Monsters Under the Poker Bed

It occurred to me the other day that I rarely write about "good" things in these columns.
In fact, without doing any careful analysis, my sense is that I write about "bad" stuff about 10 times as often as I write about "good" stuff.
The reason is actually pretty straightforward. Good stuff in poker, like good stuff in the rest of life, isn't really very interesting.
Oh, sure, it's fun to get hit in the head with the deck; it's a welcome relief to suck out on someone (especially someone you really, really dislike), and if you play marked cards professionally, you need more "good" days than "bad" ones or you're going to end up looking for work elsewhere.
But, at least to this here psychologist, the reason "good" is uninteresting is because everyone pretty much reacts the same way, which I find boring. When they're running good most folks do fine, play aggressively, make money and are happy campers.
But when the bad stuff happens, when the figurative s**t hits the fan, that's when we peel away the layers of illusion and see the real "you."