An Open Letter to Drew Chapman

Drew, first and foremost, a disclaimer: I am not writing this to single you out or criticize you. I am writing this publicly because it it something that has been troubling both myself and Travis for some time now and we believe that you and others will be helped greatly by reading this.

Though I sympathize greatly with your most recent downswing, I am concerned that you are dealing with it in the wrong light. What I am referring to is your decision to upload your hands to Poker Luck Meter and posting the results of it.

Yesterday I decided to finally do away with my own EV calculator permanently. The reason? I can not think of a single time that it has either helped or reassure me during a session or afterwards. Though I believe that there is both a time and a place for such tools (which will be addressed in a future post), they are far more likely to be a destructive force in your career than a helping hand. You already know that you are a winning player and with your very honest reflective skills, you know full well the quality of your play in any given day. Having an imperfect tool spit back that information without consideration of your opponent or metagame history and based solely on information gleaned in showdown situations is only likely to make you feel victimized.

As any economist can tell you, the pain of a dollar lost is more than the joy felt by a dollar won. What this translates to is that the visualization of a bad run will make you feel much worse than the knowledge of having run well will make you feel good. Perhaps more importantly, it is the denial of reality in that Sklansky bucks can not be withdrawn to pay your rent or put food on the table.

Of even more to concern to me is that posting a bad EV run puts your excellent blog in serious danger of becoming mediocre. Postings of bad runs on blogs are fodder for the common folk. It also tends to draw a powwow of other people who are anxious to spill their guts about bad beats to whom they expect will provide a sympathetic ear. These people usually have nothing to offer and will threaten to take you down with with them. Your self-awareness and the ability to express it is rare and it is what has drawn you your followers and the great respect of your readership. Don't let that go away. Every bad run hides within it a very compelling moral lesson. Find that lesson, and mine it into gold.

Loss of Focus to Focus of Loss

Today I ended the session fairly early after booking my largest loss of the year to date of $1,400.  More importantly than that, this was my first loss of the month.  Since winning every session is not particularly interesting, I decided to "make" this an opportunity to write a new post.  But first, take a leap of faith with me.

WINNING EVERY SESSION IS BAD FOR YOU

Until you have experienced this personally for a large sum of money, you will consider this complete and utter horseshit.  I don't blame you.  Several months ago, when said Mr. Kruger was challenging the credibility of my results, he questioned (at least to Travis, who passed the message on to me) why I would not be at home playing day and night and enjoying the fruits of my automatic money machine.  This is a very valid question and it has many answers, but the first and foremost, and the one by which I hope to make you understand is this: you lose the hunger.

Here is my analogy.  When you go the entire day without eating and decide that you will order pizza tonight, you engorge yourself when it first arrives (at least I do!).  Those first few slices are amazing but as your belly gets full, the pizza, while it may taste the same, declines in pleasure and you quickly find something else that is more entertaining.  Though I have stated this before and it has been stated many times before (as the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility), the reason this is bad for you is that when the money rolls in, there is no urgent need to improve.

To this day, I can not think of any time in my playing career where I was truly focused during a rush.  The facets of my game where I need improvement are always present and I make a mental list of them, yet there is no pressing need to fill those gaps as long as you are winning.  However, when that downswing hits, you are forced to look at your performance for the session and make a checklist of all the things that you could have done differently and with the pain of loss, the hunger quickly sets back in.

Now I am not saying that this imperfection within yourself is something that you should strive to eliminate completely once you finally get to experience it.  No professionals are perfect, rather, they are just more aware of their imperfections and can bounce back quicker when they arise.