A while back it occurred to me just how badly you can run playing poker, and how long it sometimes can take to get back from it. I thought, like everybody else, that I had already lived through the worst possible periods. I had already experienced my fair share of 50-100k BE-stretches and 25 BI dips. What I did not actually realize back then was that I had gone on brutal heaters as well. It’s easy to take credit and call it madskillz when you crush the games session after session. But really, it’s usually just a combination of positive variance and newly found self confidence. This flawed thinking is extremely standard for most poker players, especially in the low- and midstakes games. There are so many, otherwise awesome players, who really do not understand half of what variance means. When they win, they are the best of the best. When they lose, they think they just broke the world record in having bad luck.
Anyway, I thought that I had seen it all. I thought I had been experiencing downswings as brutally as one could, and that I was a hardened veteran that variance could not budge. Nothing could stop me, and for some time I almost felt unbeatable in the games I played. During this time I booked $50k-months like it was the easiest thing in the world, and a part of me did not believe that one day it would all come to an end. This sounds a bit exaggerated, but I want you to understand what I am getting at. I knew I was running well during this period of time, but I really did not realize how well I ran.
Sometime in May last year things started going differently. Not just a little either. I got a taste of the big sledgehammer variance can be. During this time I was grinding $ 25/50 as soon as there was value, and when you start gunning away buyins there – things easily get messy. That month I completely wrecked a record month (by far) and turned it into a mediocre even/loosing-month. The months following were spent in the US of A and Vegas, and there the massacre at 5k continued. I continued to win at $ 3/6 – $ 10/20 which kept the results somewhat decent. By decent I mean just above the breakeven point, nothing fancier than that. I was a shitload of $3/6 buyins from all time high, but I tried not to think too much about it.
When I got home, however, all hell broke loose. I pretty much lost as soon as I sat down, at this point I had stopped playing $25/50 and later I felt I needed to step down from $10/20 as well. The following two months after Vegas I lost around 60 buyins, even though I had worked harder than ever to improve my game and mental focus during this time. I was being coached by players I have tremendous amounts of respect for, I watched all the good video material I could find and I modified some previous bad lines of thought. Everything felt so damn good, but I could not win. My game had evolved significantly and I was many times the player I was before I hit the downswing. I was spending countless hours striving to improve, only to fail miserably time after time. A question I started asking myself more and more frequently was: “what if I’m not a winning player at these stakes anymore?” In most cases this question would only motivate me to push myself even further and study harder than I had ever studied before, but during other times I had serious thoughts of quitting poker completely and live well with the money I had earned thus far. I finally decided take a couple of weeks off gambling and just simply focus on feeling good.
After a while I finally decided to give poker a fresh start. I was sick of feeling bad every time I lost $10K, so the natural solution was to step it down a few notches in terms of stakes. I know it doesn’t seem very logical to step down from a level where at you meet the bankroll requirements and feel you have an edge. However, this was not about EV, it was about life-EV. I discussed this decision a lot with the girl I was currently seeing and she helped to understand that money is not the most important thing in life. As I opened my eyes I realized that I really had nothing to complain about. Said and done, I decided to step down to $2/4 and grinded away. I didn’t feel bad about losing a few buyins, and most importantly, I was feeling really good about my game. I played over 52K hands at 400NL and 600NL that month and ended up winning about $13K. No longer did I feel bad about a few losing sessions, and as time went by I could start to slowly stop associating poker with pain and misery. The grind was fun, more like a challenge than work.
Anyway, this is getting a bit offtopic now, back to the point. At this time I have realized just how much of our results that we have absolutely no power in controlling. The only thing we can do is to play as much as possible during as good circumstances as possible, the rest we leave to randomness. I am confident that the vast majority of poker professionals do not understand how big of a part variance play in their results, and just how badly they can run. 100K hands BE-stretches is probably common, but how about 200k? 250k? 300k? Most have probably had a couple of bad months or maybe even a longer downstreak, but I know people that have never had it. It is easy to assume that this will never happen to you, but trust me, be prepared.
As I read about people having 200K BE-stretches prior to my own, I honestly felt that these people were doing something wrong. Either they had not been playing well or they were not winning players anymore. I would never end up there, because I was me, the fucking king of poker. I was not planning to go on BE-stretches any time soon, I was planning to get rich and getting a lot of hoes. Preferably a boat aswell.
Now that I am wiser I know that I was wrong (except for the part with the hoes duuuuh 
).
It scares me that some players are whining about them being unlucky during their 800 hands session where they “only ended up winning 3 buyins.” Setups, flips and donkeys ruined the session which was peaking over 10 buyins up. These guys haven’t understood that they still were running over expectation in this session. We do not deserve anything, but over a very large amount of hands we can at least hope that we have made the money that is equivalent to our win rate. More often than not the win rate is lower than you want to believe, and the variance is bigger than you realize. It is easy to sit down and rationalize away at bad periods with random arguments, but keep on randomclicking in pots when when running good and never realize what`s really happening. It might be a good idea to wake up and realize that you are not the next durrrrrr, and stop blaming tough times on bad luck. One day you might not be winning anymore, and when that time comes you have to be alert and honest to yourself so you actually get yourself a chance to realize it. If not, it will probably result in a slow, long busting of your bankroll.
As a last side note I would like to push for being conservative with your bankroll, at the table as well as in real life. I spent over $100K irl last year, much of it went to travelling and a car so it’s not as much as it sounds. The thing is that it’s easy to adopt some expensive habits when you’re winning a lot, which is no problem, but as soon as you start losing these habits can be an expressway to draining your bankroll. Yeah, it’s nice to be a baller now and then, but it’s never cool to be an idiot when it comes to handling your economy. I really regret that I didn’t realize this until years later, would have been nice with a few extra bucks in the bank. At the tables, I’m not against taking a shot at higher stakes if it’s a good spot, as long as you’re aware of the risks and are prepared to take a shovel of shit to the face now and then. I’ve tried my best to be a Bankroll-nit in my days, and even though I let loose during the summer I think it’s what suits me best. I don’t like losing 1/3 of my bankroll during a few weeks, so really, why stress it? Money is sometimes important, but living a good and healthy life is so much more important. For us younger players these might be our golden years, so why go around feeling bad about swings? Why take those shots when you don’t have to? Take your time, be smart and work hard. In the long run, it will pay off. Big time.
WalmartBrat
