I think it's fair to say if you want to make a living playing poker, and not grind your face off for 60 hours a week, you need to be playing 2/5 or something similar where you can make $30- $50/ hr.

In the past, I've mostly taken shots at bigger games, but never played them day in and day out.

But if I ever want to get better and make money, I won't get there being fearful.

So I committed this entire month to play bigger. And I am playing awful.

I'm doing things I know are wrong, things I learned a long time ago, and I do it anyway.

I think this is the most frustrating thing about poker for me.

There isn't a single course, book, or coach in the world who can help you execute.

All coaching / studying does it makes you more knowledgeable, but how do you execute in game?

I will just have these "brain farts" where I can't think and I don't know what to do in a very basic spot.

How do you stop that?

I don't think there is a solution.

I want to be the best poker player I can be, but while I've watched everyone around me move up, I'm still stuck in the kiddie game because I just can do the right thing often enough especially in big pots.

Maybe I just need more reps, but at what expense?

I don't even like poker anymore. I've been playing forever, and its either play, do nothing, or start panhandling.

If I actually won and crushed, it might actually be fun again.

Even though I am educated, none of that matters.

I can barely get a $15/hr job, and I pretty sure the guy with the sign on the street corner is doing better than that.

I'm frusterated and fearful of losing more money. Money that could go to better use than to someone who has a job and doesn't need it.

I really have no idea why I am on this earth, and there is nothing anyone can say or do to fix it.

I hope I'm wrong, but I am sick and tired of who I am as I know it.

If this post is an accurate representation of your mental state, you are not anywhere near where you need to be mentally to play poker professionally. Sorry if that's harsh but pro poker is a serious endeavor so if you're considering it you need to get comfortable with hard truths. Few thoughts on what you might do to improve the situation:

- You need to seek professional mental health support. Everybody benefits from it, but when you're in a place where you're anonymously posting on a poker forum that you "have no idea who why you're on this earth, and there is nothing anyone can say or do to fix it," and "you're sick an tired of who you are as you know it," that's more than a little bit of a red flag. Talk to someone.

- If you don't like poker, don't play poker. You are going to put as much or more time and effort into playing poker professionally than you would in almost any other career. If you don't love it, it's not the right choice.

- If you don't like who you are, you need to a) love yourself more, there are inherent components of your identity that are independent of poker or anything else you do that are good and should be celebrated, and b) change things. Like it sounds like you're not happy with where you are in poker, so you need to do something different than what you've been doing in poker.

- Be brutally honest about how well you know poker strategy. You say you know the right plays you just make the wrong plays because of implementation errors. In 90%+ cases when someone says I'm good at poker there's just this XYZ mental block that prevents me from executing, they aren't as good at poker as they think they are. True because everybody can always get better at poker, and because you're playing 1/3 and 2/5, if you're decent at poker the opponents in those games should appear to be awful, because they are.

- Really understand the nature of the game. If you're playing professionally, at some point you are going to run worse than you ever imagined possible. Somewhere right now a winning player who has crushed his game for the last 5 years is in the middle of a multi-month downswing questioning whether he's any good or if he can continue. But needs to have the grit to get through that. If you can't fight through the way you feel right now, poker is probably not for you.

- Study more. If you haven't already spent a few hundred hours at least deliberately studying with active learning techniques, there's your real answer on why you're struggling. If you have, study more. Studying makes you better and builds your confidence at little to no cost.

- Develop a consistent decision making framework. A list of questions you ask yourself in every spot to determine the right action. Most people are adverse to this, I guess because it feels clunky and unnatural at first, but particularly if you're having genuine issues implementing things you know, this helps.

GJ, I saw a Psychologist in January who specializes in Peak Performance, and it has been a night and day difference for me. Moving up shouldn't feel different, and if it does, that's the area of your mental game that needs work. A good Psychologist will help you to identify the thoughts you're having in those key moments where you make the wrong decisions that you know are wrong. Then, they'll get you to think of the earliest examples in your childhood where these things happened. Once you unlock that, you should be able to play in the tougher games without a lack of confidence.

I've always had issues with tilt (which isn't some lack of skill thing like Mason spouts), and when I realized that my unhealthy views about competition in general stemmed from my father, I was able to get to the bottom of things. It's helped me to not only tilt like 95% less severely, but I still play men's league sports and it's helped me to not be a poor sport and complain to the refs as well.


I paid for 6 sessions at like $250 a pop, and it has paid for itself many times over already this year.

That's awesome. I will definitely look into that.

Not sure if this helps, but here goes...

I personally find it hard to maintain a stoic outlook about losing sessions when I'm only playing once / week, for about 6-8 hours. I know "it's all one long session", but it's hard to view it that way when I'm going through a 3-4 session downswing, torching 2-3 buy-ins per session, even though I know that's really not that much of a downswing.

There's a reg I've gotten to know in my local room, who committed himself to what he dubbed "$10k May" - he wanted to make $10k in profit playing, but more challenging, he set a goal for himself to play 300 hours that month.

