So since my big win I have been playing more steps. I have been running slightly below expectation. That is I am barely showing profit as far as the cost of the steps go. But all is good. Technically I haven’t really spent any money yet. Because a week or two ago I managed to final table a multi-table-tournament. That was good enough to boost my BR another 1k.

I am happy with the way my bankroll is turning out but my luck has really got me feeling down in these steps. Then today I saw a video at PokerRoad that made me crack up and feel all better (since I definitely feel like I can relate).  I am sure all poker players have felt this way at one time or another. 

Beware HIGH level of profanity:

The following article, originally published in Cardplayer Magazine, was written by Eric “Rizen” Lynch.  Rizen is a professional poker player from Olathe, Kansas.  I can personally say that his first video series for PokerXFactor was probably one of the biggest eye-openers for me as a poker player.  I have read where some publications consider Rizen a timid personality; well his poker playing is nothing short of audacious.  I hope you enjoy his writing.  I know I do.

One of the toughest things about poker is that the variance that the luck factor brings to the game can really mess with your short-term results. I often receive questions like the following from readers of both this column and my blog: “Could you fold aces here?” “Can I get away from a set here?” There are some rare instances when I can, but for the most part, these are just inexperienced players who suffered a bad fate (their aces or sets got cracked), and since they lost the pot, they’re desperately trying to figure out what they did wrong.

Poker is a funny game that way. Some players are always blaming luck when they lose a pot, while others are always looking for what they should have done differently. The truth is, we measure our success in the game by our profit, so we should be results-oriented, right? Well, yes, we should be long-term results-oriented, but in the shorter term, we should expect some variance within the game and realize that sometimes we’re going to make good decisions that lead to bad results, and sometimes we’ll make bad decisions and still get rewarded.

The key to evaluating your game and not letting short-term fluctuations lead you to alter your game in negative ways is being able to evaluate situations and hands after they’re over without being results-oriented. Have confidence in your game and look back at the decisions you made. If you believe they were correct, move on even if the result wasn’t positive.

I’ve found that it also helps if you have some friends you trust from both a skill perspective and an honesty perspective with whom you can discuss hands or situations. Lay the situation out for them and ask them what they would do. Make sure not to tell them the results of the hand, though; that way, they can just look at the situation in isolation and give feedback. Also, when approaching your peers, make sure that you ask not only about hands in which the results where unfavorable, but ones in which the results were favorable, as well. Maybe it’s a hand in which you drew out but the decision was close, or a situation in which you thought it was a real close decision and you ended up having the best hand, but you’re not positive that your play had a positive expectation against your opponent’s hand range.

Book co-authored by Rizen, Pearljammer, and Apestyles

As an example, I recently played a hand in which I raised with the Q 10 from the button. The big blind flat-called. The flop was K 9 2 , a dream flop for me. The big blind checked to me, I made a standard continuation bet, and he made a decent-sized raise. Looking at our stack sizes, I knew that if I flat-called and he bet the turn, he would be committing himself to the pot. I wanted to play for his stack, so I just flat-called. Sure enough, on the turn, he put the rest of his chips in and I gladly called, only to see him turn over the A 5 for the nut flush.

Now, if I were being results-oriented, it would be very easy for me to look back on this hand and try to figure out a point where I could have laid it down. The truth is, though, that the stacks weren’t deep enough for me to ever really get an indication that I was beat. I very easily could have been up against something like the A K, a naked A , or even a set. A vast majority of the time, I end up with this guy’s entire stack and don’t think twice about it. There are times when situations arise and there is really very little you can do to avoid them. It’s key to be able to recognize these situations and not let the results impact future plays. I’d be making a huge mistake if the next time I was faced with that exact situation, I folded my queen-high flush out of fear that my opponent held the only hand that beat me.

