Now I'm intrigued; where did we meet?? DM me if you prefer.

Oh, I figured it out. Sometimes I'm an idiot.

Subbed for later

Good decision, you will not regret it

Always disheartening to see you brick the WSOP karamazonk, but one of these years, I hope

Thanks for checking out the thread, danny, and thanks for the kind words, dub!


UPDATE:

I had a good month post-WSOP on and off the felt. Poker-wise, I continued to play mostly mixed games while playing enough PLO and NL to keep the rust off and try to boost my monthly profit expectation a bit. I can't make as much money playing mixed games, but they continue to be infinitely more fun for me to play and I'm starting to believe I can make pretty decent $ playing them even only playing up to 10-20 and 10-20 w/ a half-kill to 15-30. The PLO and NL games haven't been/looked that great lately, anyways, so as an added plus the opportunity costs of playing mixed instead of big bet have been low.

I've turned a corner in O8 and am confident that I'm playing that game better than ever while still being aware there's plenty of room for improvement. On the other hand, my badugi game is pretty awful. I understand how I could play the game better, but I've been struggling to be disciplined and end up playing way too many hands, constantly finding myself in spots I know I have zero business being in. I had the same problem with O8 for a very long time and am hoping it doesn't take similarly long for me to learn from my mistakes and adjust my play accordingly. In general, I am ultra-disciplined in PLO, fairly disciplined in NL, but struggle to stay disciplined in mixed games; I think it's a skill/mindset that, for me personally, I develop through cumulative experience.

This month, I made $1100 over 32 hours of OE (O8/stud8), $3,700 over 20 hours of PLO, $2300 over 37 hours of O8, and $600 over 16 hours of NL. I lost $300 over 27 hours of the larger mixed rotation (i.e., THORSE, badugi, razzdugi, etc.)

Off the felt, I am quite pleased with the last month. I meditated every day, spent a ton of time reading and listening to podcasts, watched a lot of interesting things on netflix (highly recommend Wild, Wild Country and The Vietnam War in particular), have taken some steps to get back into dating, spent a few hours cleaning my apartment (a big deal for me, since this is something I've historically neglected way too much), limited my time playing video games, and simply find myself much happier on a daily basis than I've generally been for the last two or three years. Most days lately, I wake up and am actually excited to meet the day, which used to be a rare experience for me.

Greetings Karamazonk,

I am grateful for the opportunity to both read this thread and learn from your experience. If I might be so bold, a few questions for you?

1. How do you deal with the feelings of fear when on an amazing heater? The fear of when this is going to end, it could end badly. Do you have a process? Do you just accept that this heater will continue and you deserve it?

2. Do you feel meditation has positively impacted your play on the table?

3. Do you still ever get tilted and what are the situations that do tend to tilt you?

4. Is there a way you have ironed out for properly banking winnings? Any hints on how to do the accounting part/keeping the most for you instead of paying the man taxes?

5. Who in your opinion had the best "soul reading" abilities, pure instincts and natural ability to "feel" things at the table?

6. Finally, with regard to the question above- do you feel that there are just some "special" people out there capable of poker on a higher level than others through gods gifts? People, who are just highly intuitive, empathic and almost psychic?

In closing, I don't think you realize how much people enjoy your story and how many people you are helping.

Thanks, danny, you're most welcome. Answers in bold below.

Good thread man. It seems we go through a lot of the same ****, you just write (and probably think) about it a lot better than I do.

Also, I meant to pm you, but since I'm here I'll just thank you now for your kind words in my thread. It means a lot coming from you.

You are killing it at life sir, I truly appreciate you taking the time to respond and I can't tell you how much it empowers me to know there are people out there willing to give their time to and help perfect strangers.

Toast to Karamazonk!

Thanks for stopping in and for the kind words; I've definitely felt the same upon reading your thread and have been following it with interest since the beginning. I was inspired by your well-deserved huge week and hope you can experience another one before the end of this season.

On a semi-related note, I've been getting back into baseball more and more with the Cleveland Indians' return to relevance over the last few years. The current incarnation of the team is so lovable and easy to root for. It's a joy to watch Trevor Bauer pitch when he's on like he was this week.

