My Stint as a Break Even Cash Game Player

I consider myself to a be pretty decent poker player. I've definitely made much more money than I've put in. However, the majority of my success has been in tournament poker. Most of my money has come from multitable tournaments (MTTs), some from single table tournaments (STTs), and before this year, I was pretty much a break even cash game player.

Poker players are known for overestimating their own abilities and perhaps even inflating their winnings. I don't think people do this intentionally. They either keep somewhat haphazard records, or I guess they don't want to consider that they're not as skillful as they would like to think they are. I'm guilty of both. I thought I had pretty good records of my tournament winnings. I keep a record on my computer, and I knew I was a winning player, but how much of one? Well, in my records I had myself as a huge huge winner. Using my records I can calculate my return on investment (ROI) for MTT tournaments, which is how much I should be making for each tournament I enter, and I calculated mine to be just over 200%. This was pretty amazing, and I believed it, too. I didn't intentionally leave out any tournaments to increase my stats because I wanted to gloat; I've hardly told anybody this statistic. I really wanted to keep an accurate database of my winnings, and that was the point.

Well, earlier this year, bluffmagazine.com came out with a database of all online tournament results. I signed up for it, because I sorta wanted to confirm my own database. I was shocked at how bloated my results were. I haven't gone through the math to add up all the numbers from the different sites I play, but I they calculate my ROI to be much closer to 100%. In fact i think it might be lower and close to the 80% range. This was a sort of wakeup call because it really forced me to reexamine some other "Truths" I held about my poker game.

I've always played cash games sort of on the side even when I played a lot of tournament poker. I reasoned that because I was a winning tournament poker player, I must be a winning cash game poker player. After all, it is the same game, right? Due to this "Truth", I attributed my lack of success in cash games to variance. It must be because I wasn't "running good". In other words, I got a bad run of cards, and there's nothing that can be done about my lack of success.
In fact, it's very common to hear that a recent string of losses, or lack of success, is because of a "cold deck of cards". After all, isn't poker a game of variance?

If you read my previous post, this attitude for me changed after I watched Brian Townsend's (SBRugby) instructional poker video on cardrunners.com. I have so much respect and admiration for him as a poker player, and from what I can tell he seems like a great guy. You can watch him play for $60,000 stacks daily on FullTiltPoker.com and I'm pretty sure he's already made more than a $1 million in poker this year alone. You can go to highstakesdb.com if you want to look up his actual winnings this year. He doesn't have to teach people how to play poker, he's already extremely wealthy. He says that he's doing it for altruistic reasons, and that he wants to give back to the poker community - I believe him. There's a large percentage of high stakes cash players who refuse to teach poker and give their insights into how to play poker, because they're afraid that they'll divulge some secrets about how they play to their regular competition and it'll eat into their profits. For that reason alone I have a lot of respect for him.

In his video, Brian Townsend's advice is that you need to take personal accountability of your results in poker. He doesn't deny the fact that variance does exist, but constantly attributing less than stellar results to a bad run of cards is not extremely detrimental to a players ability to improve. Yes, at times you will be given bad cards, however, most losses and downswings are much more often due to bad play than people would like to admit. This was the major step that I took to start to become more successful in cash games. I seriously looked over how I played, and started evaluating the way I would think of playing cash games. I started looking over all my old hands and tried to objectively evaluate them. I started seeing a lot of leaks, and general tilty play where I would call an all in or push all my money in at the most horrible points.

After realizing this, I have probably had the most educational three months of poker since I started playing. I've actually put in the time and effort into learning poker theory, putting in the hands to practice this game, and I am getting a lot better at controlling my tilt. Tilt still affects me, but nowhere near the extent to which it did before.

I know I've written a lot, but I'm done ranting for now. I'll be posting graphs of my poker results which will basically summarize my journey so far.