The Losses Hurt More Than the Wins Feel Good

For the last week of December and the first two weeks of January, I went on the heater of my life and won $3,100 in the span of 4,000 hands. This is a pretty remarkable hot streak. But over the past week, I've played roughly another 4,500 hands and lost $800. Overall, for the month so far, I've played about 8,500 hands and booked $2,300 of profit - unquestionably a great month for a small stakes player. But this brief stretch of losing over the past few days has had a pretty disproportionate effect on my psychological state.

I initially suspect that part of it is just the size of the numbers in absolute dollar terms. The idea of losing $800 without any context is pretty jarring, especially for a lifenit like me. $800 is almost a full month's rent. It is almost as much money as I spend on food in a full year. Losing this amount of money feels awful when I think of it in those terms. So what if I try to think about in terms of buyins rather than dollars? If I frame losing $800 in terms of buyins at 1/2, it's just a 4 buyin downswing. Downswings of 4 buyins are pretty routine for anyone who puts in any real volume at poker, including myself.

I know this to be true on an intellectual level and I know that it should provide some measure of comfort to me and help me dismiss this heretofore brief and mild downswing as not being a big deal. But I still feel pretty awful about it. And it's same type of awfulness that I felt back when I was grinding away at NL20 and lost $80. This suggests to me that the actual dollar amounts are not really that big of a deal, and that I'm good enough at divorcing the ideas of real world money and poker bankroll that it isn't really an issue for me.

Losing sucks and winning is fun. This is obvious not only in poker but in every endeavor where it's possible to win or lose. I have been a winning player overall, especially this month. It would seem to stand to reason that looking back on this month, I should be more happy than sad, but right now this doesn't seem to be the case. A 5,000-hand breakeven stretch has me feeling pretty down. Why, given that I know I am still up more than $2,000 for the month?

Thinking back to my state of mind at the peak of my heater, I felt pretty ecstatic and giddy, but the magnitude of that happiness was definitely less than the magnitude of my unhappiness right now while going through a downswing of vastly lesser magnitude than my heater. It seems to be that psychologically, for me, losing hurts more than winning feels good.

Part of this could be due to the nature of my wins and losses. My massive heater was fueled by a combination of (1) playing with lots really bad players who were not online poker regulars and who decided to play over the holidays and ended up just spewing away tons of money into my waiting hands, and (2) getting really card-lucky both by having strong enough hands to stack off against these fish and by hitting nearly all of my draw. These are things that are basically totally outside my control and are totally inapposite to the question of whether or not I am actually a good poker player. For example, take a look at one of my biggest wins during that period. This is a hand where I just happened to be in the right place at the right time against some idiot who was begging for someone to take his money. Witness also this gem, where I get it in as a 3:1 dog, get there on the turn, and also manage to dodge his ten outs to a boat or quads on the river.

On the other hand, my losses over the past week have been largely from spots where I've stupidly called people down with weak one-pair hands and stupidly tried to shove people off obviously strong hands while holding nothing. These are things that are totally within my own control, and are the very essence of the question of whether or not I am actually a good poker player. To illustrate, take a look at this disaster, wherein I idiotically pay someone off with second pair on the river, or this trainwreck, wherein, playing against a tough regular, I ignore an incredibly strong turn call and shove on a river that helps every hand but mine.

This demonstrates to me that all of my wins have simply been the results of incredible dumb luck and all of my losses have been caused by my own terrible play and bad decisionmaking. This is largely why I feel so bad. I'm not doing anything special or brilliant that's resulting in my wins. I'm not making spectacular, sick plays - I'm just getting really good cards. But my losses are mostly due to massive blunders that I can't possibly honestly dismiss as mere bad luck. The psychological effect of this is to undermine my confidence in my ability to win at this game in the long run, as time goes to infinity and the cards end up treating everyone equally. If the only way I can win is by running like Usain Bolt, how am I going to avoid going broke when luck equalizes?

I believe the reason these small routine downswings inspire such dread in me is that they tap into my deep-rooted fear of being a losing player in the long run. Every time I swing down, I'm terrified that the long run has finally arrived.