Thanks, danny, 2p2 has done a lot for me so I'm happy to return the favor. I wouldn't say I'm crushing life and in fact I think I have a long ways to go, but I feel like I'm on the path to get there.

Great read!

End of 2018 and Beginning of 2019, pt. 1:

I know it's been pretty dead here, and truthfully it will likely remain that way aside from any sporadic updates like this one, but I figured I would throw in a quick end-of-the-year update.

So, this past April, I wrote a long post regarding the situation I had found myself in, i.e., the most demoralizing downswing I've ever had.

I would like to provide some additional context for my mental state at the time. So, the first few months of 2017 (note: 2017, not 2018), I ran red hot, played very well, and I felt like I had reached a new peak of play with no end in sight. Despite only playing ~350 hours pre-2017 WSOP, I won $64k playing primarily 5-5 and 5-10 PLO for a beautiful small sample hourly of $180/hr. PLO had only gotten more popular locally, and that was a very good development for me.

There is a reason that, despite having done so well, my volume prior to that WSOP was quite low for the year. While I was at the firm, and for many years before, poker was an endless source of enjoyment and intellectual fascination for me. I had a seemingly infinite motor to play and think about the game. I played more during downswings, I played more during upswings, I game selected vigorously, I looked for every opportunity to make the most $, I could discuss HHs and player tendencies for hours, I paid attention to every little thing at the table. All of the limited free time I had while at the firm was devoted to poker, and it helped provide a distraction and mental sanctuary away from a miserable job situation. In short, I was happily obsessed with the game and it occupied a prominent place in my thoughts.

In 2015, I had my best year of poker ever and finished paying off what had been staggering law school debt, something I was able to accomplish sooner than expected after quitting my job in mid-2013. With that, one of my primary motivations to succeed disappeared; I no longer felt as much of a need to chase as much profit as possible. It was also around that time that another motivation began to wane, that need to prove to others (and perhaps to myself) that I could succeed as a poker pro. After a few years between 2007 and 2012 of growing pains of ups and downs and spectacular blow-ups, I had plugged my biggest leaks and sustained a high level of play over a very large sample and had earned the respect of other players.

Meanwhile, a trend continued where I did extremely well in the Midwest scene but failed to find much success in Vegas over repeated trips, nor in tournaments (lifetime pretty big loser in live mtts now). I think there are several reasons for this: a) I have run really, really bad in the aggregate in Vegas, b) I have never traveled well nor adjusted great when my everyday habits get disrupted, c) a lot of my success locally has come from adjusting well to my knowledge of players I have played a zillion hours with and understanding local dynamics of play; my fundamentals are good but my ceiling for success is nowhere near as high in games where I am less comfortable with the standard game dynamics or players.

In addition to that, it became plain to me a long time ago that the poker scene will only continue to get worse. I used to dream about competing against the best players in the world. When I was playing hu sngs and had become the biggest winner at the $55s turbo over a few months right before Black Friday, I had dreams of moving up to the livb stakes and doing everything I could to realize my poker ceiling. Over time, between my lack of success away from the Midwest, disappearance of the glory days of online, and declining future of poker, I lost motivation to invest much in my growth as a player and became content simply to grind out a good living at home. With my new attitude about poker, I found almost all of my obsessiveness gone, and I could suddenly imagine a future where I barely played the game, which had previously seemed unfathomable due to how much I loved it.

Finally, my spiritual disenchantment with the game only continued to grow as I watched people I care about lose way more $ than they ought to, to my financial benefit. I’ve written enough about this subject matter on here, so I won’t belabor the point, but this has always been the toughest aspect of the local poker experience for me and it got especially tough with the # of PLO players who play the bigger games being pretty small.

