I had my first few drinks of the year last night. Just some champagne to help drown my sorrows. It is not a sign for the floodgates to open, but I plan to ease myself back into the world of booze this month. Only special occasions for the moment. Like living through another 24 hours. Working its way down to living through another one hour.
I didn't massively enjoy the alcohol and certainly didn't get drunk. I was very tired after the game, having slept badly all week due to the adrenalin of doing gigs or nerves at the upcoming poker. Last night I slept badly because I kept going over my mistakes in my head.
And it turned out my poker hangover was much worse than my drink one. The thoughts that had kept me awake plagued me through the day. It was a serious downer.
Although I was able to see the positive side of the loss, the effects of the gutting continued right through the day.
I bumped into the man who came 8th on the platform at Cardiff station. He was feeling similarly psychologically pained (and let's face it, he really should, what a big loser! Unlike me, with my classy seventh place). We spent the next two hours reliving our waking nightmare together.
I think we were both glad to have taken part and even proud of having done well enough to get to the final, and if nothing else we had been paid to receive a valuable lesson in poker.
Like so much in life, winning at poker is mainly down to confidence. Skill, knowledge and experience play their part, but confidence is the key that unlocks the box of treasure. It struck me how similar the psychology was to being a stand-up. It's all about letting the other people in the room know that you are in command. Any chink of weakness in your psychic armour and you're done for. If you start to doubt yourself all will be lost.
So shell-shocked was I that I wondered if this might affect my stand-up gig tonight, but I think I took the lessons I'd learned in with me and did my best gig so far. I was ad-libbing stuff and expressing ideas that were fresh to me with clarity and it was all pretty funny. The yoghurt routine is getting better with every telling and every new addition. I guess it will peak in about a fortnight and from then on never quite reach the same heights again. Try and catch it now before it is too late.
So I am looking forward to more gigs and also to more poker. Hopefully the former will fund the latter. But if the latter starts to make me serious money I can give up the former and turn my usual hours wasted on the internet into cold hard cash.
