Dealing With Variance

I played a show last night with my band, Villain's Lament. We played a pretty good show for an awesome crowd. Jared Tendler showed up, and it was great to meet him, particularly on a day that I was dealing with some serious negative variance.

The club's stage was tiny and rickety, and their outlets were so worn that the power strip I was plugged into repeatedly worked its way out from the wall. It's hard to rip it up on guitar when your amp keeps flickering on and off. On top of that, I had both cable and pedal issues so bad that I actually ripped them out of the signal chain for our closing cover of Paradise City. In spite of these technical issues, I managed to play well enough and actually enjoy the show.

I think I've mentioned that I hate February. Well, it hasn't been doing much to redeem itself. Outside of joining Drag the Bar (which I'm still exceedingly psyched about), things have been bleak. I've hit the first 500 Big Bet downswing of my poker career. Intellectually, I know that it's quite likely to suffer such a downer despite playing your best with a solid edge over the competition. If you play long enough, these things will eventually happen. I also know that I have not been consistently playing my A game this month, so I can take some responsibility for my poor results.

I think it's critical to recognize that things are rarely either/or. It's not that I'm [B]either[/B] running bad, [B]or[/B] I'm playing less than my best. I know that I'm playing my A game less often than I did last month, but I also know that I'm running as poorly as I ever have in my life. My absurdly low W$SD is evidence of that.

It's also critical to keep things in perspective. For instance, in a five year period my mom lost her mother, father, brother and sister. All this was only seven years after my dad died, leaving her to raise me on her own. Some people are born with missing limbs, senses, or mental faculties. A lot of those people don't spend their whole lives feeling sorry for themselves, so why should I? Having a little perspective makes it pretty hard to stay upset about losing a few hundred Big Bets, or having a guitar amp cut in and out.