 27 evening/Thu Aug 28 morning), I started having severe stomach pains to the point where I was puking my guts out for 8 hrs straight. I chalked it up to some kind of food poisoning or stomach flu and remained bed-ridden and eating soup.

That weekend (Aug 30/31), I was still in pretty rough shape but I sucked it up and played in the round 2 tournaments I qualified for. The first round 2 on Saturday, I ended up winning 1 dollar! That one dollar let me enter in a few 10 cent tournaments and 50 cent tournaments where I was able to earn a few more cents.

The second round 2 tournament, I played really well. Despite horrible stomach cramps and fever and chills, I managed to finish 20 out of almost 7000 entrants! I played for 6.5 hrs and I won $3.40. Had I managed to survive for another hour of play, I could’ve won a first prize of around $270. So close, yet so far. Not bad for someone who’s been playing poker for less than 2 months, but I was a little sore, knowing how close I was to much bigger money than I finished with, and because I lost on a bad beat.

At that point, I could have chosen to call it a day, take the small victory. But no. Still smarting from my loss, I decide to take my $5.15 of weekend earnings to a 2cent / 5cent cash game pot limit hold’ em table.…. After playing 6 and a half hours of mistake-free poker, I make one big mistake in about 2 minutes. I put essentially my whole stack on the line with top pair and lose to trips from a big stack. With about 35 cents left and looking like a complete idiot at this point, another dude at the table notices that I obviously made a mistake and asks if I’m a “noob”. I wanted to say hell no and get into it with him verbally. Instead, I kept my cool and started building my stack up again. I got back up to around a dollar, then went all-in with pocket tens and lost to someone’s King-Queen who ended up hitting the straight (the second card that came down was a ten, so for a split second, I was sitting pretty with trip 10’s). Despite all my hard work, I ended up with zero in prize money. Ouch. Poker pain and physical pain, all coming together.

Throughout the next week, the “stomach flu” continued until one night, I felt like I was shot in the stomach and went to the hospital emergency room at 4am in the morning. It turns out, the first night I had stomach pain, I actually ruptured my appendix. My surgery ended up being a full week AFTER my appendix ruptured. Because of that, I had to spend the next week in the hospital hooked up to an I.V with 3 different types of antibiotics, only able to eat ice chips the whole time. THAT was the worst pain of my life. But, on the bright side, I managed to come out of it alive and on the road to recovery, feeling grateful to be alive.

It also means I played 6.5 hours of tournament poker with a ruptured appendix! Had I finished first in the tournament, that would’ve went down as a classic wounded performance, like Ali fighting through a broken jaw or Jordan playing an NBA Finals game with the flu!

And the legend of U-E the kid continue...

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