So, anyways, in early 2017 I was running great while feeling more and more disenchanted and bored with the game. Around mid-2017, starting with my annual trip to Vegas, an absurdly negative variance stretch of PLO and NLHE began that turned my boredom with poker into visceral disgust. Having already lost the biggest pot of the year and biggest pot I ever played to a one outer (somehow during the halcyon early months of 2017, so I could have run even hotter by a significant amount), I returned home from Vegas and got 3 outed for the second biggest pot I played of the year. Meanwhile, I found myself getting increasingly annoyed by several developments in the local PLO game that I don’t want to discuss on here. All in all, PLO locally, as profitable as it had been for me, had become extremely unfun and I found myself playing less and less of it despite it being my best game and by far my highest hourly of any game I could play at home.

I couldn’t fully admit it to myself at the time, but I didn’t want to play poker at all any more yet was not ready to make the transition away from it. I found myself grasping for solutions and found one that seemed interesting where I could sustain an income and possibly have fun in poker again: mixed games. Unfortunately, the only games that ran regularly were pretty small (10-20, sometimes 10-20 with half kill to 15-30). Nevertheless, I jumped into these games hard and they started to constitute the bulk of my still pretty modest volume. To my delight, I found they were serving their purpose well in terms of poker being fun and intellectually stimulating again. As an added bonus, I found myself falling in love with the fast pace of play and laid-back nature of fixed limit poker. The whole table always seemed to be having way more fun than the NLHE table across the room. Unfortunately, I was playing the games too much to have fun, and was winning only modestly in the games for months, playing too loose and gambly despite having a pretty good idea of how to play the games better. Meanwhile, I continued to run pretty bad in PLO and NLHE when I played them, and continued to find myself wanting to do anything else but play those games, having very little fun with them compared to the past or what I was experiencing in the mixed games.

Suddenly I blinked and almost a year had passed since the 2017 WSOP, and I found I had by far my worst 12 month span of poker ever since becoming a pro five years earlier, in stark contrast to the sick run immediately prior to that. In addition, my personal life had become a trainwreck and I was as depressed as I had been in a long time. Due to some physical issues, I had to stop working out and while still healthy and eating well I missed the benefits of working out. I was reading and meditating less. I was spending way too much time playing video games and being a shut-in. I tried entering the dating world again but hated everything about it again. I desperately wanted to make progress out of poker but it was proving difficult as inertia had set in and I had entered the territory I have recently seen described as no man's land, where I knew I wasn't happy but wasn't feeling enough pressure to change the still lifestyle-comfortable status quo.

Anyways, all of this is what led me to deciding I was in a bit of a crisis situation that I needed to get out of and what led to my April post.

I have stop writing for now, but will follow up with a part two soon.

Great post thx for the update. If it makes you feel better I have struggled with many of the same things as it relates to poker over the years. I think your whole progression from having a strong passion/love for poker all the way to hating the grind/variance is a very natural progression for most of us. Idk about you but for me personally I'm not someone who loves gambling all that much. I love that poker allows me to make a great living from a game and have a great lifestyle with flexibility, but I hate dealing with the variance and it really is a big part of what wears me out with poker. A great example of that is this past summer I ran super deep in the $300ish online wsop bracelet event, ran super good the whole tourney, but at the end with like 20 people left I lost a huge pot aipf with AA to 88. In a tourney with 150k up top that just knocks the wind out of me because you don't get those opportunities very often. I'd imagine that you getting 1 outed and 3 outed in those huge pots probably caused similar feelings. Especially with live cash you prob just will not get that perfect storm of events very often where you get it in as a huge favorite for a huge pot. But yeah I think frustration with variance builds over time and helps to wear out the passion for poker over time, along with the fact that naturally doing anything for a long time will lead to it getting a bit stale for most.

And I also struggle with the same thing in terms of some desire to move on to other things but also wanting to hold onto the poker lifestyle. And obviously as of yet I am still playing poker. It can be hard to leave something where you are making good money because of course the grass isn't always greener. Am I remembering wrong that it was you that was trying to learn some coding at some point? If that was you how is that going?

End of 2018 and Beginning of 2019, pt. 2:

As I detailed in my April post, after deciding I was in a crisis situation I finally took some definitive steps out of the rut and started to enjoy life again:

I’m happy to report that, not only did this positive momentum continue in my life through to the end of the year, but that it was reflected in my poker results as well and, even though I had my worst calendar year as a pro, I salvaged what had started as an alarmingly bad year by my standards.