Think about it - that's 75 hours per week, almost double the hours someone would work at a full time job. Last I saw him, about 3 weeks into the month, he said he had to back off that goal a bit, but he still argued it wasn't unreasonable.

He was playing tournaments, as well as 1/3 and 2/5 in a variety of rooms. He wasn't picky about the stakes or the structure, as long as he was playing.

Something I noticed, though, in a couple of sessions when we were at the same table, was that he was pretty stoic about being up or down for the session. Part of it was probably that he doesn't seem very prone to tilt normally. Part of it may have been that he started the month really strong, like up $5k in the first few days, creating some cushion for his $10k goal.

But I think a large part of it was that he was mostly focused on the big challenge of simply putting in the time he needed to, in order to hit the 300 hours goal. And I also think that he had simply been playing so much that being stuck $1500 in a single session just didn't faze him the way it would typically faze me, again, because I only get to play once a week.

I guess my point is, rather than shot-taking simply because you think you're ready, perhaps because you've been crushing lower stakes, consider putting in more hours at lower stakes.

First, doing that will give you more experience, which will benefit you when you do eventually move up. Secondly, even if your hourly rate isn't as good, you'll be putting in more hours. Third, you should have less costly downswings. Fourth, your bankroll will go farther. Fifth, you'll probably be playing softer games. Sixth, your confidence level will shoot up (assuming you're not losing).

Lastly, when you play more, each mistake taken in isolation will matter less, both in terms of how it affects your mental state, as well as how it affects your results.

On a more personal note, I felt a certain amount of self-imposed pressure to move up to 2/5 after grinding it out for years at 1/3. I saw friends moving up. They and others told me I should move up. I heard Bart Hanson and others talking about moving up, because of the higher rake at lower stakes, whatever. After cashing for about $11k in a couple tournaments, I decided to move up to 2/5.

And, honestly, it wasn't as much fun. I'm not trying to pay my bills by playing poker. I play for fun. I played in some fun 2/5 games, but more often than not, the games were filled with grinders, and just not nearly as fun to play as the typical 1/3 game. I played okay, stringing together a few wins early on, but a 3-4 session downswing basically torched half my bankroll, so I moved back down to 1/3.

What I realized moving down to 1/3 is that there's no shame in it. Like I said, the pressure I felt to move up was entirely self-imposed, but kind of stupid, if I'm not trying to play professionally. And also like I said, I see guys who regularly play 2/5 also playing 1/3, sometimes while they wait for a 2/5 seat to open, but often because they've also been having a rough go of it at 2/5.

Case in point - in a recent session, I played with a 2/5 reg who I'd heard had been on a massive downswing. Sure enough, he confirmed it, but then he absolutely crushed it at 1/3, at least during the time he was playing at my table.

Since I moved back down to 1/3, I've mostly been killing it. What few downswings I've had have been short and not that bad. I may move back up to 2/5 eventually, but I'll likely wait until I feel like I can withstand the downswings a little better than I did the first time I took my shot.

If you would like we can have a talk about your problems and see if i can help you. I am a performance coach and i work with poker players. I think i can help you with your fears of losing giving you another view to the situation. You can find me here https://discord.gg/hMumJb5F69.

Except I never said that tilt was caused by a lack of skill. What I said is that tilt is usually caused by a lack of knowledge which means that your brain can't understand why certain events at the poker table happen (to you). This is different from what you're saying.

By the way, your explanation of how you solved your tilt issues is consistent with what I've written.

Mason

Elaborate please.

You should get my book Real Poker Psychology - Expanded Edition and read what I wrote.

Mason

LOL, really?

You made a claim, I asked for more information. You then try to use this as a chance to sell a book?


Nevermind. If you don't want to support your argument with actual examples, I'll live.

I’ve posted many excerpts from the book on this website. So, I suggest before you make statements about things I never said, you find some of what I posted here.

Mason

You say that my explanation of how I solved my tilt issues is consistent with what you've written, elaborate.

Help me see the connection between me working on my core beliefs, (which stemmed from childhood events) and your book.

To me, that doesn't sound like a smart goal. Anyone can sit at a table for 300 hours. If 150 of those hours are winning using dumb luck, it's just reinforcing/rewarding dumb play. Trying to meet that goal might result in the same problem I had with trying to make my winning sessions goal.


This might only be a me thing, but I realized I had to change my goal setting. As an extremely goal focused biz consultant, everything I do in biz has goals attached to it. I literally coach small biz founders on how to set goals.

Sometimes, I've had to back up and realize that some of my poker goals aren't the right goals.

Bad goal for me: I was trying to break my record of 12 >$200 winning sessions in a row. It took me way to long to realize that's a stupid goal *for me* bc I'll get to 6 or 8 consecutive wins and then run into a bad luck, bad table, or bad me day and go on stupid tilt. To continue the streak, I would start breaking the rules of my strategy.

Like my rule is to only set mine with stacks that are 15X the bet. But if I was tilting bc I needed to get the win, I was breaking the rule. My thinking was that if I hit my magical set of ducks I could call it a winning day and go home. That just made me lose more trying to eek out a win that was only significant to my streak. If I was tired, I should just rack up and go, record be damned.