Bad Luck

Not at the tables, though. I came home and played about 40 minutes on the $1/$2 6-max limit table and made a bit over $20 profit, which I was happy enough with. Another $20 and I'll be green with that game.

But my pc reset once while I was playing. I had already folded the hand so I was able to wait until my pc booted up again, log back in, and no hard done, but it bothered me. Recently it has been rebooting like this every now and then - I figured it was getting a bit too hot, since it does get pretty damn hot in Tokyo during the summer.

So I played a little more, made my $20, and closed my table. Playing around with my machine more, it's resetting more often, usually when I have quite a few programs running and loading the system down. Ran a comprehensive memory check program with no errors, so I suspect either my cpu or motherboard is giving errors. Probably it got too hot at some point and something is beginning to fail because of it.

I'm buying an apartment in two months, man, I don't want to be shelling out for a new pc right now. I can replace the cpu with a Celeron for 9800yen or so, which is not too bad. But if the motherboard is the problem, it will be more expensive, since I have one of the small form factor Shuttle cases, so I'd need to replace the whole enclosure.

I can still play poker in the meantime - my machine seems to be all right under lighter loads, so a single table open seems to be fine. PokerTracker and GameTime+ running as well might give it problems but I don't know yet. If the machine gave up the ghost entirely, I could even play from my powermac under the VirtualPC machine - it's not the fastest, but it runs the Empire Poker client software well enough. (Poker Tracker chokes and dies in emulation with the size of my current database, though.)

But it is annoying.