My girlfriend plays poker. For those of you out there in a single poker relationship, this isn’t a boast. In fact it’s a cautionary tale that sums up perfectly why you should be very, very, careful what you wish for. Let me explain…
I remember a story Todd Brunson told a few years back. He said he managed to get his wife playing poker and then had to put up with coming back from a losing session in the Big Game, down say half a million dollars, and listening to her bad beat stories from the $0.05/$0.10 tables. I’ve never had the money or the skills to play in the Big Game, but I do play poker and I do moan more than I should about my bad beats. Now I’m getting it back. Every night as I walk in the house.
My girlfriend and I started playing each other heads-up in order to get her game up to speed. The problem was, she quickly started beating me, and bluffing me, and putting me on life-tilt. The last time we did this was on holiday in the Maldives, which was when I discovered you can be sitting yards from a turquoise ocean, in blazing sunshine, with the love of your life and a cold beer in hand, and still feel like you’re the unluckiest man in the world…
Feeling the burn
Poker can teach you the meaning of 'the better half'
To top it off, she’s started winning more than me online. Regularly. Now that doesn’t hurt me on a chauvinistic level, but it does deep down in the spirit of competition. I’ve been playing longer than her, read more strategy then her, watched more videos than her, and now I’m having to put up with her coming to bed at 4am, waking me up and telling me how much money she’s won. I wouldn’t mind, but at the moment everything she wins is getting ploughed into her bankroll – something I told her she should have – which means I don’t even get to reap any of the rewards.
So, if you’re reading this and you’re still desperately trying to get your partner into the game, stop, take ten seconds to think it through, and maybe, just maybe, back away from the topic and never mention it again. You don’t know how lucky you are.