Brags. Beats. Battlestar Galactica.

I decided that I'd return to using this blog after neglecting it for half a year. I keep a personal one too but that one's read by a fair amount of non-poker players so this would be a good space to delve into the nitty gritty, touch on strategy concepts, hand history analysis and generally use a lot of advanced terminology they wouldn't understand. Above all though, this may help me get motivated again about poker. First I'll tell you about how my PLO heater was quickly converted into self-destruction.

Since March, I won solidly for a few months, leading up to my big July where I made $11k in about 50 hours of play (thanks to running at 80bb/100 over 8k hands at 100PLO 6max and binking 4 small field tournaments) and I pretty much felt indestructible. With the boost to my bankroll and confidence in my abilities, I decided to finally take a shot at 200PLO HU in August. I ended up losing about $9k in two sessions. Here's what I wrote shortly after it happened:

I've decided to take a few days off and figure out exactly why this downswing shouldn't bother me and I should return to playing poker as normal, even though deep in my mind it will until I recover from it. It probably won't happen this month, so sadly my streak of winning months will come to an end." 

And this a few days after:

"So what did we learn? First of all, keep variance low. When you up the variance, you open yourself up to larger emotional swings which can quickly turn into a vicious cycle where you keep increasing the variance, and then end up self destructing like I did. Stick to what you're comfortable doing until you've completely prepared yourself in all ways to make a change.

Secondly, do not get complacent. I did. I actually was quite rusty at the game when I decided to play 1/2 and yet I thought I could beat it. In reality, my game was weak and I was bound to lose a lot. After months of constant success, the average person is bound to become complacent, but don't settle for being the average person.

Lastly, never get too hung up on your results. If I didn't look at my results and see I was down $3k, I probably wouldn't have ended down $8k. Thinking about how badly you're doing can destroy you and it's best to just focus on playing your best at all times instead of chasing the break-even line."

Let this be an expensive lesson in complacency. At no point should you ever lose sight of your limitations and think to yourself you can just show up and win. You have to be rigorously critical of yourself at all times, while continuously studying and self-improving. 

After my self-destruction, I went back to 100PLO, 4/8 8-game and my downswing continued and I lost a further $4k in September, this time not playing that great but not that badly, but I ran 2k under EV. Last month, I won $1700 and unlocked $5k in bonuses and cash credits, which was a helpful boost to a dwindling online roll.

I didn't play much at all last month though (clocking in 30 hours), which was partly due to distraction in making a series of spoof youtube videos and doing stand up comedy. Generally, though, I lost the competitive drive. Perhaps this was due to my horrific downswing, but I never felt the urge to jump on the tables and win, and instead felt gun-shy every time I loaded up Pokerstars. I lost both motivation and confidence, afraid of further damaging what is a respectable yearly.

However, all that's going to change from now. My goal is to get motivated this November: play more poker and devote more time to it off the tables, something I continually emphasise as absolutely essential in my blog but haven't been doing myself.