Suffering

I had a doctor's appointment this morning.  Not to worry, just a change of physicians required a visit.  While in the waiting room I bumped into one of the Cannon Beach poker regulars.  I began our conversation by asking how his game was going.  "Not so good, haven't cashed in a long time".  Now this is a very good young player who has had big wins in big tournaments.  I replied that my luck was so rotten that I constantly was losing to 2 and 3 outers.  I also observed that the game seemed to be a lot tougher than a few years ago.  He attributed it to the wealth of online information available to the "recreational" player.  I disagreed as I feel that very few of these guys spend any time studying and trying to improve their game.  So, I was called into my appointment and our talk ended.  Thinking later it seems to me that the quote about pain being inevitable but suffering being optional applies to my poker thinking.  How often I wake up in the middle of the night agonizing about some bad call or opponent lucky suck out.  My suffering is definitely optional, and often drives my blog posts.

Shifting gears somewhat, I am definitely unhappy with Pokerstars.  Recently logging on and planning to play a little Omaha hi-low limit poker I was disappointed to find that they had removed all of those games, replacing them with only high limit no limit omaha high.  Also, they removed all slower speed SNG tournaments so only turbo and hyper remain with much higher buy-ins. Evidently they were tired of us guys enjoying ourselves and instead are looking to burn through our play money faster.  Turning to WSOP website, that is a joke too.  With a 48% preflop fold statistic I am super tight, with most players folding preflop 20% of the time on average.  Unreal.  This is not poker.
What is a guy to do in this sparse live game environment.  Looks like I am heading back to Americas Card Room.