I don’t know why but whenever I cross 50K online I go on some huge downswing. The first time I crossed it I managed to hit a high of 54K before going on to lose 13.5K in the space of two days. This week I crossed it three times and each time I lost in the following session - 6.5K, 3.7K and today 9.7K. Not fun at all. It’s as though I can’t manage to string together two winning sessions if I hit 50K. I know the problem is obviously a mental one more than anything. I think it may be that whenever I’m below 50K (which for me is a big milestone) I’m striving hard to reach it and always playing as well as I can. But when I cross 50K I feel like a big weight is off my shoulders and I start splashing around more and generally playing poorer because I have all this ‘excess’ money above 50K (I don’t know why but I feel significantly richer and more well rolled with 51K than I do with 49K).
Anyway, to stop this mental barrier I’ve decided to try to do something that I’ve seen people talk about in some 2+2 threads. I’m going to try to never look at my bankroll or check how much I’m up or down for a session until the very end of the month when I do my monthly review. This should help me to treat poker as one long session and not get bogged down by stupid artifices like stringing together multiple winning sessions or getting back to even before I quit a session. It should also help prevent me tilting to a certain extent since I won’t know how much I’m down if I’m having a losing session. Often I find that if I’m down two or three buy-ins I can continue to play well but once I get stuck 4K or something I simply can’t play well since I know there is virtually no chance I can get even in that session. Hopefully by not looking at my session results I’ll be able to avoid this problem in the future. Finally, by not being able to focus on whether I’m up or down for a session and thinking things like ‘come on Joey, just five more buy-ins and you’ll be back to even”, I’ll instead be focusing on simply playing my best in every hand that I’m in. Again this should help reinforce that poker is just one long session and that the numbers that might correspond to any given session simply don’t matter.
I’ve actually found that being on holidays and being able to play every day has really helped me in this regard. I think that when you can only play every weekend or every third day it’s really hard not to regard every session as an isolated session. If I’m stuck 2K during semester I know that I won’t be able to get it back until my next session, perhaps a week later. This makes it more tempting to chase right then and there. But now that I’m on holidays I find that I can easily think “just stop now and come back tomorrow morning” or something similar since I literally can play just about whenever I like. And this means that I know that even if I don’t get even right now, I can just play later and get even tomorrow or the day after and everything will be alright again pretty soon.
Anyway, still not cool to lose 20% of my online roll today in one day. I’ll try to play 3/6 only until I get it back since it’s low variance and I really can’t afford to go on too big of a downswing just before APPT Sydney and PCA. So time to buckle down and do a Leatherass/zero2lose! I’ll go back to being a 5/10 and 10/20 raptor/CTS wannabe later I think, perhaps in the new year when (if!) I’m well-rolled and have reached my bankroll goal of 70K (net of PCA package).
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