The Big Dig

YIPES suffered a gigantic meltdown this week. In the span of three days, I went from $150 to $70, effectively losing $80 in about eight hours of poker. The fall was amazingly fast, with beat after beat taking larger and larger chunks of my bankroll, and with each ten dollar drop accelerating the tilt I was falling into. The result: more than half of my bankroll flushed down the toilet after months of building it up.

In hindsight, I should have quit when I was down $25 or so. I should have walked away and not played a single hand of poker for 48 hours and reevaluated what was happening and if I could right the ship. But I got caught up in the whole “I’m down and there’s only ten days left in the month to get to the $160 goal” mentality. To turn the tide, I jumped into progressively larger and larger games. And along the way, I ran into some truly awful beats. In one day alone I lost to quads three separate times! And these just weren’t little quad beats, either. Take the time I had AA in late position, raised, and got reraised. We ended up capping pre-flop. The flop was A-K-8 offsuit. I bet my set and we capped again. Turn was a blank, I fired and again we capped. River was a second king, giving me aces full. Once more we capped the betting, with my opponent turning over quad kings. Making matters worse, this was a $1/2 game and I ended up dropping $24 on that one hand alone. Owowowowowouch!

I know that a beat like this is just the risk one takes playing poker. It’s all part of poker. In fact, I had the best hand (until the river) and got as much money into the center as I could. Up to the river, I did everything right. Perhaps I could have slowed down on fifth street and saved a few bucks, as logically, the only real hand the opp could have held was AA or KK (he was a tight/semi-weak player), but I was blinded by the boat I hit.

To be honest, even though it felt like an RPG to the belly, losing to quads isn’t what stung the most. What really hurts (in hindsight) is the fact that I was playing at limits WAY too big for my bankroll and thought I could get away with it. Swings are bound to happen, but when the result of a particularly big downswing is half of your bankroll, you’re clearly in a game bigger than you can afford. If I had been playing at the levels I was supposed to be playing at with $150 in my bankroll, I would have only dropped 1/3-1/2 of what I lost. Instead, here I am with seven days to earn back $90.

Okay, so how the hell do I intend to recover? Honestly, I don’t know. Go back to lower limits, grind away, play a bunch of single table SNGs, maybe play some $1 multis and hope I get lucky. Dunno, really. I’m playing today and I’m up already about $10, which, if I average every day will actually get me back to $160. Unfortunately, today is unusual in that I can play a fair bit and get in a lot of hands. The rest of the week isn’t so open for a lot of poker. All I can do is keep plugging away and hope I can dig my way out of this giant hole I created.

All-in for now…
-Bug