The Other Side of the Coin

Hey!

I won't bore you all with beat stories, as no-one ever wants to hear them. But I think I can now say the heater, just like the weather outside, is well and truly over. Let's just say that things haven't been going too well on the virtual felt the past few days but nevermind that. I just need to get the volume in, stick to good BR management and grind me back some profits!

John (Burnley Poker on the blog list) just pointed out about a really good value tournament coming up on Jokerst.., I mean Pokerstars.

It is a UK only $100,000 freeroll! You can satellite in for free or buy-in for a $ if you want to make sure you still have some hair left on your head by the end of the evening.

I just read a really, really inspiring post by Seabeast, one of the top MTT players in the world. In this instance, he is referring to people that get staked for tournaments, and I think he speaks a lot of truth. I want to be the effort and commitment in to eventually become one of the best MTT players in the world. I know i will take a lot of dedication, skill, commitment and effort but I'm going to keep at it.

Seabeast Wrote:

maybe my tone was overly harsh. it's not that i think that the types of people i was referring to would never make a dollar if they were able to play an infinite number of tournaments.

it's that i strongly disagree with the prevailing sentiment that just because someone reads the forums and decides they want to be a winning player, they are automatically a winning player.

not being a losing player is not the same as being a winning player.

it's almost as though people think we are all equally good because we read the same threads and register in the same tournaments, and that some of us just have to wait longer for our heaters than others.

eventually we'll all be rich, because lucky us, we all found the same automatic cashcow!

poker is hard to beat. it takes discipline, study, and self control.

very few people ever really take a large amount of money out of the game. this doesn't change whether they are backed or not, or whether they play tourneys, cashgames, or back other players.

you aren't a winning player just because you show up, even if you never make a huge spewy embarassing mistake, or play table games, or tilt off money like other people you know... even if you read 2+2 for two hours a day...

all that is still not enough. it takes more. profit in poker is GROUND OUT, it's not automatically there. it's a privilege. it's earnt, over time, not by *avoiding mistakes*, but by actually becoming a tough player.

there are some people making backers rich at their own expense, because they don't have the stones to deal with natural swings.

then there's other people burning backers' money, because they are able to convince their backers/themselves that they a higher skill level/more self control than they really do.

this is the nature of the game and the business... backers make money from the lack of self-confidence or the financial impatience of their better players (if you're a good player, going out and investing your first 100-200k in something other than yourself is pretty lol), and they engage in a mutually high variance close to neutral ev random walk with the rest (though some are obviously -ev from the outset and others will pleasingly grow into strong players over time).

the difference in skill level between a gboro or a zeejustin or a lilholdem and the average HSMTT poster is way, way bigger than most people think.

ultimately there's the 1-5% of people *getting money*, and then there's the rest.





Tomorrow I'll probably continue the grind and try to claw back some of the losses of the last few days. But other than that, not much to report (other than the final 9 coming soon in the WSOP main event - but other bloggers are more in depth in this than me!)

Cheers, gl at the felt all!