Despite the early runbad in them, I ended up posting very good hourlies in local big bet games for the year, albeit due to all of the factors already discussed my volume in them was quite low:

PLO: +$91/hr over 267 hours playing primarily 5-5 PLO and 1-2 ($5 bring-in) PLO
NLHE: +$72/hr over 83 hours playing 2-5 NLHE and deep 1-2 NLHE

Ironically, I think I ended up running pretty well in both PLO and NLHE for 2018 overall. Any sense of running bad in either game has long faded. I’m still struggling not to get bored or revert to autopilot mode a lot of the time when playing in these games, but even autopiloting I can do pretty well.

My proudest poker highlight of the year is how well I did playing O8. I went from feeling pretty bewildered to how to play the game about a year ago to way more comfortable playing it, and it was the poker variant I enjoyed playing the most in 2018, thanks in no small part to a neat community of people I didn’t really know that well a year or two ago but are now some of the people I most enjoy playing poker with.

O8 local hourly in 2018: +$44/hr over 322 hours, all 10-20 with 15-30 half-kill. Filtered for the last 250 hours, it’s just shy of $50/hr.

The poker lowlight of the year was undoubtedly the quality of my play in mixed games that weren’t O8 or stud8. I played ~175 hours of these games (usually some mix of O8, stud8, LHE, stud hi, badugi, deuce to seven triple draw, razzdugi, razz) and booked a small loser overall (-0.4 BB if I had to guess; my filters are all messed up for these games since I tried to be faithful to the actual mix of games played and there were a million different variations). I probably ran below expectation, but without a doubt I also made a ton of mistakes and played worse than I am capable of. While these games are really fun and especially interesting on an intellectual level since I still feel like I don’t grasp most of them very well, I decided I could no longer count them as legitimate poker volume if I’m not capable of making at least $30/hr in them, which I don’t think I am. The opportunity costs of playing these games versus other games is very significant and I’m no longer willing to be okay with that if I want to continue relying on poker for income.

I ended up having more fun playing poker this year than I have any year since probably 2015. I really wish more big bet players would be willing to give mixed games a try. Hands fly and you’re typically making way more meaningful decisions in an hour than you would in a big bet game, there’s a ton of friendly chatter at the table and more diversity in personalities (or perhaps it just appears that way because people are so much more willing to talk during hands), the vibe is much more chill and conducive to friendly needling, the variance is much lower and your hourly over a meaningful sample is much more likely to be closer to your true hourly than in big bet, and if you have any clue at all how to play them you’re probably winning.

Going forward, I plan on playing less mixed games that aren’t O8 or OE and replacing that volume with big bet games. For my last 600 hours of local play, in my bread and butter games of PLO, NLHE, O8, and OE, I made +$66/hr. If I can simply maintain that kind of hourly while putting in reasonable volume, I will be quite pleased, even if it’s less than I had been accustomed to making. I could be looking at mixed games from too rosy a perspective right now, but I really like the idea of the stability of limit games being a form of variance insurance when one is putting in a decent amount of big bet volume as well. Despite the fact I have now played over 10,000 hours of poker, the swings still affect my everyday emotional livelihood quite a bit (I may be more susceptible to that than most poker pros), and the more I can lessen the impact of negative variance the better.

Re: life, I don’t want to discuss all of it on here, but I’ve had a decent amount of exciting stuff going on and I’m excited to see where things lead. As I mentioned previously, one of the things I’ve been doing in my free time is writing. I had been feeling a calling to write for a long time but had been ignoring the itch. Around April, I reached out to bob_124 aka Ben Saxton, my favorite poker writer (hell, probably everyone’s favorite, see: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...r-u-s-1334833/) for some guidance on getting the ball rolling, which he generously bestowed. Upon Ben’s suggestions, I committed to writing X hours/week for a couple months and ended up writing a lot of content.

