It’s been too long since I’ve written. I guess I was focused more on making the show as well as some other personal things, trips out of town, finding a job, etc.
I don’t have a new episode out yet in part because of that, as I didn’t have much time to record, but probably more importantly because I couldn’t line up a guest in time. I’m gonna try to get back on that as soon as possible.
My actual time committed to playing poker has been very sporadic of late. Some of that is due to the aforementioned reasons. Some of it is just that it’s hard to keep up my confidence on this losing streak I’ve been on. Because I play on sites that don’t save hand histories, I can’t quantify exactly how bad it is. But I’ve been losing over my last 850 tournaments with an average buyin in the low $30s. Even though I know I have some skills I need to improve and I’m far from a perfect player, I am certainly good enough at those stakes that that is not reflective of my ability.
And while I can tell myself it’s just something I need to grind through and that it’ll turn around… it’s hard to actually believe that, you know? And hard not to think that, even if my goal is just making money, that finding a job (or getting enough people to listen to the podcast that it actually generates revenue) would be a better use of my time.
It’s certainly not fun to be going through this. Taking the fun out of the game makes it hard to want to keep playing.
Even having said all that, I think as much as anything I need a shift in mindset. It’s hard not to see myself as unlucky given all this, that I just can’t ever get the break I need. That every time I come to a point where I’m close to moving up to meaningful stakes or where a win could really break me through, I instead go on a long losing streak. (This year, in buyins $80 and up, I’m at something like a -93% ROI.) And now that losing streak has reached eight and a half months.
But I do think, especially with poker, a lot of that is just perception. It’s something Andrew Lichtenberger and I discussed when he appeared on the podcast, the idea that a lot of whether we see ourselves as lucky or not is how we interpret events, and our mindsets can do a lot to shape our realities.
The problem is, I don’t know how to change mine.
I feel like there are poker players who see themselves as lucky, just decide to, and then they are, and they win. They’re obviously good players, too, but I don’t know how they just decided to see themselves that way, and I can’t seem to do it for myself.
Every time I convince myself I’m gonna take a more emotionally mature approach at the tables, every time I say I’m gonna focus on the ways I get lucky instead of the ways I get unlucky, what actually ends up happening is, I just lose even more until I finally snap. It never actually ends up affecting anything, and I just see myself as unlucky all over again.
Again, the length of this losing streak has a lot to do with this. I don’t know how I’m supposed to see myself as lucky when the first 2-4 hours of every session I lose every time I’m all-in for my tournament life. I don’t know how I’m supposed to see myself as lucky when I keep losing with the best hand. I don’t know how to see myself as lucky when I have been objectively unlucky at poker for eight and a half months.
What am I to do about this? Who has mindset advice?
The good news is, I decided to start playing on CoinPoker after I learned my buddy Jon Van Fleet (an episode 3 guest!) was a sponsored pro there. I felt like I should expand my horizons a little, because so much of my experience with the other sites has degraded:
- ACR has sucked for a while with all the bots and collusion they don’t care about, and I went on a long streak at a -30% ROI there, and that was enough to get me to quit.
- I used to win on Ignition, but that stopped happening, the software sucks, and the site flagrantly dumps bots into tournaments at the end of late registration so there’s no overlay, and then those bots collude to make sure they all mincash.
- I never became a winning player on Global, even though I think the competition is not very good. I have no idea why.
ClubWPT Gold I was doing great on for the first eight months or so. Then they started cutting back the vanilla tournaments and the small- and mid-sized field tournaments. And I’ve been on a losing streak there for eight months. The competition is still fairly soft, but so many of the tournaments are huge fields now, and those are that much more difficult to win. And the site is full of PKOs, which I’ve never been that good at winning, and bounty tournaments, which just remove a bunch of the prize pool along the way. (I’ve had better luck in mystery bounties, where at least there’s hope of hitting a big prize for everyone.)
Anyway, my first two sessions on CoinPoker, I made a final table each one. Which was the first time in about two months that happened. Admittedly, there weren’t a lot of tournaments played over that period, for all the reasons I stated. It just gets hard to stay motivated when you keep having 7-8 session losing streaks, when even your big cashes don’t get you back to even. (And especially for me, who has very frustratingly become unable to close a tournament. I’m 0-3 heads-up this year after going 1-9 last year, and I have no idea why.)
They weren’t that big. One I only finished sixth. The other we made a deal four-handed when we were all pretty close to even and pretty deep, so I took a little less than second place. Still, encouraging. I just need to adjust my playing schedule so I can hit more events on the site, because the schedule is not at all geared to Americans, especially night owls like me.
Well, that was a lot to write. Hopefully getting it off my chest will help me unpack any negativity I’m carrying around. And hopefully I’ll be able to book some more guests and resume the show soon. If you have any tips or advice on either one, please reach out.
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