“What . . . Would You Say . . . You Do Here?”

Talk about anticlimax. For the very brief time I was in the AIPS II Main Event, I played about as badly as I ever have, making at least three poor-to-horrific plays (including one involving me calling off a significant amount of chips with friggin’ king-high -- ack!). Only outlasted six other players, in fact, finishing a miserable 84th of 90 runners. Only the final nine got paid, so I knew it was going to be a longshot anyhow for me to make any scratch here.

Rather than start (and continue) in my usual supertight mode, I had some strange, otherworldly urge early on to mix it up. Wouldn’t have been a bad approach, actually, if I knew what I was doing. To be completely honest, my head just wasn’t in the game at all. When the virtual cards went in the air, I was only virtually there.

It’s no fun -- though certainly beneficial -- to assess one’s play after a poorly-managed tourney or session. Kind of ironic, actually, because one of the reasons why I think I was distracted yesterday had to do with the fact that I’ve been preoccupied the last few days by my having to complete some year-end assessment at work.

A lot of you working types know what I’m talking about. Most jobs involve some sort of annual review or self-evaluation-type activity where one is asked to explain just what the hell one has contributed toward the achievement of various aims, purposes, goals, and/or objectives set forth by one’s employer.

Sometimes (as in my case) such an exercise involves quantifying one’s activities in ways that make little practical sense, assigning percentages or “objective” measures to actions that simply cannot be described or valued in that way. Sort of thing tends to create an unhealthy mix of frustration (“What do these people know about it, really?”) and self-loathing (“What the hell am I doing here, really?”).

When it comes to self-assessment in poker, we’ve all got one, easy-to-read bottom line that describes what we’ve accomplished -- the amount of chips we take from the tables relative to what we brought. Not always an accurate measure, as oftentimes (in a given session) we take away more or less than we really deserved. But when it comes to annual reviews, it’s pretty easy to say whether you’ve been a credit or a deficit to your own personal “company.”

All of which is to say, in the ongoing battle between poker and non-poker, poker wins again. Will be nice to get this assessment applesauce out of the way and focus for a while on what really matters. Or at least makes sense.