Among what I worked on is a poker piece that I am proud to report was published in the 2p2 Magazine this month, entitled “Cool Bad Beat Story, Bro” :
Cool Bad Beat Story, Bro

I noticed that there was a void in poker literature regarding bad beat stories, that poker tradition that we all know and hate, and I wanted to give a go at addressing why bad beat stories have become such a prevalent part of the poker social experience and attempting to discourage their use. Please feel very free to send the link to your bad-beat-telling friends! I continue to prefer that my name not appear in this thread, so please don’t out me as part of any discussion of the piece.

Anyways, I ended 2018 feeling really good about the year, mostly because the second half of the year was so much better than the first half in every way and I had succeeded in dragging myself out of a bad rut. I feel very fortunate to have turned things around and plan on keeping it up. Poker continues to be secondary to me, but I will continue to play for now, and fortunately I've been enjoying it more.

I can identify strongly with everything you wrote and think you hit the nail on the head with the bolded sentence. I think we may be in the minority of poker players, but I’ve never enjoyed gambling either, which has been the cause of a lot of friendly needling from gambly friends who don’t understand why I would opt out of credit card roulette.

Re: coding, yep, that was me, I took a free intensive MIT EDX python course for a few months and treated it pretty seriously. At the time, the experience was a barometer for whether I wanted to enroll in a coding boot camp. I enjoyed it and it definitely seemed like something I could do for a living and would be nice to have in my back pocket as an option if other things fail, but I couldn’t envision a future where I excelled in it or wouldn’t get bored doing it after so many years (though maybe that’s inevitable w/ most things).

Good write up, glad to hear you're enjoying life on and off the felt again. I think the majority of pros vastly underestimate how much a balanced and fulfilled life away from the table affects their enjoyment of poker. Therefore, it's no surprise that once you started intentionally focusing on improving your life, you started enjoying poker again. Congrats!

I'm curious for you and Tyman....how much of your accumulation of disdain for variance over time do you think is a result of purely just the temporary downswings and bad beats/other results of variance? Or does it have anything to do with being under more financial pressure (lifestyle inflation/bigger monthly nut) these days and perhaps a smaller bankroll than earlier in your career? I've noticed the same sentiment in a couple other long term pros too, but they have been financially stressed.

Cause I feel like it should be the exact opposite, and it is for me (11yr pro). I feel I understand the nature of variance better than earlier in my career, as well as have a much better overall mental game and therefore handle it way better.

But who knows, maybe its my results the past few years and I just haven't experienced enough negative variance lately that's given me a bias? Would love to hear any other long term (4+ yrs) pros thoughts too.

For me it's definitely not a financial pressure thing at all. I've been smart and careful with my money over time and done well enough that I am generally pretty set at this point. I wouldn't say I'm set for life but barring something terrible happening I have saved enough that I would be fine even if poker were to disappear tomorrow. I also have very reasonable monthly expenses which helps. I know a lot of poker players tend to overspend especially during periods of over expectation results. Personally that's luckily never really been a problem for me. If you aren't saving up a lot of money than poker as a job is a pretty big mistake imo, because the poker economy is def getting worse and starting at the bottom somewhere later with no money doesn't sound fun.

I agree about having a much better understanding of variance after playing so long, but tbh I think that actually has the opposite effect on me. Knowing the extreme insanity that variance can be in this game just isn't a fun thought. Obviously you can end up on the good side of variance as well but there will always be negative variance and downswings. My mental game is actually really good in terms of my actual play. I don't play much worse or play more hands or move to higher stakes or whatever else chasing losses (which for a pro should obv be pretty standard stuff to not do). It just ends up taking some of the enjoyment away from poker because I know there will be many days where I put in a hard days work but end up with the feeling of moving backwards (even if I moved forward in terms of ev).

I also worry about how fast things seem like they can change. I've had a great last 10-15 years of results in poker but past performance doesn't guarantee future performance. Rake has been raised over time, players have gotten better, rakeback has been reduced, and at least as a US player the whole landscape of being an online grinder today is sketchy sites and apps with lots of software bugs. My winrate is still strong but who knows what changes will continue to happen over time. It's a delicate balance of being confident in your abilities while also being self aware enough to know that you aren't invincible. I'm sure plenty of the crushers in poker from a decade ago didn't think they'd ever stop being better than the competition and some of them probably lost a lot of money before they realized the economy had changed for them.

