R-Day Minus 20

The Poker Mutant will be retiring (mostly) from poker on 1 January. This is the latest installment in his thrilling countdown to the End of Times.

Played a satellite for the Ignition Casino 12 Days of Turbo Wrap Up #61 NLHE and only got 20th place, the jumped into the game directly. I lost some ground early on with a series of pairs that didn’t go anywhere (although I could see from the rabbit cam feature that the pair of sevens I folded on the flop with two overs would have made a set on the turn, grrrr…).

I got ground down to 6K from the 15K start relatively early, then picked up a couple thousand before the first break. It being a turbo, I was getting down into the Danger Zone, when I picked up [ax qx] in early position and jammed about 12bb. A middle position player with 40bb called with [ax tx] there was a ten in the door and I was out.

Played two $2 NLHE Jackpot Sit-N-Gos and busted third on the first. The second was a $10 payout, I got down to 15bb early on, then came back and won it.

Sixteen years ago today I nearly died from a pulmonary embolism (PE), technically a bunch of them, from multiple blood clots that formed in my leg after I broke it making their way to my lungs two months to the day after my fallNothing quite like this, but this guy definitely had clots in his lungs. My mother died four years ago from a pulmonary embolism, completely unexpectedly, without breaking anything. Fifteen years ago, there was a spate of stories about something called economy-class syndrome, which was basically people getting pulmonary embolisms on plane flights just from sitting in cramped quarters without moving their legs for hours. That’s all it takes. Sudden shortness of breath, coughing, and related issues may be all you get. And medical personnel aren’t always on top of it: I had literally called the advice nurse the day I had mine because I was feeling unexpectedly winded after moving from crutches to a cane; my mother was getting ready to go to a doctor’s appointment she’d made after complaining she had trouble breathing at her ophthalmologist’s office when she died. And she knew I’d had a PE. None of us even thought of it until the autopsy. We poker players tend to sit around a lot. But take this as a gentle public service announcement: Get up and move around.