Blog affecting play?

Last week was really tough. It started out slow and on Wednesday I suffered my worst day in terms of losses, before breaking the record again on Thursday. For those in the know, this represented almost 4 buy-ins. Hopefully the family members reading this wont know exactly how much that is, as they are unlikely to understand that these sorts of things happen from time to time, and to put it in ‘real money’ context it is actually a lot of money to most people.

There were a couple of issues that annoyed me this week:

The first was that when I started losing on Wednesday I got annoyed and started to play too loose and too aggressive: otherwise known as tilting. I lost track of what my table image was and tried too many bluffs against decent opponents who were reading me well at the time. With hindsight, leaving the game was the best option.

Secondly, I was conscious of how these losses would look to my blog readers, in particular non-poker-playing friends and family. I was putting myself under pressure to get the losses back so I could avoid reporting them on this blog. As any decent poker player will know, the past results are almost totally irrelevant and should very rarely be a factor in current decision-making. It’s also a well-known scientific fact that the process of observing an event has an impact on the actual event itself. This was a case in point.

Every couple of days my wife asks me how I’ve done and this puts me in an awkward position. I never tell her the actual ‘cash’ results as I believe these are irrelevant. I hate having to tell her the ‘theoretical results’ too as there are big swings in these and I would rather keep her away from these swings. As a poker player of eight years I have become used to the swings and so am less-affected emotionally by them. However, telling a layman that you have won $1000 one day and lost $800 the next, I’m sure, would elicit some sort of reaction along the lines of “Oh my god!” or “Why didn’t you not play today?” The problem is we can’t really predict when there will be wins or losses. We can only use our judgement and decide to play a game because we expect it to be favourable: sometimes we will win, sometimes lose, but we expect to win more than we lose.

Looking back at the start of this blog, the main reason for starting it up was as means to regulate my play. I wanted the blog to stop me from playing badly, as I didnt want to report that I had done something stupid and lost all of my money. My success in the last 3-4 months in particular has come about because I have consistently played at or near my best.

However, the pressure to not do anything stupid has been replaced in my own mind by a pressure to keep posting good results, or at least never post bad results. I have to change my thought process as a result of my much improved level of play and emotional control. I need to continue to be honest with myself and aim to play well, make good decisions and not be influenced by unhelpful irrelevant factors like short-term results and the anticipated reactions of non-poker-playing family and friends. It's that simple: make good decisions, play well, remain emotionally detached from the game and reap the long-term benefits.

Despite all of that, I am going to stop writing up a weekly scorecard for the time being as I don’t want this to influence my play during the week. I don’t want to be afraid of losing as this is a good way to ensure that it’ll happen. Instead I am going to report my total winnings per hour (now $62.78), as well as my winnings per hour at the current game level ($5-$10: $98.68/hr). As I’ve played well over 300 hours now in total, and over 200 hours at $5-$10, even an extraordinary weekly results will not massively affect these figures. The long-term aim is to keep these figures as high as possible.

Oh, and for the record, this week’s loss was a record $1,705. Oops.