Grinding Away Tilt

Well I've been putting a lot of time and effort into improving my cash game, and I never realized that it was such hard work. I've spent countless hours studying lots of poker theory, like reading 2plus2 forums, watching tons of poker videos and going over my hands in poker tracker. Although this has helped me a lot, the one thing that I think has improved my game the most is probably grinding. That's right, grinding away thousands and thousands of hands at a certain stake before letting your results show that you're ready to move up. For some reason grinding has gotten a negative connotation. If I remember correctly, in the movie Rounders, the two main characters looked down upon the "grinders", people who play thousands of hands at the same stakes like a job. They wanted to go get rich quick, go win the WSOP or go on a rush in the big game. I have to say that I used to think like that, but in poker, as in life, there isn't really a quick easy way to do something, you have to put in your time and hard work to be succeed in anything.

Grinding thousands of hands at certain stakes certainly helps a lot in becoming a better poker player. First of all it helps players experience variance and how it shouldn't affect how you play. Plus over thousands of hands, one experiences it all: getting sucked out on an one outer, getting hit by the decked, not seeing premium hands for many many hands and so on. The greatest test, I feel though, is when a player eventually hits a downswing. Learning to deal with these downswings, I feel, is one of the major differences that separates the top poker players from the rest of the field. You won't experience the ups and downs and learn how to cope with losing money without actually putting in the necessary thousands of hands.

If people moved up the poker stakes the proper way, they would realize that grinding away at each stake teaches them something new: as the players get tougher different skills are needed in order to be a winning player at that stake. Basically you start off very fundamental and as you gradually move up stakes you have to start to become more perceptive and trickier as your opponents become trickier. You have to understand that the other players grinding away at the stake that you're playing, were most probably winners at the lower stakes that they play. Yes, there are recreational gamblers who play to gamble and are probably big losers, but in order to make money at various stakes, you have to be able to at least break even with the regulars if most of your profit at that level is coming from the donkeys at that level.

Although your poker knowledge will have to grow at each level, I think grinding will improve your ability to control your emotions at each level. I think that is one of my biggest leaks and probably that of most players. Basically at each level, you're forced to learn how to cope with losing X amount of money without losing your cool. This is absolutely necessary in order to become a winning player. I think I've read that most downswings last for roughly 5 buyins, and very rarely, one might experience a 10-20 buyin downswing. Your skill level, playing style, and stakes will of course affect how big of a downswing you'll likely experience. As you go up in stakes, the edge you have over the rest of the field will decrease, and that will add to your variance. Plus if you're a player that's very loose and aggressive, you should have higher variance than a player of equal skill that plays tighter, the theory is that you're compensated for this variance by higher overall returns. A player at the .1/.25nl stakes would have to learn how to regularly see $250 downswings, a 1/2nl player will probably see $1000 down swings, a 5/10nl would most likely see $5000 swings, and the highest stakes player at $300/600nl must learn how to deal with swings over $300,000 on a regular basis. These numbers are very rough guidelines and these are the "baby" swings that one has to deal with. In real life these swings can be much larger and will often be exacerbated by poor emotional control.

If somebody could play the same way and be emotionless even when one is losing money, their swings should be as tiny as possible. In reality, though, this is pretty much impossible. It's impossible to not let our present situation affect the way we play, however, I have found that the more I grind, the better I can recognize when I'm letting my emotions severely affect the way I play. I think this is because the more you play the more times you'll be put into situations that will affect your emotion. We all know that practice makes perfect, so you have to play thousands of hands against different opponents in order to practice coping with your emotions under different stresses. I have trouble keeping my emotions in check.

Personally, my biggest leak occurs when I lose money and for some reason or another I feel I absolutely must make back the money that I lost. This is often referred to as "chasing your losses". There are various ways to chase your losses. After a losing session at a certain stake, some will rationalize that if they move up takes, they can make back the money they lost at a faster rate. That makes sense, right? Except that the higher stakes are games with higher variance, and if you're losing money at the lower stakes, what makes you think that you can beat the higher stakes game? The way that I find that I chase my losses is that I will try to bluff out my opponents in many large pots, where it is highly likely that they have a good hand, and I'll find myself intentionally gambling as the underdog because I feel that I deserve to somehow suckout and get lucky. It's a vicious circle because as I lose more money, I feel compelled to make back the money that I just lost and I'll gamble even more.

