Lost $11k yesterday for one of my biggest days in the red ever. Total downswing is somewhere around $30k which is definitely my biggest downswing ever. Graph is below. Not included is $6k I lost playing 25/50 plo with antes and $1-3k I lost playing 10/20 plo with antes. I’m not gonna sit here and whine about how bad I’m running, the fact is:
I made poor decisions in hands I played(raising when I should be folding or calling, calling when I should be folding, folding when I should be calling etc). I made poor decisions in games I sat in(sitting in tough games, sitting in games I am not bankrolled for). And I made poor decisions in when I played(took time off which made me play worse, not 100% focused when I played, not quitting when I should be, not playing in primetime to take advantage of juicy games).
After especially big losing days I like to remind myself of two things which I think poker players often forget:
1) This is why we are paid so well. Poker players make well over $100/hour. No college degree required. Not many people can go to work and at the end of the money be left with less money than they started the day with. On days where you lose money, you should really feel like you really earned your pay that day(not literally of course, but your theoretical hourly because it was a tough day at work).
2) While playing poker professionally is a financially risky profession it is not a life threatening risky profession. Think about how much poker players bitch and moan about this or that bad beat or running bad or whatever boo hoo my life is so stressful. Why don’t you try being a cop, firefighter, crab fisherman, in the army, demolition man, insert dangerous profession here for a day where there’s a very real possibility you may die every day you go to work. In all likelihood you are making more than these people and yet there’s about a 0% chance you are going to die doing your job.
Anyways, on the bright side of things I did manage to stack the great Stinger for an $11k pot and I also have way less money on fulltilt so if I get hacked there it’s not actually that big of a deal anymore. On stars I have way more $$ but I finally got my RSA token there so I’m not so worried. If you haven’t taken other basic security measures I suggest you follow this guide If you don’t want to pay for roboform you can download keypass for free. It’s not as fancy of a program I’m sure, but it gets the job done.
Also, I will ship $100 to anyone who sees me playing headsup at a headsup table, or sees me playing above $2/$4 plo for the rest of the month. I may renew this for June who knows. There’s sick money to be made at $2/$4 plo and loads of donks. Current plan is to 6 table grind that for awhile, work on my fundamentals, and put in some hours slowly grinding my roll back.
Prittay, Prittay, Prittaaaay Bad Graph
