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Computers, eh. They run OK most of the time and then they kick you in the arse. Really hard. Last night was one of those times.
It's Sunday evening and I'm playing my usual poker tournaments, the monthly TMF and the weekly BritBloggerment. I couldn't get going in the TMF and busted out 8th out of a rather small field of ten. But I was doing pretty well in the BritBloggerment, getting the chip lead during the second hour.
The bubble bursts, leaving myself, Acorn and Cell to fight it out. I was still chip lead but not by much. Just after play recommenced after the second break it all goes pear shaped.
"Not enough storage space" bleats my network traffic monitor software. Uh Oh. I'd been getting this error on and off for the last week and hadn't been able to track it down. I knew I was in trouble as it seems to lock up the whole system. A couple of times over the last week, I'd been able to do a graceful shutdown and restart but the normal way to fix it was to turn off and restart. Knowing that I had to act fast, I powered the machine off and restarted. But for some reason, XP decides it wants to do a chkdsk this time which it hadn't bothered doing before. "Oh Crap", I thought, "That's going to take a while". My next thought was just to go through to the living room and use the "old" laptop. But I had turned off the wireless internet earlier on as I wanted to watch TV while playing and the video senders that send the tv signal through to the office interferes with the wi-fi. Bollocks. So I fire up the PC that my girlfriend uses. It's an older machine and boots up much slower than I remembered. Anyway, I get logged on and start PokerStars. Of course, I haven't used that machine for poker playing for a long time and the version of PokerStars on it is quite old. So old, that it isn't able to update itself. Bollocks. So I start my browser of choice, Opera, and go to pokerstars.com, dismissing the "do I want to upgrade Opera" prompt, to get the latest version. I finally get back to table to see that my stack had been blinded away from 12K to 1K. I'm forced to push 39s which loses to Acorn and I bust in 3rd place.
I believe "Argghhhhhhhhhhhh" was my general feeling.
Looking over the hand history, it's clear to see that my pc problems basically ruined the rest of the game. Instead of being a battle between three good players, it became a match that Acorn, due to his position at the table, couldn't really lose. He was the recipient of most of my big blinds and Cell just had to steal enough to overtake my stack to ensure second place with minimal risk. There wasn't really any other way to play it either. Acorn's stack was growing due the free blinds on offer from my stack and Cell wasn't going to risk busting out in third while I was unable to play. I'd have done the same myself.
Ach well.
But it ends on a good note. In a fine display of sportsmanship, not often associated with Leeds fans :-), Cell transferred $5 to me so that, in effect, we finished joint second. A very sporting gesture indeed.
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