Comments: The Newbie Circle of Death

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Great post!

I've been down this path.

You're missing the, "AGHHH! I QUIT!" Phase, though, for a month or so because of your neglect of the rest of your life and frustration with cards.

I shit Poker Chips too.

But I don't recall eating them...

-'rilla

So your saying don't get over confident and if your winning at a certain limit, stick to it until you are ready to move up?

Good advice Very Happy

Phase VII: Do I really suck?
JJ under the gun. Ya know, i would usually raise here, but with my luck, I'm probably up against kings or aces, so I'm just limping. Another lost pot. Another hand, hit trips on the flop, yes! I'm getting paid! A third diamond appears on the turn... aw crap, ya know Party Poker gives out flushes like there's no tomorrow, and shit, he just re-raised me! Is he bluffing? All my instincts are completely gone out of the window. No more confidence. The slide continues.

Phase VII: I was good, I promise!
How did I turn that $50 bucks into $700 in the first place? I can't believe I'm back where I started. Panic is starting to creep in. I guess poker just wasn't meant for me, but it sure did play with my emotions. I didn't think I needed a break, I mean, how does a break affect how you play the next hand anyway?

---
I'm right here....******* AAAAAGH! Where did all of my poker skills go????

wow...outstanding post. From my mind to u'r keyboard?....

phase I: check
phase II: check
phase III: check
phase IV: check
phase V: check
phase VI: check
phase VII: check
phase VIII: check
phase IX: check
phase X: check

It comes and it goes. One week every time you sit down you expect to leave $100 richer, the next week you can't hit shit and when you do you get sucked out on.

Thanks for the good feedback guys... (sticky worthy?) I just noticed I have two Phase VII's, probably because by the time you're in this phase you probably cant count anymore anyway...

Just to clarify, here are some of the mistakes I was making:

-Overvaluing good hands when I finally catch one. Was on a bad run for so long, that when I finally caught something, I played it too strongly and ended up running into a bigger hand pretty often.

-OVER Confidence - You think you know everything, so you start slowplaying more to suck more money out of pots. You try to start bending and twisting the basic concepts that built your bankroll to begin with. (Loosening up, calling down, bluffing, etc.) You start messing around with other things, seeing how many tables you can run at a time.

-Lack of focus, goes hand-in-hand with over confidence. You feel like the game is almost "automatic" to you, and you can sit with a laptop and watch TV in between good hands. Or you just sit in at a table for a few minutes to see some cards, and hope to get lucky. If you're ever "hoping to get lucky", then you're playing for the wrong reason.

-No patience (stupidest of them all) I remember playing one morning before work, and I really had to leave. After seeing people take down $4-7 dollar pots by betting without seeing a showdown for a while, I decided it was my turn to take a pot just so I could leave in the green, and I was betting/raising no matter what. Dumbest decision ever, someone flopped a boat.

-No more fishing. Table selection is one of the most important factors in being profitable. But once you get to a certain level, you expect to sit down at any table and turn a profit. And a lot of the time you know a table isn't good, but you just want to get back your original buy in and get out.

Sounds exactly like the last 3 weeks for me. Down to my last $25 2 days ago, got down to $8 and had to step back, take a look at what I was doing. I have come to the conclusion that this is a game that I will continue to be learning for as long as I play, whether I'm learning about the game or learning about myself. Been a pretty frustrating couple of weeks though. Question

Man, I always knew the internet wasn't secure but how the hell have you been watching me play poker the past 6 months?!?!

Great post. (I am somewhere between 9 and 10 at this point...)

Gah! That's me this week, down, down, down in the beating beaten sucks hell.

*Last edited by Les_Worm on Fri, 03 Jun 2005, 4:29pm; edited 2 times in total*

This alone is sticky worthy.

I just figured I would chime in here, and say I am still in the premature phases of this as but thats only because I am just about to discover the world of online poker. All games I play have been in person to this point.

However, Howard Lederer was just on a local radio station around here and gave this advice, "Walk away for the night, the game will be there tommorow".

Basically he plays large cash games at the Belagio whenever he is not playing in tournaments. He has a safe deposit box at the Belagio, he will withdraw a certain amount of cash and if he loses for some reason he is done for the night. Basically he said that if he loses then he is off his game and he just needs to go home and come back another day. Getting more money to spend that night is just bankroll suicide.

Of course he is light years ahead of us as far as his game is concerned but its still sound advice.

hopfully you are joking..............

Excellent post.

Once you come out the other side things look a lot better.

Great post! I really recognize myself here. A couple of times after a good run in nl25 or nl50 I have moved up and still multitabled which has evidently cost me money and made me come back down. Or if I have stayed at the same stakes I have started to become cocky and play too many hands, be overly aggressive against the non-bluffable fish and so and..

I've been losing a bit, still up everyday but my game really seems unstable. After reading this, I think I know where I'm going wrong..

i like your post!

I had stopped playing for a few months because of those very reasons. Ive been studying just to keep myself on the ball incase a home game came around. After reading this i have to give it another chance...

Great post storm!

I always find low if I take some beats in the ring games, low buy tourneys are a good way to work of some aggression. If you can snag a few chips early you can make peoples lives a misery pushing over the top, check raise bluffing and generally trying all the crazy plays you want.

In my (limited) Laggy play doesn't fly for me at $25 NL ring, the fish call me down. I'd rather camp, and hammer them with my good hands. I guess to play this way you need a great post flop game and good reads.

Luckily I just caught myself in Phase V: Here come the swings,so I'll keep that in mind.Thanks for the warning;you got me before my "too late" phase.

