Breaking News: Poker is Hard

My blog is back and it's not going anywhere this time.

Playing poker for a living is incredibly hard and the second that you think you've got it figured out it kicks you in the nuts and tells you "you're still my bitch."

I've been through it all. The huge upswings, the brutal downswings, the long breakeven stretches, the days where you win 10 buyins then lose it all back in half an hour. The highs are never as fun as the lows are brutal. At the end of every bad day, when I start feeling sorry for myself, I look at my 45 degree angle ss graph and snap back to reality and realize this is just one long rollercoaster ride to the top.

For me, the battle is maintaining that "long term" thought process and realizing that one game, one session, or even 500 games really do not matter in the grand scheme of my poker career. We have to find the balance between obsessing over making the correct decisions in the short term, but realizing that a few mistakes or a few setbacks have little to no impact on our longterm results.

I always tell myself to stay positive...

Stay positive while you don't win for 700 games. Stay positive when you lose 15 straight all ins. Stay positive when every game it seems like your opponents is dealt miracle setups. And then, when the tides turn and you run better and skill prevails, don't get too excited and start expecting better results than your skill equates to...and certainly don't get complacent. The human mind was not designed to work this way. This is the challenge of playing poker for a living and maximizing your results. Stay positive, look past the short term, focus on good decisions...oh ya and stay positive.

I could easily settle for my own version of mediocrity and continue to play 500 games a month and make a more than decent living. But why can't I play 1000 games a month and maximize my potential? Sure, compared to most other peoples standards I have "made it," but my own standards are all that matter to me and at the end of each month I'm still left wondering, "what if I played 400 more games this month?" I have the time and the skillset to do it, but I can't find the motivation or the ability to positively deal with variance to get in that extra 300-500ish games per month that I've always been looking for.

If you've read from the beginning of this blog, increasing my volume has always been the #1 thing I work at. It's still a work in progress. I use to play 300-450/month. Now i play in the 450-700 range. I do not play a huge amount of hours and I definitely could play closer to 1000 without hurting my quality of life at all. The more games I get in per month, the faster I get to the longterm and the more money I will make.

Running bad for 2 months in my world is not the same as running bad in PrimordialAA's world. I play 500 games per month, he plays at least 1200. 2 months in my poker career is <1 month in his. He could have run worse than me for 500 of his games, but it doesn't matter because he plays enough for the variance to even out. Playing 1200 games a month on your A/B game is a skill and I don't have it and I'm still working towards it.

Anyways, I don't mean to sound overly cynical or depressing. That's not it at all. I have come so far in poker, I love my life, and I appreciate everything that I have learned throughout the journey. Poker has made me a more self-aware, disciplined person. It is just frustrating because I definitely see "the pot at the end of the rainbow" and it is playing 800-1000 games a month on my A/B game.

I'm going to challenge myself in April.

If I don't play 800 or more games (according to sharkscope) in April, I will give a free hand history review to anyone who comments on this blog entry. If I do play over 800 games in April, I will email a free video with commentary (not husng.com video) to anyone who posts a comment. So leave your email address so I can ship the video to you =).

March: +5996
February: +7632
January: +14,331