I love play pokah

Chau Giang loves poker. I heard him say so, and his reported behavior certainly bears it out. He's well known for playing literally days on end. At one tournament, I think it was a WPT event, after playing all day to make the final table, he went and played high stakes ring games all night, showing up at the tournament final table without getting any sleep at all.

He first came on my radar during a WSOP Omaha final table when he stood up, brushed his hands up and down over his nipples (through his shirt) and said, "I love play pokah." Funniest thing I've ever seen around a poker table. (I don't mean to make fun of him. Giang is one of the world's best and I should be so lucky as to ever sit at a table with him. But it was incredibly funny. See the video.)

I mention this because an odd thing happened this morning. I woke up at 5am. And it wasn't one of those wake up, look at the clock, roll over and go back to sleep awakenings. It was the eyes pop open and whole body says, "I'm awake!", kind of awakenings. This is very, very rare for me. I'm more of the hit the snooze button five or six times and eventually drag my ass out of bed kind of person. After hitting the bathroom, and realizing I was really awake, one of the first thoughts to come into my head was to go see if there was any action in the shallow end of the NL pool at Stars.

I had intended to continue The Quest last night but I fell asleep on the sofa and didn't wake up until way past bed time. Still, even if I went one night without my poker fix, I don't recall ever having the urge to play poker at 5am.

Despite this odd 5am poker urge, it has occurred to me that, unlike Chau Giang, I don't love playing poker so much as I love winning at poker. My current streak of 14 winning poker days in a row is what's stoking my desire to keep playing. When I'm running good I can't get enough poker. It continually tries to work its way into my thoughts during the day and sometimes even fills my dreams at night.

But when I'm running bad I find myself almost hating the game. I'm sure this is why I've taken so many long breaks over the last year. I'll do particularly poorly in a few tournaments and have some big losing sessions at ring games and it will occur to me that there are at least a dozen things I'd rather be doing than sitting in front of the computer getting sucked out on one more time.

Given what I know of poker outcomes and having had some very bad runs, I'm not sure what this says of my long term prospects with poker. I'm probably destined to a series of extended breaks after bad runs, followed by a renewed interest after the time away. Or maybe I just need to schedule periodic vacations from poker.

Regardless of what happens in the long run with my poker "career", I do know one thing. I love win pokah.

Edit: Photo added