This is another one of those articles from CheckItDown, my other blog. Being honest with oneself is very important on the road to becoming a solid poker player, and like it or not, this is an issue that has to be addressed - enjoy!

Taking A Break

Before these past 3 months, I never really understood what poker players meant by being in a funk for more than a week. In the year and a half of playing, I’d never experienced any sort of long term losing streak. These past three months, however, has put me on the brink of losing control.

It all started after a 3rd place finish in a $30 tournament on UB. Since then, that money has vanished. What’s the problem Joe, you’ve broke even over a 3 month period? That may be true, but I haven’t taken profit out of a website for 3 months, and I’ve never ever had that happen, even when I first started playing. Lately, if I put $100 in and take out $50, I consider it a victory.

In the early stages, I was taking a lot of bad beats. Bad beats happen, and I understand that, but the amount of bad beats I was dealing with was taking a toll on my emotions. I was afraid to play hands for fear of beats, and eventually I was blinding myself out of tournaments. I started to realize this, then pressed too much in tournaments, getting my money in frequently with the worst cards.

I lose and I lose, but I still feel like I’m better than 9 out of every 10 players at any stakes. Call me arrogant, cocky, confident, but that’s how I feel, so I figure that if I move up to bigger stakes, I can make my money back a little quicker and suffer fewer bad beats. This just started to compound the problem as you might imagine.

Today I officially ended up breaking even for the semester, so I’ve uninstalled UltimateBet and won’t be playing for a long time, who knows how long. Many of you that know me also know that I always guarantee I won’t be playing for X period of time, and it usually turns out to be less than half that time before I start playing again. Well folks, this time I don’t have a choice, I can’t afford to play anymore. The money I won in that $30 tourney was leftover money from the summer, and now that I’ve burned all that, I have no money I feel like I can afford to lose.

No matter how high the stakes, how out of control, and how many bad beats I took, I feel very confident about my skills, and I feel more confident about myself as a person to know that I am and always have played with only the poker money I could afford to lose. As close as I am to the line of “gambling addiction”, I feel like I haven’t and won’t cross it, because I’m not playing with money that I can’t afford to lose.

So until I get a full time job, the stakes I play, if any, are going to be quite small. Best of luck to all the poker players out there, and I hope that when you hit a bad streak, you can control your emotions and your abilities a little bit better than I did.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Poker Mentality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.