One thing that I've recently discovered that absolutely infuriates me is when I lose a big pot to an obvious and obnoxious donkey. These are players who are utterly horrible, they play close to have of all their hands, however, they think that they are amazing poker players and aren't afraid to voice it and berate other people through the chatbox. For the most part I play my normal game against these players. However sometimes, when they suckout on me in a couple huge pots in a row, a switch goes off inside me. This is often ofcourse followed by them berating me or laughing at me in the chatbox. I know it shouldn't bother me, it's chat on the freaking internet, but I really let them get to me. It's perhaps my competitive nature, or perhaps even my pride, but I feel that I need to outplay and get back the money that I've lost to them and more.

I start to play horrible poker. I completely fall of my game and I don't concentrate at all. I bluff in positions that if I had time to think, are awful bluffing spots, and I try to get into as many big pots with these players to try and take their stacks. For example, I'll call big bets with a gutshot straight draw which has 10% chance of hitting on each street, because the only thing going through my mind is that I want to take their stack, or I'll shove with just a flush draw knowing that he probably has a pretty strong hand and probably will not fold. The only thing I can think of is hitting my card to take hi stack. I basically become a stupid gambler, which is something I don't usually do. My irrational and emotional decision making process starts to leak into all of my other tables that I'm playing on, and I'm basically giving away chips left and right. As soon as I "sober" up and realize what it is I'm doing, I've lost much much more than I should have lost. I start to play little better, however, not completely. Very rarely do I ever win back a reasonable amount of the money that I have already lost to the donk. He either has given it away to somebody else and has already quit because he lost all his money (plus mine), or he realizes that I'm no longer playing retarded and actually start to recoup some of my losses against him. He almost always quits right around here.

This has happened to me a couple times, especially when I was playing the lower stakes. This usually ended up in me going on some form of permatilt and I start playing awful awful poker. Whenever I win I can easily quit after an hour or two. However, if I'm losing, especially after a session where I lost tons of money to a donk, I can only think about making that money back, and the amount of money that I could have made from him if I didn't play stupid. Back when I didn't play much cash games what I would usually do is play winning poker, for the most part over a couple days or weeks. I'd get a couple hundreds hands in every so often but that's it. However, once I started losing, I would play for for hours and hours on end. I'd play for 8-9 hours plus determined to make back the money that I lost. Eventually I would either somehow make the money back, or more often than not I would lose a lot of my cash game profits almost overnight.

The reason why I bring this up is that before this year, I haven't had too much success in cash games because of my inability to control tilt. I never really had to learn to control this tilt because I never put in the time and effort needed to grind it out in cash games in order to become a winning player. I made the majority of my bankroll through multitable tournaments and sit n' goes where tilting does not affect your profits as much. For example, sit n' goes would last for at least thirty minutes and multitable tournaments would last for possibly hours. If I got pissed of I could only lose so much in a given amount of time. Plus, there was no way I could physically give me money to the players that really annoy. If I lost money to a really bad player, I could take solace in the fact that they probably are not going to cash because there are other players who should beat him for the prize. This is completely different in cash games. I could and actually did basically give money to horrible players that pissed me off. Another big thing with tournaments is that once I join it, the money is a sunk cost. I no longer have it, and it's pretty much gone. Plus even if I do play bad, I was never guaranteed the money prizes, so it wasn't too big of a deal. With cash games, however, the money you lose is money that you currently have. And I think this accounts for most of my inability to consistently perform well in cash games.

Up till the beginning of this year I would account for my lack of results in cash games to variance. There are ups and downs in poker, and I must just be experiencing them. Earlier this year SBRugby, Brian Townsend, who I think is probably one of the best, if not the best, cash game NLHE and Omaha PL players in the world, bought part of cardrunners.com and became a lead instructor there. He absolutely destroys cash games online and only started playing No Limit Hold 'Em around the time that I started playing in online poker. He used to be a limit player. He mentioned that in order to be a succesful cash player you must be acountable for your results. Too often you hear poker players who are losing money or are breaking even, and you hear them say, "Oh, I've been running bad". That pretty much takes the player off the hook, because it's not his fault that he's not playing well. I used to do this, and after hearing Brian Townsend say it, I reexamined why I wasn't making any money in cash games. I would have short periods of success followed by periods when I gave it all back. I realized then that a huge leak of mine was tilt control and I've tried to be aware of that ever since.

Although I'm writing all this in one day, I really want to get my blog up to date. So I'll add my next few posts in a sort of chronological order. I also think this specific post is also getting quite long.