And last thing I'll add to what has somehow turned into a ridiculously long post lol, is that these big spots that can come up in a poker career (and even just in other areas of life) are such deciding factors of where you end up. This is especially true in terms of tournament results. Imagine how the trajectory of Jason Mercier's life changes if he doesn't bink off one of his first live tourneys for 1M+. There are a bunch of grinders out there who are all similar in skill but some % of them get a big break bink and many of them don't. Sean Snyder was talking about this in his most recent post in DGAF's thread in terms of how huge an effect a small % of big pots has on what his yearly results look like. tldr variance in poker and life is crazier than we think. Sorry this was so long!

Solid updates Karamazonk and nice to see this thread active again with this variance discussion

Great post tyman...I’ll start by start by saying congrats on the saving over your career. Sounds like you’re in a great spot and have numerous (maybe more?!) years of living expenses saved up.

I agree with your general sentiment about the craziness that variance is and for sure almost everyone in poker underestimates it. Especially with some of the stuff you mentioned like tourney binks, running hot at beginning of career and the slingshot effect that can have, as well as of course live only players like Sean Snyder who chooses to play a huge range of stakes and games that opens himself up to crazy variance from year to year, or even over a career.

But how does all the above effect you specifically whatsoever currently? Don’t you mostly play online and like only between 1 or 2 different stakes?

*btw if clogging up thread can obviously just move discussion over to mine, or just end it altogether too.


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Oh I forgot to address the part where you said you get less enjoyment because some days you know you will run bad and not get rewarded for your effort. That’s short term thinking, not long term. That doesn’t sound like you fully get variance on a subtle and deep level.

Also your paragraph about games dying and the changes to the industry. That’s not really same topic as variance and the accumulation of bad beats over time though.

Thats just a fear/paranoia thing that’s common in a ton of industries but even more so within poker it seems. Every year for a decade plus it’s been poker is done. Remember like 2014 when it was all really supposed to be dead soon? GTO! Then solvers in 2017! But it’s 2019! and even online there are still great games. Let alone live poker. Of course it’s harder/players are better, and you have to do more things to keep your edge/find good games. The market has become more efficient. But poker isn’t gonna just die in the next few years. My suggestion would be to really question your assumption that poker really is changing so rapidly and might end soon.

Sorry end of rant, but I bought into this misconception year after year until lately. Not gonna go into how I realized it was wrong or why bc I said end of rant and I need to get my old ass to bed lol.

*plus who the **** wants to solely play poker for a living for another 15+ years anyway, right?!

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Yeah idk whether karamazonk wants his thread cluttered with this discussion. I guess I'll answer this one here and then karamazonk can let us know if he wants us to move it elsewhere when he checks in on the thread.

Thx for the congrats, although obv it's something everyone should be doing no matter their profession. Just especially important for poker players with the resume gap and the way the poker economy is going. Yeah I could live for many many years on what I've already saved, although obv goal is to continue to make money lol. Having just turned 30 and wife not far behind I also imagine prob having a kid in the next few years so hoping to save up as much as humanly possible before that huge expense and lifestyle change lol.

So these days those variance things affect me more intermittently, but unfortunately they still occur from time to time because randomly really soft bigger games will be going or I'll have a deep tourney run. As mentioned above this past summer I got like 20th in the wsop online bracelet event after losing AA to 88 aipf for a pot worth 2nd in chips and 150k up top. That really really stung lol. I ran like god that entire tourney up until when it mattered most. And I've unfortunately had a small handful of those situations throughout my career where I ran very very deep with life affecting money up top and ran very badly to bust for a small bink. I'm not a high volume tourney grinder and those spots just don't come up very often and running better in those spots for obvious reasons would have been very beneficial. And just to be clear no one deserves to get there and run good any more than any other person, but that doesn't make it suck less Another recent example was that early this year I was on a very soft asian app. There was a lot of pretty damn soft $3.75/$7.50/$15 blind straddle games going. I broke about even in them and was easily 25-30k below ev and unfortunately that particular asian app got shut down. I ended up having a pretty great year but obv adding 25-30% ish to the yearly total is signficant. But yeah unfortunately there was no way to answer that question without some bitching about run bad. This stuff has way more significance in the life of a tourney grinder, but is still something I have to encounter from time to time.

