The Streak Is Over (Hallelujah)

Two gigs left on this tour. Tomorrow night in San Antonio and Wednesday in Austin. It’s that dichotomous thing where I feel like I’ve been away from home forever, but the tour itself has flown by. Only been three weeks. Hard to believe we used to do 10-week plus tours back in the day. If Rachel could travel with us more I could still knock those down no problem. I have yet to develop any serious issues with hotels or highways. Although I have found some of the long drives a little more tedious than usual this tour, but I think that’s mainly cause I’ve been overtired from playing too much poker.

How much to tour nationally is still a pretty tough question to answer, near impossible. Fact is, our best paying gigs in our strong regions sometimes pay as much as we’ll gross in two full weeks on the road other places. So financially there’s nothing even to discuss. But bottom line is we just like touring nationally. We like seeing new cities, and old friends, and the challenge/sometimes-excitement of not really knowing what the next night’s show is going to be like.

If the new record ends up on a label (the lawyer is about to shop it, and there’s some confidence it will) then I’m sure we’ll keep doing the national tours. The publicity we got from Nettwerk Records (who released the previous two albums) made a big difference. We have surely felt the absence of a national publicist these last weeks. But if it doesn’t, I guess we’ll just carry on what we’re doing. Which is making tour by tour decisions on whether to continue taking on the whole country, hopefully finding some bigger shows to anchor things, and generally carrying on ad infinitum about how hard a decision this is (often times having the discussion while traversing an interstate in Texas, or Florida, or Illinois, or Maryland, or, – well, you get it, right? I don’t need to list any more states, right?)

In poker news, my winning streak crashed to an end after 21 sessions. I booked two straight losing sessions totaling ~7 buy-ins (hard to say exactly cause I’m game selecting from two levels) before recovering about half of it in a third session. Had a fourth session too that was basically break even. (though technically a loser). Those four sessions were spread over about 36 hours in Little Rock, and along with the Saturday morning (felt like Friday night to me, but not to the FullTilt clock) session I wrote about previously I ended up making about $500 in rakeback. Big jump in that department since I started mixing in the 200NL. Will end up at about $700 for the week, which is the biggest for me so far. I’m curious what the extreme multi-table/long session grinders pull out of it. I would think there’s some guys making a couple grand a week, but hard to imagine it could get much past there. Maybe for the high-stakes sit’n’go guys, but I think they’re more on Stars.

Losing the streak was a great relief. I instantly felt more able to focus on the ‘process model’ type of stuff that I think needs to be the basis for my poker career if I want it to be a successful one. Very odd that I knew it was happening, and I knew it was going to keep happening until I booked a loser, and yet it seemed I couldn’t do anything about it. Yet another thing to figure out. As much as I want to not care about results, I’d rather not have a losing session be good news.