“There are about 3-5 non-poker players in the world who I could tell I lost $20k last week and have them take it in stride - my wife, a couple close friends, my mom, that might be it. To any of them I can say without elaboration, “I got unlucky” and they understand the basic principles well enough to know that this is a legit thing to say, i.e. you can be a winning player and lose badly. And they would sympathize, feel bad for me, etc, but not really understand what it feels like to go through it. Meanwhile, all of the poker players I know have experienced the same or worse several times. All have had stretches where they had awful results, have played horribly, run badly, tilted, or some combination. And nearly all have been stupid and played drunk/high and/or blown a bankroll tilting really bad. These people have a better understanding of how I feel right now, but basically none of them would be genuinely sad to hear the bad stuff just happened to me this week. One of the guys I live with this series is much better than me, plays much higher stakes, and has had every type of swing I’ve had, but magnified accordingly. So when I say I’ve been running bad, what the f kind of reaction is he supposed to have? Roughly the same one I have when I’m playing a $1500 wsop event and hear a story about aces getting cracked. For better or worse, poker players are just desensitized enough to this stuff to only care when it happens to them, and the best of them don’t care then either.”
Downswings and Professionalism, part 1 - LearnedfromTV
Friday, June 25, 2010
