Just watched a video in which Gus Hansen describes winning $1M in three days of playing online. In the clip, he said that he had been on a losing streak for the previous two months and had been down a little over one million bucks in total. In the span of three days, however, he essentially erased the deficit and came back to zero. While interesting in its own right, the thing that caught my attention was when he mentioned that, for him, it was psychologically better to have lost the money and then won it back, bringing him back to zero, than it would have been to win a million bucks and then lose. In both cases he would have ended up with zero net gain to his bankroll, but he'd feel better about it in one case, and worse in the other.
This seemed like an odd statement, but the longer I thought about it, the more I realized that I tend to feel the same way. There is nothing wonderful about losing money and then gaining it back, but it really does feel better than the opposite. This is especially true if the losing part of the roller coaster was due to bad beats.
For instance, let's say you sit down at a cash NL table and get dealt rockets on your very first hand. You get a ton of action with the aces and manage to get all the money in preflop against one opponent. He turns over cowboys. Woo hoo! But then he hits his set on the river, felting you. You rebuy, and then spend then next hour grinding and bobbing and weaving and ducking and bluffing and feinting and stealing.... and end up with twice your original stack size sitting in front of you. The net result, however, is you've had a net gain of zero added to your bankroll. Grrrrr, you think, but then also think: well, at least I recovered what I lost. The bad beat still stings, but it's assuaged by the knowledge that you "got it back, dammit!" and "I guess I am a pretty good poker poker!"
Fine, but now let's look at the opposite situation. This time you sit down at the table and you don't get rockets right off the bat. Instead you get normal cards and just grind and bob and weave for an hour. You do well, and at the end of the sixty minutes you've doubled your stack. Woo hoo, you're thinking, I guess I am a pretty good poker player...
...but then on the last hand of the session you get those aforementioned rockets, the opp has cowboys, all the money goes in... and you drop back to your original buy-in amount. Grrrr, you think, that really sucked. An hour wasted! I hate poker.
Us human beings are funny creatures. The net gain (zero) is the same in both cases, but in one we feel OK about the results, while in the other we feel like we've lost somehow. In the former, it's almost like we're proud of how we've dug ourselves out of a pit, while in the latter we feel like we've given up something we had already banked on. Weird.
All-in for now....
-Bug
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