The bottom line is that in the longer term, we need to be focused on producing results. However, in the shorter term, we need to be more focused on making good decisions than on the outcome of those decisions. That can be a constant challenge, since poker can throw some real curveballs at you at times. The good news for us poker players is that it is this very form of short-term variance that leads bad players to give us their money. They’re often having bad decisions positively reinforced in the short term when they get lucky, and they’re always able to blame the bad results on luck.

Well, it has been nearly four weeks since my last post, and in that time I think I might have logged a total of five hours over three sessions of poker. In those sessions I left losing a little bit more of my BR.

I am over the whole bad beat stuff, and I realize it is just part of the game. Only time will tell if I have been able to truly learn from the whole mess.

I just am not accustomed to losing even though deep down I know it is not in my control. But what is in my control, I need to continue to strive to make better in my poker game. Not to name anyone, but I have recently gotten some extra motivation to hit the tables once again.

I decided to fire up the good ole’ $4.40 limit 5 card draw mtt tonight. A tourney that I consistently do well in when I play, but in the past six months, you can count the times I have played that MTT on one hand.

To make a long story short, I beat out 126 players for another first place in that tournament. The only down side is that it is not really what I consider “big money.” Though $136 is more than a 10 percent increase for my Stars BR. For that I am grateful.

Back to my motivation to play this tournament again…. Well a person that I had basically taught the basic ins-and-outs of online limit 5 card draw has recently been doing really well. So much so that she increased her Bankroll by 700 percent from just playing 5 card draw!

So to overcome “that losing feeling” that I get when not final tabling a huge field NLH tournament. I have decided that I can off set that by playing more of the 5 card draw mtt, and also fire up more SNG’s.

Speaking of SNG’s I have a ton of frequent player points on Stars, in which I plan to use to play some PCA steps. For those that have not been following my blog, I came incredibly close to winning a $12,000 package back in May by playing the WSOP steps. I feel with the amount of FPPs I have, I should expect an average of 2-3 step 6 tickets (starting at step 1). So for free money, I feel it is worth another shot.

I really felt good tonight playing poker again. I was getting the same rush tonight as though I had never won a tournament before. Something that I was starting to miss not only because I wasn’t winning but because I wasn’t motivated.

On another note……..I opened up my fulltilt account and found that I had just under 15 dollars in there. During some of my few recent sessions, I worked that up to over 80 bucks. So hopefully I can start to build some money on there as well.

I will update my total BR on the right of this website tonight to include the total from FullTilt and Pokerstars.

Until next time……

When I was growing up having aspirations of being the next big time pitcher in the MLB, I was constantly working hard on my game and always thinking about game situations. The hard work eventually paid off. I helped my high school team win a state championship by pitching to a 12-0 record my senior year. This would cap a 26-2 three year varsity high school career pitching record and another 10-0 on the JV team my freshman year.

I was truly on top of my game then. I would receive all kinds of accolades, many of which were on the national level.

Growing up, my motivation was not just the aspirations of baseball stardom. I wanted to win every time I took the mound. It was who I was as a person. I used it as my other motivation, the hate for losing.

When I went off to a then-ranked top 25 division 1 college for baseball and had to have surgery on my pitching arm after my freshman year, I was distraught. Needless to say I was never the same and it showed on the playing field. I just couldn’t do what I was capable of doing years before. It was a hard time for me. I had to cope with the fact that I couldn’t win a game solely due to my efforts on the mound each time out.

Today my new brand of competition is poker. Not much has changed when it comes to my thought processes for motivation though. I want to be the next poker phenom taking a huge pot from Phil Ivey at the WSOP final table. Not only that, but I want to win, and win often. Along with this will come the money which is a third motivation.

So it is only natural to get upset when I don’t win. When I go on a streak like I have been recently, you can only imagine how much more upset I get. I start to question if poker is really the right outlet for me in this stage of my life. I just can’t seem to handle the losing.

