No point in sugarcoating it: I’m near busto.

Near is a keyword, though.

This year has been a rollercoaster that unfortunately has a valley that is about the size of my bankroll. I started out OK, and reached a high point sometime in June. After that, I went on a three month downswing where I either lost big or kept myself just afloat. No real big winning sessions for three months. Come October, I felt hopeless. I had moved down from 5/10 to 2/4. My bankroll was a third of what it was in June.

Then October happened. I ran good at 2/4 for almost the entire month and I rebuilt some of the lost money, although not that much in the grand scheme of things. Still, I felt that I was back on track. I felt GOOD about poker. I liked it. I felt that my come-back was up.

But now it’s mid-November, and my nuts can’t take much more of poker kicking at them. I’m now down to 10% of my June bankroll, and I’m no longer actually within my own bankroll requirements of playing even $1/$2. This happening after October going so well seems like telling a fatally ill patient that he’s cured, and then a few days later go “oops! my bad, I mixed up the charts. You’re still dying.”

I’ve lost sick amounts of big bets every time I’ve sat down. I’ve played occasionally well, and gotten beaten in a way that makes me realize how much the poker gods must hate me (three days ago, I flopped three sets in 50 hands and lost each time), or I’ve gone on monkey tilt and instead of drawing out on the other players - which seems to be happen to every maniac who plays against me - I’ve actually had to pay up for playing poorly.

In summary: I can’t win. I’ve tilted off a large portion of my bankroll, but the tilt wasn’t without merit, so to speak. Still, now I need to find a way back and it’s going to be difficult. The difficulty is compounded by my near-completion-status of PokerStars Supernova, which would grant me a $1500 cash bonus (sort of). The reason this makes it more difficult is that if I want that money, I can’t just lay off poker for the rest of the year; I need to actually get my shit together and play the required 15k hands or so that are missing.

Anyway.

Don’t feel sorry for me. Everything else in life is going very, very, very well and since poker is only a small hobby - that has actually paid off nicely in the past, and the money that I’ve already cashed out isn’t being touched - this is probably only a parenthesis in the larger perspective. However, there is a real possibility of me actually going bust in which case I’m not entirely sure how to proceed. Can I actually have gotten so bad that I no longer know how to beat the low limit games? Was I, perhaps, never actually a winner but ran hot for a year and a half and the only thing stopping me from losing money was pure luck?

These are real possibilities and I need some time to come to terms with what I’m going to do next. For your reading pleasure, I’ll see if I can update this blog with whatever findings I come across. And even if you couldn’t care less, I’m at least going to try to document it for purely therapeutical reasons.