Idk if you follow Benabadbeat's thread but he's a long term very good player and has friends that are also very good players. And he's on like a 300k hand breakeven stretch. Granted US games are softer so things shouldn't ever get THAT bad, but just the idea that there are great players out there playing not even that high of stakes and a normal part of that is multiple hundred thousand hand breakeven stretches is just deflating to me a bit tbh. It's probably better to know what's possible but I think it was more enjoyable to be ignorant about it. It wasn't even THAT many years ago that we all thought 20-30k hands was a decent sample for what someones long term expectation was.

I think you can understand variance and still feel negatively about it. Like I have a decent idea of what my ev hourly probably is when I'm grinding, but knowing that doesn't make me want to have to go through the ups and downs in order to end up there. Even if someone were to only grind one stake all year, let's say 1/2, and in good games, there is still going to be a big disparity in results between the best running version of themselves and the worst running version of themselves over that year. If I could pay someone 10% of my hourly to get 90% of my hourly variance free I'd for sure do it.

When I say poker is dying I just mean to the extent it eventually becomes a waste of time. That point will be different for different people of course. I don't think online poker is done, but I think hourlies will continue to shrink over time. In my personal opinion, and in terms of what makes sense for my life, I would not find playing poker worth it if I can't make a certain amount per hour. I really don't think anyone can honestly look at the direction online poker is headed and feel confident that it has a long future ahead of it as a viable profession. Live poker is a totally different situation. Hourlies have shrunk there too but I think if you're willing to grind mostly 2/5 and grind out somewhere around $30-$50/hr, that'll probably be available to people for a long time to go. Personally the idea of being a full time live grinder sounds pretty awful to me, unless I could grind something like 75/150 10 game mix forever.

*Sorry your thread is getting super cluttered karamazonk, I'm sure a mod can move it to mine or IntheNow's thread if you decide you want it moved.

No worries about thread "cluttering," especially when it's in the form of solid, well thought-out posts like the ones above that are relevant to my recent update. Y’all are welcome to keep them coming as far as I am concerned.

Thanks for popping in and for the kind words, IntheNow. Again I can identify a lot with what Tyman has written in response and it sounds like the two of us have had similar conclusions after playing the game so long. Logically, one would expect more experience playing the game and more knowledge regarding the nature of variance to lead to better emotional insulation against negative variance, and I’m sure that it has for many other poker pros such as yourself, but in my personal experience that unfortunately hasn’t been the case.

Over my close to 7k hours playing live cash games as a full-time pro, I’ve had at least three pretty brutal downswings (averaging ~600 hours), and each one has exacted a pretty severe emotional toll. While at the table I’ve gotten better at not letting a downswing affect the quality of my play too much (even though I’m sure it still does), it’s more the quality of my life suffering away from the table that troubles me. I find that feeling of being in the grip of a downswing deeply unpleasant, a kind of persistent spiritual malaise that plagues my everyday enjoyment of life. I say all of this as someone aware that “downswings” are simply large clusters of hands where the aggregate result has seen the player run well below expectation and as someone aware that the outcome of the next allin has nothing to do with “how I’ve been running” and continues to be determined by random chance. Nevertheless, the malaise defies my own rationality. I still feel anxiety heading into the next session despite knowing the poker gods do not have any memory regarding recent sessions.

My low emotional tolerance for downswings has become a worse problem in the sense that, with the first couple of serious ones, the downswing had the effect of making me play more since I still had a lot of financial (paying off loans), intellectual, and ego motivation to play the game, whereas with this most recent one, already feeling way less motivation to play poker in general, I found myself wanting to do anything but play poker. This most recent one lasted close to a year and it had a lot to do with why I felt like this almost yearlong period was one of the worst stretches of my adult life.

