I am posting because I just got back to even for the month. As I hinted in a previous blog post, this month has featured me playing some of the worst poker in recent memory and running really, really badly in important pots and in situations which are completely invisible with EV graphs. So, I present you the month of August so far:



When I finally broke even, my first reaction was to say "let's forget the first eight days of this month" and just go from there, but very quickly I realized that this totally not what I want to do. The first eight days of this month will be instrumental in my forward progress.

In his latest PokerCurious interview, Jungleman said the following when asked about losing a lot of money:

The best thing to do when losing a lot of money is to view it as an experience to be learned from, and then forget about the pain of losing that much. It is recessive to keep thinking about how much it sucks to lose X amount of dollars.

This really hit home with me because instead of focusing on the fact that I was losing, I shifted my focus to my overall approach to poker. My technical understanding of the 100NL and 200NL games is certainly good enough to win, but my I my overall emotional approach was filled with tons of leaks. I lacked some key fail-safes which would have been instrumental in nipping my overall downswing before it did the damage that it did.

There was discussion in the 2+2 uNL forums about downswings. Brian J, mentioned that he is currently on a 60 BI downswing and I mentioned that "60 BIs ... that's not a downswing - that's a playing style" which led to stop-losses. Some people like stop losses and others hate them. They feel that if they are losing but still playing well they should be able to keep playing.

While I agreed with that, I also think that stop-losses are key for some people. Your number depends on you though. How many BI's can you lose in a session and still play your A-game? You need to be very honest with yourself BEFORE a session starts and have the number down, because once you are in the middle of s session, all bets are off. I'll explain specifically why.

Jared Tendler wrote a key article entitled "The Only Reason Tilt Happens" on Nov 27, 2008. He discussed that once you are on tilt, it's almost impossible to get out of that state and in many ways, you cannot be held accountable for it:

The brain responds to a threat by increasing emotion in proportion to the perceived significance of that threat. When emotions rise to your threshold, which is the point when the brain takes direct action against the threat, higher brain functions are systematically reduced in proportion to the level of emotion. The loss of higher brain functions like: self control, rational thought, logic, perception of self and other, organization, planning, strategy, mental manipulation of information, and others are the hallmark characteristics of Tilt. If the brain didn't respond to a threat by shutting down these functions, your emotions could be completely out of control and you would still play great; Tilt would not exist.

The sobering reality is that you have absolutely no control over this process. When emotions rise to threshold, the response taken by the brain happen every time, guaranteed (assuming there isn't actual brain damage). Knowing the brain has limitations is important, because just like in poker, information determines course of action.

The implication of this is pretty simple. If you are not really making decisions on tilt, you need someone to physically stop you before tilt does serious damage to your bankroll. This mechanism needs to be in place with a preset limit. Is 20 BI's your limit? 10? 5? 3?

There will be times when you lose two BI's and you stop a session because you feel the onset of tilt approaching. Well done. There are other times when you lose three BI's but are playing great and in general play a style where 3 BI swings are nothing. Again - great!

But ... for that ONE time when you lose more than you should and would continue to lose even more since your mind cannot function correctly anymore for w/e reason, you will benefit from a stop-loss. I know that on August 2nd, I sure would have and that's a key lesson I'm going to go forward with.