Imagine only breaking about even 15% of the time and only making what many consider a decent profit less than 5% of the time. The rest of the time, you lose your investment. This is the life of a multitable tournament specialist. It is a life full of failure.

People say it is similar to a batter in baseball. If you can get out only 70 percent of the time, you could be an all-star. Well, I didn’t hit. I was a pitcher. I guess I never prepared myself for these types of failures.

In fact I have even taken the time to read Zen and the Art of Poker in the past. Though it was a great book, it just left me with the knowledge of how I should be and I couldn’t really apply what I had learned. Maybe I should go back, re-read the book, and see if I can’t come away with a different outlook.

But looking for an immediate response to my recent tournament losing ways, I took one of my last resorts. I posted the question of why I even care to work on my game any more in the PokerXFactor forums. I listed a couple of bad beats that happened all in one night just to give examples.

I got many of the same answers that I would expect, many of which I have given to other players when they are in a rut.

“don’t be so results-oriented, be happy you are getting your money in good”
“it’s just variance, your luck will change”
“your hand is only a slight favorite, you cant win every hand”

But then I started to get some other responses. Taking the topic more into the psychological aspects of the game. I realized exactly what I have started this blog post off with, I don’t know how to handle losing in poker.

I have been doing nothing but focusing on the negatives when I lose. Missing opportunities for me to see if I could play hands differently and ultimately putting a stalemate on my learning process as an overall player. In fact, one player over at PXF put in a quote that really started to make me think:

When you change the way you look at things – the things you look at change.

I would later find out that the quote was from Dr. Wayne W. Dyer after doing some research through Google.

Also, through this time of getting feedback from other players at PXF, I also browsed the forums at 2+2 and came across an article written by Gigabet a while back. It was titled “Almost there with Success and Failure (Long)”. It really hit close to home and made me realize how I am setting myself up for failure in poker. Not just short term, but long term as well.

I need to realize that along with the highs in poker, there will be plenty of lows. I really don’t even have a large enough sample size of tournaments to completely overcome the luck factor. Just because I get knocked out on ridiculous beats 20 tournaments in a row, doesn’t mean that I can not win. It just means that I am getting that much closer to that tournament where I don’t get a bad beat, the tournament where I can bring home a solid win that I can enjoy for a while to come.

I need to keep poker in the mindset that once attracted me to baseball when I was in little league. “It is fun!”

After a couple more days off, just working on this site and trying to catch up at work, (yes I do have a daytime job, though I would like to change that one day) I decided to go back to the usual tournaments. I just STILL can not catch a break.

The mathematical definition of variance from Wikipedia:

In probability theory and statistics, the variance of a random variable, probability distribution, or sample is one measure of statistical dispersion, averaging the squared distance of its possible values from the expected value (mean). Whereas the mean is a way to describe the location of a distribution, the variance is a way to capture its scale or degree of being spread out. The unit of variance is the square of the unit of the original variable. The positive square root of the variance, called the standard deviation, has the same units as the original variable and can be easier to interpret for this reason.

In poker Lehman’s terms, it is the luck factor that could make one win or lose more than expected over a specific sample size (ex: 20 tournaments) as compared to what the expected Return on Investment (ROI) from a given game is for that player.

To say the least, I am on the wrong end of variance when it comes to tournaments since before my break and again today. I could sit here and give you a laundry list of what I am talking about, but I don’t want to go there. This is not meant to be a “bad beat” blog. I just have recently really questioned why I spend all the time I do thinking about the game and if this time would be better served thinking about something else. Especially when some clueless guy, probably playing poker for the first time, beats me out of another pot on some crazy luck.

I have sat here and erased at least 3 paragraphs as I decide which direction to take this blog post. I really am at a loss for words. I currently just don’t play enough to let these beats not bother me. If I could play more games at a time, and be more encouraged to do so, then maybe the skill factor will overturn the bad luck at the tables.

After all, the saying is “anyone one can win any given night, but the better players will win over the course of a month, a year or 10 years.”

