Timing is everything

So I'm sitting in a must-move live $20/$40 LHE game (there are 2 main games). As people are coming and going, the game is varying widely all the way across the spectrum from just plain tight to loose passive to tough aggressive. It was a weird series of transitions if you ask me, but I digress. Anything can happen when you have a few random people come and go.

While the pendulum had swung about 3/4 of the way from passive to aggressive, I check raised semi bluffed a couple of times on the turn (during which time the involved players in those hands had played with me a fair number of hours; and whom had rarely seen me bluff or even semibluff, as far as I recall), missed on the river but my opponent had enough or caught enough to call me down. Ugh. No big deal. Bad timing, it happens.

A few hands later, I get involved in a three way hand where I have second best hand all the way and missed a very good opportunity to raise out the best hand. Too damn chicken to do it, and the best hand drags down a 9BB pot that was mine for the taking. Ugh, gotta keep looking for those right opportunities to be aggressive.

Now I've got time constraints such that I will have to wrap up my session fairly shortly. I'm thinking that I will probably need to leave before I even get my seat in a main game. At that point I'm looking around the table and trying to figure out where the money is coming from. I can see that there are no obvious donators. What am I doing in this game? I have to leave soon, so why don't I just leave now?

Well, a couple of minutes later a new player wearing a fairly nice suit sits down on my left. He happens to say something that makes me realize that he is a fellow Canadian. I'm sure you can guess what that was, eh? I start chatting with him. I see that 4 of his friends (readily identifiable by their similar nice suits; this is not the Bellagio, let alone Vegas, so this type of dress is not at all common) are also waiting for a seat. Turns out they are all NHL (that's National Hockey League for the ignorant few) players in town for a game that isn't until tomorrow night; so they have ~all~ day to play. They all bought in for a large amount of chips, and they are here to have fun.

I was only able to sit through 1.25 orbits with 2 of these guys before I absolutely had to leave. They had certainly played hold'em before, but are definitely providers. They had the sense not to play every hand, but for the hands they did play, they would see it down all the way. 5 guys, 2 main games, so even if they don't end up all at the same table (which I imagine they would try to do) there would be a minimum of 2 of these guys sitting at one table. I could be totally wrong; perhaps the other 3 guys are absolute sharks. Somehow I doubt it. For one thing, the room was spreading games as high as $100/$200. They appeared to me as a bunch of guys who were interested in playing in the lowest midstakes game available. I would be willing to bet they were all in the same skill range. Good games, good times, and unfortunately for me, time to go.

Like I said, timing is everything, and today mine was way off.