October Review (*Sigh* If I Must!)

The worst eight days of my poker career to date: stuck $6,000 and counting!

This is a warts’n’all blog so here’s the ugly truth in black-and-white (and red, and more red):


I’m trying to remain philosophical. ‘It happens.’ I’ve had a number of $2k—3k downswings before; they are not out of the ordinary any more.

Those downswings do not manifest themselves periodically, but rather at random.

Looking at the big picture, this is only the same as two $3k downswings glued together! And looking at my ‘all time profits’ chart, I’ve had dozens of upswings of comparable magnitude to this conspicuous downer.

The stark reality is that the downswing may well continue, but – if I continue to play well, and all other things being equal – The Joy Of Independent Probability [could be a bestselling book, no?] is that I’m just as likely as ever to embark on a sudden winning spree.

A month in MTTs is not a long time, so my monthly reviews are arguably trivial. In the last 18 months I have had 15 winning months and 3 losing months. Reviewing my profit graphs from a number of winning months, they are frequently characterised by one or two sudden upswings that dwarf the noise of day-to-day variance and ‘averagely big’ downswings.

Something I read on a poker forum sticks in my mind, where somebody remarked that sooner or later, ‘everyone will run worse than they thought humanly possible’.

The Poker Mindset (my latest book purchase) is a good read, and there’s lots of material on dealing with downswings and bad beats. I stumbled across a great post on PocketFives.com too. Of course all that matters is continuing to play well.

I’ve written off about 8% of my bankroll in the last week [when I say ‘my bankroll’, I’m not counting money I have invested in bonds, or any other money that is out of reach in the short term]. This stings a bit, but it isn’t enough to affect my game selection as I was already significantly over-’rolled for most of my tourneys. As a side note, I feel proud that I’ve generated almost my entire bankroll from grinding poker tournaments, from a very small seed of sub-$1k.

Some reasons to remain positive:

• I have a healthy bankroll, and the games are still hot.
• My downswing is not intrinsically indicative of anything bad. I am fairly self-assured anyway, and feel good about 98% of my play. I have made some mistakes this week but it’s all a learning process, and I like to think that each mistake makes me less likely to make that same error in future. To put it in perspective, my downswing – equivalent to maybe 120 tourney buy-ins – is not at all out of the ordinary for MTT players. There’s a two+two thread where winning players have reported downswings of 200—300 buy-ins. Hopefully this won’t be one of those!!
• I have had some deep runs in big games recently. Last night for example, I very nearly made the money in iPoker’s major and bwin’s weekly $100+1R+1A tourney. I feel I played well and held my own as the tables got tougher; quite simply my luck ran out in the late stages. Bad beats, lost flips etc, blah blah blah.
• I’m faring well in my regular games; it’s just been falling apart at the end. In the last two weeks I’ve had a number of 2nd and 3rd places where I did nothing wrong, other than perhaps having been insufficiently obsequious when I recited my nightly prayers to the poker gods. I guess I royally pissed them off on Thursday, when my biggest leak manifested itself over and over and over again – open-shoving when a player behind has A-A! I think I jammed right into Aces seven times in one night, including three consecutive shoves in the iPoker $50 rebuy. Duhhh.
• My morale is fairly high. I felt slightly depressed on Saturday night, but slept on it and feel fairly upbeat now (despite another $1,500 down the pan yesterday, LOL!)
• I have two big live games coming up – a nice break from the norm.

Onward and upward.