I figured it out. Bad luck in poker is like a relay race. If you want, you can insist on racing around the track by yourself with no help. But me, I'd rather pass the baton and let somebody else suffer.

My good friend Kevin is kind of my life-long companion, in the "we're not gay" sense of the expression. We are basically competitors of the first rank. No matter what hobby we take up, our success in it is defined only in relation to one another. We play Halo every week with friends, always on opposite teams, and we talk voluminous amounts of trash after every kill we score against the other guy. We played basketball one-on-one, just one time (which is funny, because Kevin is 6'7" and used to play college ball, and can dunk and knock down threes like he's sleepwalking; I, on the other hand, am 5'10", never played organized sports at any level, and can only dunk donuts or small children at the public swimming pool. Yet somehow, that afternoon I elevated my game to a level I didn't even know I had. We were playing 1 point for most shots, 2 points for long-range, go to 9 points and you have to win by at least two. Well, somehow I forced several ties until it was 12-12, and then, with Kevin putting all his energy into getting a stop on me any time I drove to the basket, I ended up backing off four or five steps behind the three point line and heaving up a prayer that ripped the net. Now you tell ME how the hell I won that game. Sheer force of will, I tell you, and I couldn't repeat the performance in a million tries).

Of course, the number one thing we compete in is poker. He's my heads-up buddy, and a regular home game attendee; he's also the guy I talk strategy with, the guy I introduced to online poker about eight months ago. And now, he's the recipient of my bad luck baton.

For a few weeks we were running stride for stride and I was trying to hand the thing off. He had his fingers on it. The bad beats were a tell-tale sign. His bankroll was freaking out like a Mexican jumping bean... the poor bastard went from $150 (his initial deposit) all the way up over $1000, then down to $500 (he spent half of it buying a laptop to play on). Then it dwindled and waned and almost vanished. Tuesday afternoon, after another bad run, he was down to $140. And then there was yesterday.

Kevin IM'ed me around 1:00 and opened, as he often does, with a terse recap of his last couple of significant hands:

"I had AA against KK, all in preflop"
"and he hit a king"
"then I had KK against AA all in"
"and I didnt hit a king"

Ouch. Even at the piddly $25 stakes we're both playing currently, a two-buyin hit really hurts when you only have $140. I went to look him up on Party and there he was at a $50 table, aggressively trying to either get it all back (the whole $1000, I'm guessing), or go broke.

Sure enough, he went broke. Waste of his last $90 if you ask me, but I can't say I've never done anything that stupid. It sure does blow off steam.

So Kevin's running along now with the baton, and that's me sitting idly at the side of the track - picking blades of grass and rubbing the sweat off my head. And if you haven't enjoyed yet another of my tortured metaphor-slash-analogies, you either don't know shit about writing or don't know shit about poker. Piss off, fancy boy.