This time last year I was blogging about my turbulent year on Full Tilt Poker and, more specifically, a particularly brutal online session I'd experienced in January in Australia. In Putting My Foot in It, I basically wrote about how a drunken detour to my room, to change footwear, had resulted in a seven-figure downswing.
Obviously, the poker landscape has changed drastically since that night, as have the stakes I've been playing. Its quite sobering, for me, to think that, despite playing hours and hours of poker since, that my poker bankroll would still be higher today if I'd not played at all but could just eliminate that one session. Put another way, I could have played zero hands of poker since that night and travelled the world for the last two years, staying in five-star hotels, and still be better off if I'd just avoided that one fateful episode... FML.
Of course, psychologically, this is not really the best way of rationalising or thinking about my poker past. I know this, but cant help it. It means I'm in a state of permanent semi-tilt (and more often than not, it's not that semi). This is partly because I'm always trying to force my way back to my peak lifetime bankroll even if the combination of the games I'm playing in, my current poker ability, and the poker landscape aren't conducive to this. I feel that until I get back there I cant have any sense of real progress.
This type of hunger, to build your bankroll back to its maximum, on the face of it, doesn't sound too bad. The problem is that in order to do this I'm trying to recreate the types of swings I was having two or three years ago in games which are ten times smaller - I'm trying to win £20,000 in a £10/20 live game with only £10,000 spread around the table; I'm splashing around too much preflop in an attempt to inflate the pots, but getting picked off and three-bet too often by short stacks with stronger hands; I'm compounding this problem by calling preflop in spots where I know I should be folding but just cant bare to leave money behind to players that seem to me so unimaginative and undeserving of winning; and, whilst I'm on the subject of unimaginative players, this leads me onto another poker confession: I'm giving too much action to nits because they tilt me so much.
If blogging for Black Belt Poker has helped me in any way, it's helped me to examine this attitude I've picked up somewhere down the line that because I play a more open game (call it flair, spewey, whatever), I'm somehow more entitled to win. This of course can't be the case and it was in fact this nitty short stack technique I used in the £200/400 game against players like Ziigmund and durrrr that got my 'roll going in the first place.
So, in the context of poker confessions and a false sense of entitlement, my New Year poker resolutions for 2012 are to accept the following:
1. No one style of poker is more deserving of winning than others (the poker gods don't care).
2. What goes around comes around.
3. Nits need pots too.
If someone could please remind me of these when I'm at the Vic surrounded by a table of rocks all refusing to straddle, I'd be most appreciative :).