Quote:
Originally Posted by rtd353
i dont tell people i play poker because i dont play poker anymore. All of the winnings i have from poker i lost to the casino plus tens of thousands more. Not to mention countless hours of my life. I havent been to the casino in almost 2 months and already saved close to $4k. I have been investing my time at work and getting good at my job. Once i get $10k saved I am going to learn to invest. MTT_9797 is right. Unless you are the .5% who are big winners(not just grinding for rent every month, but you can ball out from poker winnings and still have enough saved for 10-20 years down the road for your future as well), poker is not worth it.
You didn't have a poker problem, you had a bankroll management problem, in poker and more generally in life.
I don't make much money playing poker right now, partly because I am a live-in caregiver for an elderly relative part of the week. But I have don't have much interest in casinos because poker would be my only reason to be inside one. I can play poker at the nearest poker room (1.8 miles from my home) or at the nearest casino that deal NLHE tournaments (103 miles.) The rake is the same.
I don't gamble, I just play poker. I don't get lottery tickets, play bingo, buy Super Bowl squares, or do anything else where the house has an edge, or where I don't think I have an edge. I don't sell pieces or get backed. My win rate might be less than a lot of other people, but when I win it, it's all mine.
I've been on a terrible downswing the last six months. I played a tournament yesterday where my best hand for the first half hour was T3, and it didn't get much better after that. I finally wound up all in with 12 outs and i lost to two overcards. I was short enough to shove, the play was right, the math was right (you're almost always getting the right odds with that many outs) but it was just another tough loss. It seems to happen over and over an over-- that's not observer bias, I have everything on a spreadsheet.
I'm discouraged, but I know if I keep making the right plays variance will even out at some point, and since I started at my current level with a bankroll of over 100 buy-ins (now under 80) it's not a crisis. If it doesn't turn around soon I'll just drop down to a lower level where I would have about 100 buy-ins and work my way back up.
As to barely making the rent money, that's not a crisis if you have some savings, in fact, what I've made would this year would be about enough to pay the rent but nothing else. But with my wife's income we're OK, we have money in a savings account and in retirement funds and I'm saving my family thousands of dollars by helping to keep my relative at home instead of at a nursing home.
My wife and I have made some pretty good decisions from the start, and poker is a part of that. My wife knew that I made some money playing part-time (she got most of it) and we discussed bankroll requirements, variance, and all the other implications before we agreed that I should give it a shot.
In poker, half the battle is making good decisions, at the table and in life.