Time to Reflect…

I can’t quite believe what’s just happened to me. I’ve lost $30,000 now in 3 days. WHAT THE FUCK…??? How does that happen? That’s like nearly $50,000 AUD. That’s like more than a yearly wage for a lot of people. I could buy a decent car, an awesome holiday, heck I could probably feed a freaking African village for a year…

I remember two years ago when I was a 50NL player I’d gawk at the blogs of the CardRunners pros who’d swing up and down $100,000 in a session. I’m not quite at that level yet obviously, but I still remember thinking how ludicrous and upsetting it would be if anything like that happened to me… Now that it has, I know I should probably be telling myself ‘don’t worry Joey it’s completely normal, happens to everyone, just standard variance’ but believe it or not (sarcasm) that really doesn’t make me feel better.

I lost 8 out of 10 races today. Of the ones I won, one was only for $1000 total. Of the ones I lost two were for pots greater than $8000. In all I ran $15,000 below-EV in the last 3 days. The funny thing is though (and I agree you’re going to find this hard to believe), I really don’t care how much I lost. Yes, $30,000 definitely hurts, but what really hurts me more is the stupid little things: the fact that my PTBB/100 is now much worse, the fact that I’m not going to be able to string together five $20,000+ months in a row anymore, the fact that my goal to make 100 buy-ins at 5/10 and ‘graduate’ from it will now take much longer. I know that these are all stupid little things that I shouldn’t really care about, but I do; they are what drive me as a cash game player. Unfortunately, they are also what make downswings hurt the most. I’m also sure a lot of poker players can relate to me when I say that whenever I fall significantly below a previous peak, I never feel quite right until I get back there. And that’s why this downswing is going to be so annoying; it’s going to take a hell of a long time to get it back, and I won’t be relieved until I do. Now it’s obviously terrible and quite sad to live your daily life slightly under the weather until you re-reach a completely artificial barrier that you’ve set for yourself, but that’s really how it feels and it’s hard to feel otherwise.

Part of the problem though I think, and this is something that I realised quite a while ago, is this blog! I started this blog one year ago because I wanted to hold myself accountable for my play, to stop myself from ever tilting away an entire bankroll again like I did in late 2007. I figured that if I had to publish my poker results at the end of every month, I’d be less inclined to tilt and would practice more discipline since otherwise I’d have to embarrass myself by publishing a losing month. What’s happened though is that I’ve gone too far the other way. I’m too obsessed with having good months, with publishing winning months, with bettering previous months. I’ve often stopped playing in order to ‘lock-in’ another good month for my blog, yet chased until midnight on the 31st in order to do the same. I like setting goals and showing that I’ve reached them, I like publishing good $/hr figures, good PTBB/100 figures, and pretty graphs that trend upwards. In short, I don’t treat poker in the way that it should be treated; as one long session. Instead, I treat it as a bunch of monthly snapshots where each snapshot must do its best to be better than the last. If it’s not, then insane chasing and a perpetual nagging feeling inevitably results. This isn’t how it should be.

What I’ve decided to do therefore is two-fold. First, I’m going to stop publishing my monthly results and graphs. I’m not going to mention how much I made in any given session, week or month. I’ll only do a yearly review at the end of December. Hopefully this will help me to treat poker as a long-term thing rather than rushing at the start of each month to get in hands and meet a dollar quota. This should also help me to relieve the pressure that I put on myself. I found that after putting together a string of solid winning months the last thing that I wanted to happen was for that streak to break. But since I also wanted each month to be better than the last, it became harder and harder for me to maintain the streak and since there were only so many hours in a month that I could play I found myself not only chasing but chasing in a mad rush, chasing under pressure. This I’m sure contributed to some bad plays on my part and when combined with running bad can prove lethal.

Secondly, I’m not going to look at my session results in HEM until Sunday night when I make my weekly cash-out (in order to see how much I can afford to cash out). Hopefully this will help me to focus only on the hands that I’m playing and not on all the money I just lost in the last 1000 hands I played. I tried this tactic for a little while last year in order to stop myself from chasing and rushing to win my money back but soon realised that it was pretty much impossible since I needed to constantly check my results to a) see if I could move up and b) publish my results in this blog. Since both those considerations are now largely gone, I think I’ll have a much better chance of sticking to that goal.

The worry of course is that without my monthly reports holding me accountable I’ll once again go on wild tilt some day and bust my entire roll. However I really don’t think that’s an issue anymore. I honestly only swore once today and it was barely in anger. I surprised even myself. Backtrack one and a half years ago and I probably would’ve slain a cat. The difference between now and then I think is that I really don’t feel like I have much to prove anymore, either to myself or to anyone else. Part of the reason I got so pissed off when losing in late 2007 was that I knew I was better than like 90% of 200NL players yet I was losing everywhere, often due to bad beats by bad players. Nowadays, with a decent track record behind me, I know that on the whole I’ve had it pretty good.

So then, without poker reports, what on Earth will this blog be about? Well, I’ll still post about significant milestones such as moving up stakes or winning a large tournament, and I’ll still post about goals I set for myself (I just won’t track them!). I’ll also continue to do live tournament trip reports since I really enjoy writing them up. To fill the void of my usual “I made/lost $X this week” posts though, I think I’ll write more on poker strategy and poker theory and things that I’ve been thinking about and toying with and working on. I’ve done a few of these posts in the past and have enjoyed writing them and they generally have been pretty well received. The only thing that has stopped me from doing more of them is that they actually require a deceptive amount of effort to write, a hell of a lot more than simply pasting a graph and writing a couple of lines about how I ran well or didn’t!

Anyway, I think that’s enough reflective rambling for one day. I’m now going to cash out down to the nearest $10,000 and mentally set that number as my zero mark. I’m going to reset my filter in HEM so that today is zero and tomorrow is what I make it. I’m going to win that $30,000 back and more.

I’ll let you know how I went in December…