Friday, March 13, 2009

Negative karma

OK, so we're rushing, or rather snailing to Heuston, and the Friday traffic makes it touch and go as to whether I'm going to make the 16.50 to Galway. Throwing caution to the traffic fumes, Mireille makes a bold break for it, motoring up the bus/taxi lane with joyous illegality. About 50 metres shy of the station, we see a little old dear stranded in traffic after getting out of a car. We do the decent thing and stop to let her cross in safety, which she does at snail's pace.
5 minutes later, having clambered out of the car, stashing the laptop into the bag and lurching towards the Ticket Collection machine, I find myself standing behind the same old dear who has beaten me to it by a fraction of a second. It quickly becomes obvious she's all at sea in an ocean of onscreen instructions of swipage and removal of cards. My offers of assistance are greeted with annoyance at the sheer impertinence of it all and testy assurances that she can manage thank you very much, which she eventually does after several changes of credit cards and spectacles. All of which gives me a window of about 30 seconds to make a charge for the train. I do make it though, only to find that my prebooked seat with my name clearly on it has been pre-occupied by another little old dear. I lack requisite ruthlessness in these situations at the best of times and once it became apparent that she was the accompanying carer of the Down's Syndrome kid in the next seat, I decided this was not the best of times so let it slide. Apart from anything else, I didn't fancy the prospect of having to explain to the kid why I'd made his carer go away.
The negative karma seemed to keep on rolling into the tournament, where I never got going, and having shown the patience of a Buddhist monk only to shove queens into tens and a rivered ten, I was bounced into the cash game.
However, once there, I not only recouped my tournament buyin but left with a healthy profit on the night, all down to a series of successful confrontations with my old friend (nemesis), Christy Morkan. Karmic revenge for Skibbereen! (Or rather Killarney). Highlight was putting him on monkey tilt after I made what he deemed a donkey call with a pair of nines when he four bet shoved me with air, or rather 94, a move he may have learned from Nicky Power's groundbreaking training video: "4 Bet Shoving with Air and other advanced pro plays that work outside the Pale". It took repeated assurances from David Curtis that I had not only played the game before but had a few decent results to my name to bring things to a relative calm, and Christy kissed and made up in his own inimitable fashion. Once I mentioned I not only knew KP but was on his team, Christy decided I was all right, on the very reasonable grounds that KP is the nuts.

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