WCOOP Recovery
I should have just declared a blogging hiatus after the World Series of Poker.
A brief synopsis of my time since June: I bummed around the house feeling deflated for most of July, visited my girlfriend for a week in Detroit, where she was working on an auto-related reality show. I came back to California and spent most of the next few weeks in August staring at my computer, grinding FTOPS and other online poker tournaments.
At the end of August, I traveled to two weddings--one in Chicago and the other in New Jersey--and as soon as I came back to California in early September, I immersed myself in the next big poker series, the WCOOP, a three-week long series that almost rivals the WSOP in terms of effort and overall exhaustion.
My results have been good since August. Despite six WCOOP cashes (four in hold 'em, one in razz and one in NLO8) and zero enormous scores, I had a number of smaller wins that added up to a decent, post-WSOP upswing. Over 100K, but still not enough to reverse what has been well over a year of "running bad." I put that term in quotes, because when you are in the midst of a severe downswing, it's hard to pinpoint the reasons: To some extent, plain old luck is the biggest determining factor in tournament results, but results in turn have a large effect on one's confidence, which then affects how well a poker player functions, which of course plays a major role in results.
It's a strange and elusive relationship between results, confidence and performance, which are often not directly related to each other but never completely separated, either.
In any event, after almost three weeks of playing an average of 11 super-focused hours of poker a day, I feel deflated again, very similar to how I felt immediately after the WSOP.
During September, I did also win a package to the EPT London event that starts on October 2nd, so I have that to look forward to. And in a way, I guess that is a good illustration of the vicissitudes of this game: I am mostly disappointed in my poker career, but I usually have something, like this big London tournament, to look forward to. I am grateful to still be playing the game and still have opportunities to work through my career missteps and hopefully hold out long enough for the "running good/playing good" relationship to come together in a way that will make my past failings seem insignificant.
A brief synopsis of my time since June: I bummed around the house feeling deflated for most of July, visited my girlfriend for a week in Detroit, where she was working on an auto-related reality show. I came back to California and spent most of the next few weeks in August staring at my computer, grinding FTOPS and other online poker tournaments.
At the end of August, I traveled to two weddings--one in Chicago and the other in New Jersey--and as soon as I came back to California in early September, I immersed myself in the next big poker series, the WCOOP, a three-week long series that almost rivals the WSOP in terms of effort and overall exhaustion.
My results have been good since August. Despite six WCOOP cashes (four in hold 'em, one in razz and one in NLO8) and zero enormous scores, I had a number of smaller wins that added up to a decent, post-WSOP upswing. Over 100K, but still not enough to reverse what has been well over a year of "running bad." I put that term in quotes, because when you are in the midst of a severe downswing, it's hard to pinpoint the reasons: To some extent, plain old luck is the biggest determining factor in tournament results, but results in turn have a large effect on one's confidence, which then affects how well a poker player functions, which of course plays a major role in results.
It's a strange and elusive relationship between results, confidence and performance, which are often not directly related to each other but never completely separated, either.
In any event, after almost three weeks of playing an average of 11 super-focused hours of poker a day, I feel deflated again, very similar to how I felt immediately after the WSOP.
During September, I did also win a package to the EPT London event that starts on October 2nd, so I have that to look forward to. And in a way, I guess that is a good illustration of the vicissitudes of this game: I am mostly disappointed in my poker career, but I usually have something, like this big London tournament, to look forward to. I am grateful to still be playing the game and still have opportunities to work through my career missteps and hopefully hold out long enough for the "running good/playing good" relationship to come together in a way that will make my past failings seem insignificant.
posted by Shane Schleger at 10:24 AM
8 comments
