Losing My Way

Tonight there was a hiccup. A big hiccup. The kind of hiccup that sneaks up on you in the middle of your little sister's dance recital just as she's about to begin her performance of Swan Lake and the whole audience is silent, when all of a sudden . . . HICCUP!!! And everyone looks at you with disdain.

I had a bad night at the poker table. Like, a really bad night. Like, I've only lost this much in one session when it was a WSOP buy-in.

Granted, tonight was just a $400 loss, not actually a whole lot, and the WSOP buy-in was $1500, but it sure felt like that much. I sat down after the session and wrote down my thoughts on what happened and why I lost and I came to one realization: It was all my fault.

The loss tonight was 1/5th of my bankroll; a bankroll I've been diligently building since the start of 2012. I've studied the game, I've worked on my mental strength, I've been crushing the local $1/$2 game over the last six weeks, and tonight it all came crashing down.

Okay, I suppose that's a little dramatic, but it certainly felt like it. And that's probably a good thing.

Like I said before, I sat down to write down my thoughts on the session, a practice highly recommended by Jared Tendler in his book The Mental Game of Poker, and one of first practices I adopted after reading the book. When you write about each session, you get to instantly analyze how things went: what you did well, what you did poorly, what you observed about others, and, most importantly, what you observed about yourself. In the middle of writing down my thoughts, I realized I hadn't done this very thing in a couple weeks. Why not? I think the very obvious answer is that I just didn't think I had to anymore. I had been successful enough in the previous month or so that I didn't feel like I needed to take the time for such an arbitrary practice. I much preferred to make my way back to town to have drinks with my friends and celebrate yet another winning session at the poker table. My confidence was getting the better of me.

And my confidence has definitely gotten the better of me at the poker table. Tonight I found myself overplaying some hands that I knew I shouldn't be overplaying, but I think I thought I was entitled to it. More than a couple times I found myself being stubborn when the flop missed my hand and I was sure I could outplay my opponent. No, stupid, he just flopped top pair with top kicker, it's okay to fold your hand. But I wouldn't. I started playing the but/if game with myself: but if this happens on the turn; but/if this card comes on the river . . . etc, etc. That's probably the worst thing I could let my brain do.

With my overconfidence, I started opening up my range of starting hands. Even worse, I started opening up my position at the table for that same opened up range of hands. All of a sudden I was playing poker completely backwards. As I learned from reading Annie Duke's Decide To Play Great Poker, the main thing you want to do is make your own decisions easier while making your opponents' decisions more difficult. All I was doing by opening up my range and starting position at the table was making my decisions more difficult and those of my opponents easier. It was complete idiocy.

While I was writing down my thoughts about the session I realized that I had been steadily moving in this direction for the last week or so, I had just gotten lucky a couple times, and it hadn't come back to bite me in the ass. Well, this session took a big chunk out of my backside.

Good.

This setback is going to force me to get back to the basics. I had stopped focusing at the table and concentrating on what my opponents were doing and how they were playing. Instead I was Facebooking about my success or Tweeting about a recent hand or texting friends about what was going on later that night. No more phone at the table.

I haven't cracked open a poker book in at least three weeks. Well, I obviously haven't absorbed everything I needed to, or I wouldn't be having this talk with you. It's time to get back to studying the game. I have enough down-time during the week that this shouldn't be an issue, I just have to do it.

Most importantly, I have to ingrain in my brain (unintentional rhyming) that this what I want to do for a living. This is how I'm going to pay my rent. This is how I'm going to afford to go on dates. This is how I'm going to eat. So I owe it to myself to make sure that I'm totally focused on the task at hand every time I sit down at the table. I know a lot of the people I know don't see it that way, and I've succumbed to their whimsical attitudes towards poker. But it's my responsibility to make sure they understand that this is going to be my job, and just like any other job I can't just call out whenever I feel like it. And if they can't, or refuse, to understand that then they have no place in my life.

This is it, kids, this is the dream. So I have a responsibility to myself to make sure I'm prepared each and every time I sit down at the poker table.

Let's get back at it.