Around October time last year I had visions of giving up work and playing poker professionally, I was playing NL200 and winning at a fairly decent rate. Then the middle of November came and with it the most brutal downswing I have ever had, by the end of December I was playing NL100 and was nearing the end of an $11,000 downswing. I seriously thought about cashing out my remaining bankroll and never playing again, I hated the game and I felt really horrible. It seemed like every time I sat down to play I was losing money. I had lots of trouble getting to sleep at night and it was pretty much all I thought about during the day too.
I then had an epiphany of sorts, maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, maybe the amount I had been winning before the downswing had started was due more in part to luck than any kind of expert play on my part. I read a post by Jason Ho (code76545321) on Stoxpoker offering coaching so I decided to contact him. He initially went through my database and gave me a comprehensive list of the leaks I had, yep it turned out that I sucked. I was way too aggressive especially preflop. I feel like the way I play now and my general understanding of the game is a lot better and I’m enjoying the game much more again. It was amazing how bad some of the stuff I was doing was, but I couldn’t see it until someone else pointed it out to me, it’s strange how the mind works.
As a result of some of the things I have been going through with Jason and my own experiences I have started coaching a couple of people who are playing lower stakes in the hope that I can help them improve their game and maybe build up a decent reputation for myself and hopefully be able to start charging a small amount for coaching. I also hope that this will help me improve my own game at the same time.
So next time you’re running bad and think it’s just variance it may be worth looking over all the hands you’ve played in that time or get someone else who’s willing to help you out and make sure that you’re not playing badly. Of course there is the luck factor and hands that you can do nothing about, but sometimes there are also times where you lost more money than you should have on certain hands because your thought process isn’t quite right.