I really need to take a more objective view with my poker playing. I need to be less results-oriented and be happy when I get my money in ahead. I have been listening to some cash plays recently and I really admire the way Bart Hanson is able to take the point of view he does and be completely deterred from being results-oriented. That outlook is one I am trying to reach, and I hope that I can get there one day.

It is just another thing to add to the “need to learn” list before I can become the player I strive to be.

Until next time, I hope you are running better than me.

Let me start this post off with a bang. My poker account on stars is now down to $1035.74. That is a loss of over 75% of my bankroll since my post dated on August 17th.

I sit here and honestly don’t know what to say. In the past I would write something smart and feel like it was a good excuse. This time, I am just not going to make an excuse. I am really disgusted with my poker playing right now that I have decided to take a small break.

I guess if there was to be a good week to take a break, this would be it. I just recently had my wisdom teeth pulled, and I have kind of been in and out of it. I really should of had them pulled years before, but they just never bothered me.

Back to the topic at hand, I feel as though I have a good grasp of many different poker variants. But obviously something is not connecting with me.

My Official Poker Ranking shows that I am now a profitable MTT player, though this was not necessarily the case as recently as 6-8 months ago. Though notice that my most profitable game is under the “other” category due to the limit 5 card draw MTTs I have played in the past. I also believe this to be the case due to the large field sizes in the NLH mtts and I really haven’t had what I consider a big “payday” to give me that great of an ROI.

My Sharkscope is much of the same, proving that I must be doing something right. In fact, the only game that I believe I have a -ROI in when it comes to my Sharkscope is the Turbo 180 man SNGs, though I have a really good ROI in the regulars.

One thing that I have to note about both my OPR and my Sharkscope is that it really isn’t enough games for me to make a solid evaluation of my game. I have never really been much of a high volume player. Yet, I do believe if anything, my SNG numbers are pretty close, and my MTT numbers are actually behind when it comes to my true potential.

So where is the problem? It must be cash games right? Well when it comes BB/100 hands in nearly every game I frequent, I am a profitable player.

The true problem is when I hit a skid in the road. I play WAY over my BR and this is where I compound errors to be left with a less than stellar amount in the Cashier. It is like an avalanche that has become out of control. One thing brings on the next, and then I look up and realize that I just don’t know what I am doing anymore.

Now I have had many stints of jumping up levels before my bankroll was truly ready. When I really get burned is when I jump up to chase losses or when I am tilting. When I have jumped up in the past due to my knowledge of the competition or the edge I feel I have in a game, I have done pretty well. In fact, that is where I made my last run from 2k to 4k in 5 card draw.

I really just wish I could jump up to a limit today where I could compete for what I consider to be good money. Playing at the lower levels seems to bore me. I like to play against the best and at the best levels. This is my competitive desire coming out.

Am I the only one to get in a rut like this? No. In fact, it seems recently I have seen alot of “pros” and highly talented players complaining about being on a losing streak, some longer than others. It almost kind of worries me, because if they can’t make a profit, then how can I expect to? Is there really any type of a future in poker for me? Could there ever be a day where the whole playing field is so leveled out that nearly no one will be able to make an income from just playing poker?

Those are questions I can not answer, nor should I even attempt to at this point. But what I can do is answer the the question that I titled this post with. What is missing? What is holding me back?

After some long hard looks at my game (though with plenty of mistakes) I have come to the conclusion that there really isn’t much missing in my game for me to have not already reached my goal to 10k by now…..Instead it is too much of something……EGO!

I need a reality check and realize that I am only as good of a player as by how much money I make at this game. Everything starts with me, and I have to fight myself just to get to the next level. Poker really is a humbling, self-evaluating game that seems to always throw you a curveball when you are looking dead red fastball.

For the next couple of days, I plan to still keep evaluating my game and continue to brush up via videos and books. I will come back a better player and I am looking forward to it.