All Time Low: You Question Your Sanity (7.18.2010)

Around 4:50 a.m an eerie calm settles over me.  I realize I will never win.  I realize the 13 buy ins I just swung under EV in the last 3 hours will never be reclaimed.   All I could do was stare in disbelief as I got all of my chips in with the best of it again again and again only to be sucked out brutally each time.  Or to lose another unescapable coin-flip.  Or to be dominnated by the top end of a superior holding.  And sometimes I really question why I even torture myself like this.  To think that my luck has been so incredibly bad that the odds are now stacked against me heavily.  Stacked against me to even balance out in my lifetime muchless a few months.  You consider that perhaps you are that 1% that has hit the bottom end of a downswing so bad that you have been utterly defeated by variance.

As the opponent drags another pot you rewind the action in your head.  He shoved his stack on the flop over-betting with a gutshot draw and hit despite your large re-raise.  There is nothing to analyze.  You wonder if your opponent is even human.  Is a monkey sitting behind a computer somewhere just jamming keys and hoping for the best?  Has anyone else in the history of the universe ran like this?  You know anyone who has cut their losses and quit long ago.  Are you some sort of fucked up case study?  Perhaps the over-lords of the poker site are sitting around in a room somewhere laughing at you:  “Oh wow Bill look at this IDIOT can you believe he’s still playing?”

“Dude dude, let’s deal him AA and have it cracked by another 6T gut-shot, he won’t keep playing, it’s impossible”

Deep down you now realize that you aren’t actually “right” in the head.  For that matter, you never have been right.  For the past 6 months you have sacrificed everything and have nothing to show for it.  Sure you have improved drastically.  You have no doubt that if you moved away and played live you could earn at least what you do at your day job starting out (which you still plan to do).  But you actually have a nice loss online to show for it.  You have dropped off the face of the Earth.  Half of your friends will rightfully probably never even speak to you again.  Your dating life has been border-line non-existent.  For sure “you don’t have the time”.   Though in the back of your mind you wonder if it’s even possible to find a girl that would ever be willing to follow you, considering the path that you plan to pursue.  For some reason you don’t care. 

You tell yourself corporate is the enemy, in your mind it always has been.  But without corporate poker would have already failed a long time ago.  You would have no money to invest.  You blindly still choose the one path where you truly are “completely on your own” in every way.  You have the luxury of knowing some very successful people who are close to you.  But this is the one path they would never understand or support.  Any other path and you would be guaranteed success. 

The commitment on top of your day job alone continues to be brutal.  The hours of study have been never ending.  Your summer is basically gone.  Your dreams of escaping and earning your freedom are gone for the moment.  The beautiful Russian girl you could have met at the beach is dating someone else.  You have no one to blame but yourself.  This was your only chance out.  At least you tried, I suppose that means something.  You really did give it your best shot.  And despite the war you continue losing you remain defiantly committed.

You keep telling yourself that poker isn’t about the money when things don’t go well.  It’s about making the correct decisions hundreds of thousands of times.  And when the dust clears making all of those correct decisions will have paid off.  But you haven’t considered:  what if it never pays off.  Mathematically speaking you could theoretically make the correct decision 900 times and still lose 800 of them.  You aren’t a casino with an unlimited bankroll.

And you tell yourself that you could get out whenever you want.  But the scary truth is that there isn’t a stop point in the near future.  You have somehow convinced yourself that your life must revolve around making it work.  Every dollar you can scrape out of your day job during the next month or so you will continue to throw on virtual tables in the hopes that it all reaches a point of self-sustaining.  In hopes that what you're passionate about can materialize into something meaningful.  Then you can escape the horrors of corporate.  Then you can live the life you want and be your own man.  You see it as a necessary investment.  Is there really an initial price on giving yourself a chance to live with with a daily freedom and purpose that is acceptable to you?

Your pride could ultimately prevent you from choosing another path until you have hit rock bottom.  Perhaps you deserve to hit rock bottom.  Maybe you need to have absolutely nothing to your name to understand how fortunate you really were/are.  Then again if there is a time to hit rock bottom in your life it would be now.  No one said this would be easy.

The clock approaches 5:30 a.m as you decide to log.  You aren’t tilting or really tired for that matter.  It seems the action has slowed.  As usual a wave of fools have sucked out your money during the past few hours, distributed it around the tables to other regulars and gone bust.  Such is the way of your life.  Perhaps you should have just gone out for drinks tonight.  Perhaps you should have just gone out for drinks every weekend during the past 6 months.

Before you can log your AA on table 8 is pathetically drilled as a 9T offsuit all in preflop turns trip nines.  As if you haven’t suffered enough.  Not even in the last rotation before the blinds hit can you find any sort of solace, there is no balance.  In the past 12 hours you have lost on the tables about what you made last week during your day job.  Supernova will not magically fix everything once attained.  It will simply clear back what you have been screwed out of the first 3 weeks of this month.

Tonight you have lost -$591 in 6 hours.  It is now 6:30 a.m.  Tomorrow you will wake up around 3:00 p.m and try to prepare yourself for another session. 

You question your sanity.