The Brain Kept a-Rollin’ All Night Long

Late posting today. Everything ran late today. Was covering a couple of different Spring Championship of Online Poker events last night for the PokerStars blog, one of which ended up running on and on and on, not completing until nearly noon today. Thus the sleep deprivation. I did manage to catch a few hours this afternoon and will be back at it tonight, but thought I’d pop in over here for a moment just to touch base.

When I say everything ran late today, I’m also including a somewhat momentous left turn I took around lunchtime (that “detour” to which I alluded last week), in which I finally, finally, finally made it official regarding moving on from my longtime place of employment. Had wanted to do that first thing in the morning, but I was spending those hours watching three guys not making a deal at a final table instead. (Some interesting stuff there, actually, about which I might write a little later in the week.)

A bit of situational irony, I suppose, that I would stay up working the whole night before I finally really did go in and leave the “day job.”

I say it was a “momentous” turn because, well, it was. Doing anything for a long time (we’re talking many years here) then deciding not to do it anymore, can be tough. You get ideas of yourself, your identity, how you introduce yourself to the world -- that stuff is hard to shake.

Sort of like developing a particular playing style that seems to work for you for a time, perhaps even a long time, then finally realizing it just isn’t going to cut it anymore. For whatever reason, you just know you can’t continue doing what you have done. So you know a change is in order, but it takes a while to make it. Then even when you do manage to change, you continue to think of yourself as before.

The fact is, I didn’t mind so much staying up all night being occupied with SCOOP, given that I might well have had a hard time relaxing and getting to sleep anyway, anticipating the move I took today.

Don’t worry -- I’m not going to go on too much further with the abstract navel-gazing here. Will have plenty of pokery stuff to talk about in the coming days, I’m sure, between SCOOP and the fast-approaching WSOP. Incidentally, if you want to see what I was up to last night/this morning, click here for the epic recap of that more-than-22-hour-long SCOOP Event No. 1-H (No-Limit Hold’em, $2,100 buy-in, 6-max.), won by Raj “BadcardsAA” Vohra.

Meanwhile, let me say thanks once again for all the nice comments on my “detour” post last week, as well as for the other support and feedback I’ve gotten, too.

Time to go brew some coffee. Work awaits!