Rolling Eyes

That is classic, just went through all those phases. Wish I could of read that earlier...

Great post. Just so. Just so.
damnit.

Nice post, I went through pretty much all of that, except for busting almost completely out, i dropped from 700 to 500, slapped myself in the face and started winning again.. the psychology was exactly the same.

You should be a psychologist... its like the stages you go through when you find out you are dying

Thanks for that it made alot of sense to, me especially as im mid way through it. Alothough not on such a big scale...

Anyway thanks bud.

Mine hasn't been quite that extreme, but it happened to me too. I dropped 1/3 of my BR and started to question my game. It didn't seem like I could win for a few months. Just recently, I'm starting to win a lot more, so I'm somewhere around phase 3. Hopefully I don't end up on another huge downswing.

Nice post.

That is one fine analysis of what it's like to go through the variance and the growing pains of playing poker, especially NLHE. I had to completely bottom out and go on ultra-tilt before I could even rationally get a hold of myself and stop the bleeding of my bankroll.

Phase XI: F&%! It...
I could not catch cards for what seemed like weeks and when I finally did I was getting beat while I was holding the second best hand over and over again. I did the worst thing and moved up into stakes, beyond my bankroll, to try to make up for my losses (and I knew better). Using blind aggression to muscle people out of pots with hands that are prone to be dominated. Thinking that UB was rigged. Thinking I was entitled to win because, "I was just a better player". Which deteriorated into an, "I don't give a sh!t attitude". I'll show you POKER GODS! DAMN YOU! Finally just willfully trying to blow my bankroll, which I succeded in losing a third of.

Pure Insanity and loss of rational.

I don't recommend this for anyone, but I seriously think I had to bottom out emotionally. I think I had to have my ego crushed so it would get toughened up for the long haul.

Since my meltdown I haven't had a starting hand drought quite as bad as the one that preceeded that incident, but I have had my confidence and resovle tested. I had the second best set 3 hands in a row! I just didn't let running into a better hand affect me like it had in the past. Experience and having a deeper understanding of the nature of the game dictated that, "This too shall pass."

I recently moved up in the stakes and took such a winning streak that I thought I was 1 step away from being able to give away my job. It's hard to help concluding that you are a poker genius when you're on a huge rush. Of course that rush ended and it took me a long time to realize that that's what it had been - a rush - and I've lost about 1/3 of my bankroll in that time as I experienced the negative side of the rush and had more bad beats in a week than I think I had in the entire time before that.

So now I'm consolidating. I was getting so angry with limit Texas that I decided to quit it altogether for a while to get my balance back. Instead I've been playing limit Omaha hi-lo and Texas SnG's. My bankroll is creeping back up and I'm having fun again...and sometime I will go back to the Texas Holdem ring games with my head refreshed. The fun thing is important, and I am finding Omaha hi-lo to be a very fun game...which (surprise) a lot of people play very badly...

Great Post!

I am a new member but have been lurking for a while. I was going to post something similar to this as I have been through the cycle about 4 times, but you said it perfectly. After my last downcycle I reviewed my PT stats and see that I was overplaying hands trying to get back on track. Hopefully I can stop the insanity.

pizzaman, i gotta ask, who is that bird on your avatar?!? She is STUNNING!!

Luckily it took me a while to get through these steps. Three weeks after I started I won my first tourney...a freeroll at Dynamite Poker (R.I.P.) Got a whole 6 bucks. Their tourney for the winners the following Sunday I got lucky and won it so I had 26 bucks. A month later I got third in the quarterly tourney and got 400. Then I started playing too many hands. Bankroll got cut in half before i took a look at what i was doing wrong. I have had a few dry spells since then but nothing too major.

Man oh man oh man...I wish I'd read this months ago...Absolutely bang-on...

This site is full of philosopher kings.

This is too much. I have experience this to the fullest. Initially, I deposited $50 on Pacific where i would win a bit at .25/.50 level. I got my roll up to just shy of $100 bucks. Than i decided to go ino the $10 NL room where all of my ills have occured.

My first session in NL, i win $25 bucks in the matter of twenty minutes. I am a genius right! Move over Phil Ivey and David Williamson, I am the next young gun on the poker scene. Well, poker has a way of finding out what you are made from if you are not good or play a leaky game. And sure enough, that is what has happened. My bankroll is down to zilch, and I am sitting here comtemplating how to get back to a level of consistent winning. Ouch!

I have not experienced this. Unfortunately it also took me my first 8 months of playing to build my bankroll from $50 to $200. Yes. $150 winnings for 8 months of playing. I think I was very nervous and concerned in the beginning about losing my money that it took me a while to get over the hump of "I can't, *CAN'T* lose my buyin at this NL table" so it affected my play. So basically Bankroll Management was just about the only thing I really understood and excelled at right off the bat, since it is so simple all it takes is discipline to stick to your plan.
Three cheers for giving up the newb dream!!!! Hip hip hooray!! ....
Razz

I think I read this post just in time. After 10 or so months of really careful, patient, disciplined play that took my bankroll from $5 to over $1000, I had just entered stage 4 or 5. I think I was THIS close to squandering much of my hard earned cash by messing with multiple tables involving too much of my roll. The variance was getting a little extreme.

It's back to basics for me.

Thanks for the excellent post.

I just finished going through this... took my 75 deposit up to 100 then down to $30.

Now I've gotten my shit together and I'm back up to $50~_~

Good post... put things into perspective for me to get refocused.

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