Over the past few months about 90 percent of my online poker-playing has been heads-up; as such I’ve come to think of myself as something of a heads-up ‘expert’. So I fully expected to go far in the World Heads-Up Championship in Barcelona in May.

It came as a bit of a shock to the system then to be eliminated in the first round. At first I was livid. I’ve never been one to take defeat easily, and the manner of my defeat (I lost half my stack on the first hand) made it even harder to take. I walked around Barcelona for a while contemplating why I was so angry.