Some thoughts on work ethic

I'm copying this here so people who don't play poker can read it; I'm using this as my follow up to Pooh-Bah Post part 1 here: Also I'll link you guys to the actual thread if you want to view any comments or additional posts I might make: link

Translation: I spend too much time on poker forums and make long posts like this one to sound important to new members.

As inspired by this post in the SNG regs thread, and a special thanks to my roommate Henry and to Rob for always giving me shit about how few hands I play.

The above poster was complaining about a string of consecutive bad sessions, even when taking breaks between them to clear his head. He plays well in game, takes his bad beats as well as he thinks he can, but just can't get anything going for weeks. When I'm reading this at first my immediate reaction is to lol from my internet high horse and troll him for how weak he is (which I'm proud to say is my reaction to most things now on twoplustwo). But I couldn't help but notice how close this is to the mindset I've struggled with for a long, long time. Hopefully writing out my thoughts on it can finally put that leak behind me.

I used to have a huge issue putting in a solid day's work. Every session I'd play I would be hoping it was going to be that 'big' session. You know the feeling, that day where everything goes your way: you win every flip, you hit every flop, and you go to sleep satisfied with more money in the bank than ever. Well for about a year, this never happened for me. I've posted graphs of it in the past but basically, from the time that I was demolishing 100NL and the time that I took shots at 400NL (probably too short of a time, but either way) I made about $8,000 online. The shots at 400NL didn't go so well, and I humbly moved down to 200NL and pumped out money, until I was comfortable shot taking again, and repeated. Pretty standard for every player who's trying to make it big in poker I'd imagine. The thing that felt different for me, was that for 100,000 hands from the first time I tried 400NL, I didn't make a dime. I mean sure, I had rakeback, bonuses, the occasional super turbo MTT that i'd score some money in, but if you look at my HU cash graph from about hand 30,000 to hand 130,000, I didn't make a fucking dime.

Now sure, this is rough, but the variance isn't really unbelievable considering I was moving up and down between 100NL and 600NL throughout the whole thing but the huge majority was around 200 and 400. I was probably playing too many regs, not enough fish, and despite working pretty hard on my fundamentals in the forum, I wasn't playing with the right mindset. I was constantly wishing for that 'breakout' session at mid stakes. I wanted to win a fishreg's entire bankroll in one night. I was gambling. I'd have a few bad days in a row and i wouldn't be happy with any session unless i absolutely CRUSHED. And it just never happened, I never had that big day, I'd never win that key flip that would give me a ton of momentum against a reg and I'd either win 3 buyins or lose 8. Combine that with basically never running deep in an MTT despite joining a ton every sunday and you get a pretty brutal outlook about poker.

It was really disappointing and even though I was making a little money every month, I was spending it just as quickly. It took me a while to realize that I was putting in about as little volume as possible. I never once played more than 15k hands in a month (even in 2009) and that's really pathetic. Sure, I'm a full time student at a difficult university, but how much time to I spend in the library each week and how much time to I spend on the couch? Making excuses is really the worst thing I could do, and I'll be the first to say I was full of them. Maybe I didn't get a lot of sleep that day, so I'm not fit to play tonight. Or maybe I have a test coming up and I can't afford to waste a day thinking about hand histories. Maybe I lost 5 buyins yesterday and it's too frustrating to sit down again for another two days. Sure, people say you shouldn't play if you don't feel like playing but when you get to this point then how are you ever going to make money? I needed to play some god damn hands if I ever wanted to make it big.

What it's taking for me in the past few months is just sitting the fuck down every day and playing some poker. Anyone who talks to me regularly probably knows that I went on a pretty big heater at the start of the summer and obviously that helped. I'm really disappointed that it took that much of a kick to really make me want to play. Regardless, I ended up having the motivation to sit down every day, and I just posted my biggest month of cash profit in July because I also just posted my biggest volume of heads up hands. I'm not going to turn this thread into a brag about how much money I've made and given that I'm still losing in tournaments it's probably a weak brag anyways. The point is that a lot of people really don't understand how long the long run is, and they don't value effort or volume nearly enough. The best way to get out of a downswing is to stop bitching and play more (that is, if it really is a downswing, and not a reflection of how bad you are at poker). Don't be afraid to drop a few limits where you can get better action, because putting in that many more hands and stringing together some winning sessions can be incredible for your confidence, whether or not the money you make is a meaningful sum. Everyone knows this but nobody does it, and I'm guilty of it more than anyone (until now, I hope).

There's nothing I've learned more this year than that praying for that big break is not going to work out. The worst thing about poker is that every day of the week we get a public view of who just got rich. We get to sit down every day, open up the biggest tournament running and see that some random who's worth about $10 just made six figures for doing nothing. And we want that. We want it more than anything in the fucking world. But it's not going to fall in your lap, you're not going to win the lottery, nothing is going to hand wrap itself for you and walk right up to you say 'all your troubles are solved!' The people who get this luxury are some of the luckiest people in the world, whether they appreciate it or not. But living your life trying to be the one of those people isn't going to work out any better than structuring your poker game plan around making people fold their scary flush draws when you have aces. It's crucial to realize that luck is not controllable, and that motivation is. The absolute only way to succeed is to work your hardest at what you can control and to virtually separate yourself from everything you can't.

I hope the way I wrote this won't constrain its application to poker, because it's much more than that. Everything I wrote here applies to school work, getting up and going to your job in the morning, and accomplishing just about anything you want in life. Consider this a revision of my Pooh-Bah post, which was severely lacking and quite uninformative. I'd like to think this one will give me more success and I hope it does for you too. I wish all you guys the best of luck but I encourage you to work hard enough that you never need it.