I recently had a chat with PocketFiver “dgillis,” as I often do. Doyle is a good sounding board for me regarding the poker grind and maintaining my sanity. If you don’t have a sounding board, get one. It is said, every psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist – that holds true for poker players as well. We boost each other up when we need it.I had finished a 3-day stretch of over twenty 27-man SNGs, cashing only once. Nothing unusual in terms of variance, but this stretch was rockier than most when it came to its brutality. The beats were at the worst possible times. I wasn’t just losing flips. Or open-end straight or 4-flush draws were catching up. Or even 80:20 spots with overpairs.
Over the years, I’ve come to an understanding: if my opponent played his hand the way I might have, and just got luckier than me, I’m OK with it. This was different. I was NOT OK.
During my three days, I was consistently making the right reads against bluffers, calling the overshove with 2nd pair against A-high, only for the Ace to hit the river. I’d flop a King with A-K against A-J, only for the runner-runner straight to come. A-A or K-K holding on the cash bubble? Don’t make me laugh.
In this level of despair, we need to find anything available to maintain a positive mindset. Confidence in making the right decisions is sometimes not enough. The term “Sklansky Bucks” was coined to describe the money you should have made if the odds broke evenly while you were on a bad stretch. Phil “OMGClayAiken” Galfond wrote an excellent series of articles for Bluff Magazine several years back about how he uses the “Sklansky Bucks” concept to judge and track his play.
I don’t play cash games very often, so Sklansky Bucks aren’t useful to me. In tournaments, it’s not as obvious what a bad beat cost you, because each hand has chip-value, not dollar-value. If you had not lost with KK v. AK in Level 3 of a tournament, there’s no direct dollar amount you can assign; you still had a long way to go to cash, much less go deep. Independent Chip Modeling can provide some relationship between chip-value and dollar-value, but only in specific situations – if there is a super-short stack on the money bubble, for instance.
Besides, I don’t need anything specific to get me through the bad times. As nitty as I tend to be about recordkeeping and analysis, I’m not going to sit there with a Sklansky Bucks spreadsheet.
I was searching for the adult poker equivalent of Mom tucking me in at night and telling me everything was going to be OK. A generic platitude, a simple mantra…that’s all I wanted.
Without prompting, Doyle shared something I thought filled the bill nicely. Talking about hands and my play during the downswing. He said, “You’re not running bad. You’re earning some run good.”
As poker players on a downswing, we blame too much on luck, and not enough on the poor decisions we make. If we keep running into big made hands, we tend to slow down and give our opponents too much credit. If our opponents keep sucking out, we make bad bet-sizing decisions and play scared of the evils lurking behind the next turn of a card. The mistakes we make effectively extend the bad run we’re having. It is vitally important, when we’re losing, to be honest with what we’re doing at the table. Just play as smart as you can, every decision, every hand.
Beyond that, the variance in poker swings both ways. The bad beat you suffer today will be offset by something good in the future. Each hand that breaks your heart brings you one hand closer to the timely A-A or catching a big draw on the road to the Promised Land.
Babe Ruth used to say he got excited after each swing and a miss, because he was one less swing away from his next home run. If you want a more modern example, we can turn to California’s Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the documentary “Pumping Iron”, Arnold was smiling through an endless set of stomach crunches. One of his training partners, on the verge of screaming from pain, asked why he was smiling. Arnold replied:
“I love coming to the gym. Every time I’m here I’m one step closer to winning the competition.”
Take that attitude to the poker table. If you’re confident you are playing your best game, the pain and suffering of the down times only takes you one session closer to the big money. So grit your teeth and earn your “run good”. And most of all – enjoy the fruits of your labor when you cash in your earnings.
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