Handling Losses

How do you handle a loss? If some chowder-head beats your top set with runner-runner flush, is it all you can do to not come over the table and shove those cards down some inviting orifice? Do you know that you can play your best for only about 6-7 hour sessions but stay for 22 hours when you're stuck so that you can get even? You probably can recite verbatim such catchy phrases as "It's all one long game" and "Play hours, not results" and can probably explain what they mean with remarkable clarity to some newbie who doesn't quite understand yet but do you know why, even with all this knowledge, that homicide seems like such a good idea after a particularly bad beat?

Unfortunately, I can't answer this for you. I can however, and have, answered this for myself and I can share it with you. If you see some of yourself in me - well, there appears to be hope. I am extremely competitive, always have been. In college that meant maintaining a 4.0, in chess it means checkmate, in boxing it means a knockout - and in poker it means getting the money - right? Not quite. In poker it means making correct decisions. If you do this, then in the long run you will get the money but it may not be apparent at the end of the day. Money is the way we keep score at poker though and when I went home and the days tally showed the other team ahead by $4, $40, $400 or $4000 - I felt literally sick.

I knew that it really was all one long game. I am mathematically inclined and knew what the odds were of such and such event happening and knew that it would happen at times. I knew that playing hours when I had a positive EV was smart - regardless of my results. Heck, I explained it to my father and he was voted by his high school class the least likely to accept his son being a professional poker player. I knew all these things intellectually and yet I would oftentimes get so incredibly angry at outcomes and results at the poker table that I would not recognize myself.

I told myself that it was just my extreme competitiveness that caused such reactions but I was deluding myself. If I had looked back in my past I would have found that during extreme bouts of competition, I grew an icy calm - not angry. This wasn't some revelation that came to me one night - I've always known that about myself and yet, I didn't see it. I didn't see it because I was looking the other way. I was looking the other way because if I had realized this, I would have had to reexamine myself and get honest with myself.

Who wants to honestly examine themselves? I mean, you might find something that you don't like in there for crying out loud! What if I looked and found something I couldn't handle? Something I couldn't change? It takes a great deal of courage to be willing to be honest with yourself and face your fears - and so I did what most people do, I avoided it like the plague.

Then life happened. I had a disaster in my life, the type of disaster that takes one throwing money at it to make it go away. If the size of this type of disaster can be measured by the volume of money it requires you to throw at it - then it was a six-figure disaster. It was unrelated to poker - medical actually but I found myself mentally and financially bankrupt when it was over. As broke as I had ever been, I was forced to go out and get a real job in order to rebuild a working bankroll. Want to guess what they pay a long-haired hippie type who hasn't held a real job in a decade? Saving was tough -it was almost two years till I made it back.

So why am I telling you all this? Well, during this time that I was trying to rebuild my bankroll I had to answer the question of how large that bankroll needed to be to 'quit the day job'. Since I was no longer in a poker friendly state - I couldn't just play on the side and help build one that way - it was going to have to be built completely from savings. I had a lot of anxiety about making sure I had enough before I stepped back up to the plate but there wasn't a number that made me feel confident. I questioned whether $10,000 would be enough - but there were concerns. $20,000? I still had doubts. $25,000? The doubts remained. Finally I had to admit to myself that I was afraid.

What a ridiculous notion! I played, won and lost but survived just fine for 10 years. What in the heck was I afraid about? Honestly, I was afraid that I wasn't good enough. Times where I played $40/$80 for 8 hours and lost 3 racks� jumped up to a $400/$800 game and won a pot and I'm $1000 ahead rushed back to memory. I didn't keep records. Somewhere in the back of my head I feared that I had just gotten unbelievably lucky and I really wasn't good enough. There was no doubt some truth to that. So I got honest with myself - it was either that or spend the rest of my life managing a Denny's restaurant.

I realized, through the ensuing self-examination, that when I got angry at the poker table - when some guy sucked out on me and left me with a gaping hole in my stack, my anger might have been directed at him but it was all about me. It was about me not being sure that it was about a bad player getting lucky. It was about me not being sure that I could get it back. It was about not being sure that the long run was going to bring the chips in my direction. I mean, what if I had just been lucky up till now and him winning that pot was the beginning of things evening out?

I couldn't live with not knowing. To be honest, I'm not sure I could live with knowing that I wasn't good enough either. So I read everything there was to read about poker. I ran simuls till the wee hours of the morning. I thought about the game constantly, dreamt about it. When I played I did postmortems on my play that often prevented me from playing the next day - because I was still working out details about how I played and preparing to play better next time. And an interesting thing happened. As my play improved, so did my confidence in my play - and so, oddly enough, did my patience with bad players. Losses ceased being dark and foreboding and became simply fluctuations. When I suffered bad beats, I began to smile genuinely, realizing I was in the right game.

Poker is a people game. There is one person sitting in each game though that is the most dangerous to you and who can decimate your bankroll faster than anyone else - and he's sitting in your seat. Get to know that player first.

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