I think I’ve mentioned this in previous posts, but it’s important for me to note that examining my results overall I think I have run just fine, and I can probably match every long stretch of negative variance with a similarly strong stretch of positive variance. But, the simple reality for me is that the downswings suck way harder than the upswings feel good, and like Tyman I would gladly pay some amount of variance insurance at the expense to my bottom line. My hope for this year is that I get plenty of volume in both big bet and fixed limit poker, and that the fixed limit poker helps offer a buffer to ease any negative variance that comes from big bet.

To address your question re: whether my personal financial situation has anything to do with negative variance anxiety, in my case the anxiety is unrelated to my financial situation. Ever since I paid off my law school debt a few years ago, I’ve had pretty low living expenses, I’ve been good about saving money, and I’ve never felt close to financially stressed. I’m lucky in the sense that many of the things that are significant life money leaks for a lot pros don’t apply at all to me; I have zero interest in pits, sports betting, long-term staking, massages, don’t have a gf to spoil, etc. My bankroll is pretty robust for the games that I play and I can play 5-10 PLO comfortably and take shots or sell action at 10-25 PLO. To be fair, yeah, there is probably some anxiety in the sense that I want to leave poker soon and would prefer not to have any kind of big disruption to my liferoll, but I don’t think that it has affected my game selection or volume too much apart from the fact that I’ve opted out of playing some seemingly good 10-25 PLO games (more like, 10-25-50 b/c most hands straddled) that have run recently even though I’ve had offers from people who want to buy action.

Anyways, thanks to everyone who has responded to my update, and again please feel free to keep posting.

Ok cool, thanks for writing all that. I actually responded a to a bunch of what Tyman wrote in my thread, cause wasn't sure if you wanted it all here. Then forgot to mention it here that I did, lol.

I mean, I would snap take the pay cut for variance insurance too, the biggest benefit of that being able to mix a huge gap of higher stakes and not have to worry about losing at higher stakes and winning at lower.

I totally understand everything you wrote above and have lived through it myself. I think your post highlights a couple things about playing poker for a living. 1.) The emotional pain is brutal compared to most other professions. And it is very isolating/personal and a lonely thing. 2.) Our brains just aren't meant to understand variance and deal with gambling. Humans like to think of themselves as so logical, but in reality we just aren't at all. That's why poker really should only be a 10yr or less profession, but really for the vast majority, only played as a side hustle to make some extra money.

I do think during these long downswings there's few things we must do to hack our brains/emotions and it's always good to remind ourselves of them. 1.) focus on your life away from the tables, and have some other goals that your'e working towards that matter just as much to you as poker. I think that's probably the biggest difference between how players feel overall during a downswing or long break even stretch. 2.) make sure you are playing in games that you have a massive edge in/are one of the top players in for sure. That mitigates the snowball effect of running bad turning to playing bad etc. 3.) Long run, long run, long run, focus on that. Take the bigger picture/birds eye view. Because the fact we are letting these relatively brief periods bother us means on a subconscious level we must believe/fear that we aren't winning like used to, or the "downswing" (is it really even a downswing if we take the birds eye view?) will never end. And I guess to go along with that, be extra self aware in general with our thoughts and actions and where they are coming from and why/what they mean.

2 more things:

When you say less variance at fixed limit vs big bet, you aren't referring to NLHE, right? Fixed limit holdem, for example, has way more variance than NLHE. I assume you're referring to PLO?

Also, I'm curious if you don't mind sharing, do you know what your yearly expenses are now that your'e student loans are payed off? And have you said what state you live in? No worries obv if don't feel like sharing or don't know expenses exactly.

He also plays some other games like stud8. Stud8 pretty sure has the lowest variance of all the regular games played. But it would make sense if he means in relation to plo also.

Thanks for another quality post.

Re: variance buffer, I was referring to O8 and stud8, which are the mixed games I'll mostly be playing in the near future. There is way less variance in one's results for both games than either PLO or NLHE.

I live in the Midwest (Ohio). I spend a little north of $2k/mo on expenses but could spend even less and plan on trimming some expenses like basic cable soon.