Sigh…what not to do after you lose $24K the day before: take a shot at 25/50 HU.

I mean, I actually started today really well and was up about $15K. Although I had that $-24K session last night I actually won $10K in the morning so between the three sessions I was actually even for the two days. So what do I do? Get cocky of course and notice that this really big 25/50 fish is online (down over $200K on PTR). So I sit at a 25/50 HU table and hope that he’ll sit with me. Literally within 10 seconds he sits and I proceed to win half his stack on the very first hand. So now I’m up 17.5K, have a reloading fish all to myself at 25/50, and have an equally good spot at a 25/50 FR table on Stars – what could go wrong?

LOTS!

I couldn’t really be bothered to go into the details, but I lost $30K to him and about $10K on my 25/50 six-max and full ring tables (since I was concentrating on the HU match so much I basically auto-piloted away a couple of stacks from bad c-bets and the like. Overall I finished the session down $24K again. Here’s my graph for August, AKA “how to ruin your best month ever in two days”.



I cashed out $20K four days ago so I’m now again in the precarious position of only having $56K online. Last time I went back to 5/10 to grind it all back up, and it seems that I’ll have to do the same again now. What’s really starting to bug me though is that I haven’t really made that much money this year – at least not nearly as much as I could have. I’ve spent the better part of this year trying to move up permanently to 10/20+ and have basically gone through cycles of winning $20K at 5/10 and then losing it back at 10/20+. I feel like I’ve seriously sold myself short in terms of how much money I could have made this year and so I’m starting to think that maybe the best thing for me isn’t to keep trying to move up but rather just settle down at 5/10 and still make a shitload of dough there.

The thing is though, I’m not that kind of person. I’m very ambitious and want to keep moving up. In fact, I’ve always wondered in bewilderment how some people seem to have no motivation to move up at all. On Stars especially, there are a bunch of grinders who seem to accept 1/2 or 2/4 as their lot in life and simply keep playing there forever. In some ways I’m actually kind of envious of them. They’ve reached their end-game in poker and are probably a lot more relaxed and stress-free in life overall. They know how much they make per hour, they repeat it endlessly, and they use the money to get on with the rest of their life. I don’t think I could ever do that. For me, if I’m not at the top of something, I’ll keep trying my darn best to get there, and if I realise that I simply can’t, I’ll probably find something else to do.

The thing is though, this endeavour is not like the other ones that I’ve pursued in the past. It’s very different in one very important respect: this is real money that I’m losing here, and a hell of a lot of it too. If ever there were a time to let my pride and ambition give way to logic and common sense, then surely this is it.

I’m not going to be playing poker forever. Once I graduate in one and a half years I’ll probably take a year off and travel before starting work full time. This means that I have about two and a half years left in my poker career. Two and a half years is kind of an awkward time-frame. If it were ten years then the clear play I think would be to keep trying to move up. If it were only one year the clear play would be to just grind 5/10. But two and a half years…I’m not really sure. I guess I can see one of three outcomes eventuating:

1) I decide to just grind 5/10 forever and make, say, $400K
2) I go for gold, succeed and make a cool billion
3) I go for gold, fail, and wonder why I didn’t just grind 5/10

I’m terrified of the last outcome…

So yeah, I’m not sure where I’m going to go from here. I’m definitely not going to decide right now since I’m probably not thinking very straight, but I’ll definitely give it a good hard think while I grind this money back at 5/10. Yep, back to the 5/10 tables for me…