Voices in the head

I’ve been lucky enough to spend a good few weeks in Vegas soaking up the biggest and best poker event in the world. Now I’m not going to rub it in too much (lunch with Amarillo Slim; the best VIP table in Tao with Esfandiari; a steak dinner at Binion’s with TJ Cloutier) but I was also lucky enough to spend two hours listening to the funniest stand-up comedian in the world, Jerry Seinfeld. One part of his routine was about the voices you get in your head that tell you to do the most inappropriate things at completely random moments…

‘You know what? I could just stand up in this posh restaurant and shout c♣♥♠ at the top of my voice.’

Or…

‘You know what? I could just stick that knife in my friend’s side while she’s making dinner. She’d never know.’ Luckily, most of us have another voice, a much stronger one that stops us from doing disastrous things… ‘Hey buddy, you know that’s real dumb and you know what? You’re better than that/you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in jail.’

I had one of those voices (the bad one) four hours into my bid for a gold bracelet at the WSOP. I was cruising in the $1,500 no-limit tourney. To that point I hadn’t put a foot wrong. My clutch control was perfect, my elbow was leaning on the window and I had around four times the stack I had when I started.

And then the voice kicked in. ‘Hey you. Yes you. Look, you got an over-pair to this board. Never mind that it’s full of diamonds. You really think this fat c♣♥♠ that’s just pushed you all-in has the flush? You’re already in for 400, why not put the rest of your 6000 chips in and the rest of your tournament life on the line for no reason?’ And I did. And he didn’t have the flush, but he had a pair of Kings and bang, just like that, I was out. The weird thing was, because I didn’t get unlucky, and I didn’t have anyone to blame but myself, it was okay. I was fairly content. Especially as I’d already got $1,000 off my work colleagues as ‘sponsorship’.