by SebQtaneus » Sun Feb 26, 2006 11:49 pm
Alex,
Since you didn't read the journal post I will recap it for you. I finally figured out that I'm not on the losing jag that I thought I was. My epiphany was that my losing month was caused by 3 rather large losing days. Not a bad run. My play as a whole is 'fairly' solid so that is not my problem in my opinion. What my problem is, is that sometimes I don't know when to quit when I am having a bad day and then it turns into a REALLY bad day which is hard to dig out from under in the near future.
So, what I have done is to make a promise to myself that if I am having a bad day, i.e. the totals for the day are more than $100 in the hole, then I start really watching it and if it keeps going that way and starts to approach -$200 for the day then I quit for that day. Even if it's early on in the day. The thought process being that $100 is easy to make up the in next few days after you lose it and you can get on with your month of trying to eek out a profit. But the horrible -$200 to -$400 days are next to impossible to recover from very fast. Take a look at the first page of my journal as well as the link I posted and look at the month of February and you will see what I mean. If I had stopped at -$200 on all 3 of the Really bad days, I would be MUCH better off for the month and year as a whole. But I didn't and look at what happened. My epiphany was that "in the long run, if you can keep your losses infrequent and small, you will be a big winner in the end."
I'd heard these kinds of things before but never really understoof the full meaning behind it until last night. Then it just hit me like a freight train what I was doing wrong.
Part of the reason I wasn't stopping on a bad day before was that I had this fixation on having a good winning streak (# of days that is) going all the time and that if I just kept going, the suckouts would stop and I would end up on the positive side for the day even if it was just by one cent. I now see how dumb that was from a BR point of view. That was total EGO! Ego has no place in your poker BR!
SO, to summarize it all:
1. Continue to keep the losing days as infrequent as possible. ( well, duh!)
2. Keep the losing days that DO HAPPEN in control by keeping them small and easy to recover from.
3. If a day starts to get out of control losswise, quit for that day. Start fresh tomorrow or take some time off. There are things to do besides poker you know.
Mekos King: Seb is now the way the truth and the light
Mekos King: as if we didnt know that already