I recently took a hiatus from all poker playing. And that’s not a bad thing at all now and then. I needed to clean out the bad feelings I’d been developing toward it, particularly after being demolished online. In retrospect I never had a chance and I don’t think most folks do when they play online. But my bad feelings about online poker spilled over to live poker and I played like a true donkey. I think online play corrupts your game. You tend to over-bet and call bigger bets than you should. The language of poker is all fucked up in online play.

So I’m talking a well-needed break from all that nonsense. I’m not saying how long this break will last, perhaps a week, perhaps a month, but I am confident that in time I will be able to resume the game with a clear head and a lighter heart. I mean, bad poker is a given at any table, but the combination of bad poker and absurd beats killed the game for me online. Getting raised and re-raised by fellows from Dusseldorf with J-4 suited and getting my aces and kings cracked continuously became a bit much. A break was imperative.

This happened once before, a few years back, when I lost my desire to play poker after taking a whipping at the hands of two wise guys at Fallsview whom I suspected of collusion. The fuckers were laughing at me the whole time. I never did anything about it though I should have. But what do you do to a couple of wise guys that won’t get you into a heap of trouble? I lost heart and simply stopped playing for a six- or seven-month period.

But you know, old-school players like me always come back to the table. We can’t live too long without some cards in our hands and chips at our elbows. We need to squeeze those cards and click those chips or we feel dead. We need to say the words “All-in!’ now and again or our mouths and throats dry up like deserts. So forgive me if I’m not providing you with any poker advice in this column other than to save your hard-earned money and stay away from online poker until it proves itself to be legitimate (which it likely never will).

Emile Frendo of the Honeymoon City is a semi-professional poker player and winner of the 2006 Pirate Poker Open Championship.