Most poker players, including myself until pretty recently, severely underestimate the role that variance plays in determining results even over large sample sizes. Everyone has read the 2p2 posts where people have done simulations based on winrates and standard deviations and found that it's possible to have a relatively enormous edge (3+ BB/100) and still be a significant loser over a fairly large sample (100,000+ hands). Everyone understands on a sort of abstract intellectual level that this is within the broad range of possible outcomes for a poker player. But I don't think anyone actually believes that it will happen to him until it actually does.
I definitely subscribe to the "Survival of the Luckiest" theory of the beginning stages of poker. This theory has been the topic of some discussion on 2p2 and elsewhere, and I think there is a lot of merit to it. Basically, I think that most successful poker players ran really good during crucial periods of their careers, especially in the important early formative stages, and became acclimated to winning. Because their first experiences with poker were so successful, they came to think that crushing the games for statistically aberrant winrates was the norm. So when a successful player's luck begins to normalize, his unrealistic expectations amplify the psychological impact of the downswing that, while the biggest of his career and completely outside the realm of his psychological expectation, is so well within the realm of statistical expectation that it would in fact be an unusual result for it not to occur over a large sample.
Poker communities like 2p2 are infested with people who are still in the initial rungood stage of their poker careers and think their good results qualify them to speak authoritatively on poker and variance and how it doesn't exist and how only donks can ever lose 20 buyins, but who in reality don't have even a rudimentary understanding of the awesome power that variance really has in determining results. If you post a thread on 2p2 on this subject, the two or three voices of experienced veteran poker players who have seen and felt the effects of variance will be drowned out by the shrill cacophony of idiots who have never experienced a real downswing in their lives.
The piece of constructive criticism that I most frequently receive is that I lack confidence. I have long suspected that in reality, I have an appropriate level of self-skepticism and everyone else is irrationally overconfident. I think that there is almost a sort of selection bias that causes the most vocal posters on 2p2 to be overconfident, for the same Survival of the Luckiest reasons I previously discussed.
One of the things that I find most repugnant about the overconfident poker mindset is that it forecloses the possibility of improvement. People who just shrug off every loss as "meh, variance" are ignoring the very real possibility - certainty, I should say - that there are leaks in their games and these losses provide an opportunity to identify and plug them. I guess I'm just not really sure where confidence ends and self-delusion begins, and I'm terrified of inadvertently crossing that line and accepting shot-term peace of mind to the long-term detriment of my game.
This attitude is good insofar as it leads me to search vigorously for leaks in my game and examine lines that I take in a critical light. I think my problem is that I have taken it too far, past the point where it's helpful in this way and up to the point where it's convinced me that I'm an irremediably incompetent poker player. I need to get this idea out of my head and find the appropriate amount of healthy skepticism without turning it into crushing hyperbolic self-doubt. I need to find some way to balance my range so that my "wow, that was so donkish of me" thoughts are mixed in with a decent amount of "meh, variance." I need to accept the unfortunate reality that, in poker as in all walks of life, bad things happen to good people. It's the very nature of the game that it's possible to do everything right and still lose.
I am reminding myself to be a student of the game. This is difficult after having gone off for $3,000 at stakes four times what I'm contemplating playing now - after a heater like that, after demonstrating to myself that I'm capable of doing that, I've found myself sliding into the dangerous mindset that I've already learned all the lessons there are to learn at lower stakes, that I've already solved those games. I am making a conscious effort to avoid that kind of thinking and to try to see every hand as a new lesson to be learned that will strengthen my game in preparation for my next shot at higher stakes.
In that spirit, I am also trying to take this 31-buyin downswing in stride, as a learning experience. In a way, I feel almost like this experience is a badge of honor that demonstrates that I've played enough volume to have started to experience what variance is really like. It's almost as if I've graduated into a higher rank of poker experience.
In addition to all of this, a few other factors are weighing pretty heavily in favor of taking my chances at NL50 rather than quitting poker altogether. One of these is the fact that I still have $260 of bonus to clear and I have until June to clear it. Another is the comforting fact that, in spite of all the shit that I feel like I've gone through over the past month, I'm still a little bit ahead of where I had envisioned myself. When I claimed my deposit bonus on Cake in mid-November, I thought I was barely going to be able to clear it in time grinding six tables of NL50 for two hours a day. I'm back at NL50 now, but at least I spent some time at higher stakes, gained some valuable experience, and earned some valuable rakeback and bonus at a much faster rate.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I feel like the first major downswing is almost a sort of crucible in which the composition of a poker player's spirit meets its first true test. I've fallen so very very far and been beaten down so badly and I've come now to a point where I am face to face with utter failure, staring it straight in its ignominious eye. Will I quail under its demon gaze? With my back to the wall, having lost so much ground, will I fall to my weary knees, despondent, and surrender before the final battle is even fought? Will I give up on myself? Is that the person I am? Is that who I want to be?
No. I know that I am teetering on the precipice of losing everything I've put into this game. I know that failure is possible - perhaps even likely. I know that the remainder of my poker career could amount to nothing more than the final tortured thrashings of a terminal case. But I will rot in a special hell if I let that knowledge intimidate me. I won't submit. I won't acquiesce. I'll fight it - I'll fight it down to the last grubby penny of my meager bankroll. I know that I may end up busto after all. But if that's to be my fate, at least I'll go down swinging. Downswinging. Heh.
So there. I know what I have to do - ten buyins at NL50 and then another shot at NL100. I just played a Happy Hour session of NL50 Rush and I'm down a buyin already, but fuck it. I'm not going anywhere until you see me post the NL2 hand in which I literally lose my last penny.
NL50 Progress
-$52.75 / $500.00 after 519 hands
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