Quitting poker for good
Posted by Disharmonist
Posted by
Disharmonist
posted in
Gen. Poker
Quitting poker for good
As some of you might know I have been a regular on micro stakes games on several sites and a very active member in this forum. I played for about 4 years, but never managed to move up. Lately I experienced some major downswings which make me technically a losing player for now. I took my game seriiously, reviewing my sessions and hands, reading and watching a ton of poker content, joined several study groups and also putting in a ton of volume ofc. In pokerstars alone I managed to receive supernova status playing only NL25 and PL25 which is irrelevant by now anyways. In my personal life I am considered a very rational, reasonable person, maybe sometimes too rational and unemotional. Yet poker has been a thing that got me hyped, enthusitatic but also angry and depressed, depending on the recent results ofc.
I took poker as a mental and intellectual challenge, yet the more hands I played, the more I believe to hit my boundaries of improving my game and solving game trees, looking for solutions to beat my opponents. I firmly believe that I played a good fundamental and solid style with basically no blundering. Maybe I am wrong and I missed certain points but I think I reached my max level of good play.
It might be bad luck, bad rake structure or indeed I lack something subtle what it takes to become a big winner. I also lost interest in the intellectual challenge, because now I see poker less and less as a deep strategic game and rather as a dull adventure.
I am going to quit onlinepoker once and for all.
But I also learned a lot. I learned to think more well structured, I think I strenghtened my mental resilience overall. I am glad to say that poker did take a lot of time and effort and also money, yet it did not overtake any part of my life or limited my other responsibilities. I feel a bit of remorse, though because I might have done more productive stuff instead of playing and studying poker.
I wanted to thank you as a community for the discussions, the handanalysis and the intellectual exchange on the way. The RIO community is one of the most sophisticated communities with a lot of very smart and ambitious thinkers. I wish you good luck in poker and anywhere else and herby announce my final fold.
Bye.
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I am sad to hear that you are the one to go, because you did show passion over years in forums :-)
Im very glad though that you do realise that some things become so pointless that you simply have to call it quits, and instead of being miserable and banging on a brick wall without progress, be happy for making rather hard decision for someone who loves the game , and move on !!!
Thank you for being part of forum and best of luck in other areas where i hope you will have more success and happiness :-)
GG dude take care!
GL!
Cheers and GL for the future!
GL m8 , in whatever u do ;)
Im gonna keep it real mate. I wont say 'GL' to you, not because i dont wish you the best, but because i think that your attitude is full of crap.
I think that you're fairly close-minded person with a fixed mindset and proofs for that could be found in this statement:
Or in this thread you've created, thats very far from having any healthly perspective at the state of a games:
You not succeding at NL25 is not a question of you reaching your max level of good play, its just a question of you not exhausting enough diffrent ways.
Games are still soft, and dont talk shit about poker crumbling due to finite skill gap when ive sit today with 4 recreational players at one table. At PokerStars.
Nick Howard once said, that how you do poker, you do rest of your life and i really belive that and thats why im writing this. You can run away from poker, start something else, maybe even find something that will be more suitable for you, maybe something with way easier field to overcome, but that wont resolve a problem with you having wrong perspective about how things really are. Thats not really progress, thats not growing and i refuse to see anything noble in quitting your problems, instead of overcoming them.
And i wouldnt lose my time to write this shit if i didnt know that you're capable.
I roughly estimated how much rakeback I did receive in the last 12 months. Roughly 2200-2500 dollars. Now you can estimate the amount I paid in total and rethink your statement. As I said, I might have reached my capacity and I accept it. We live in a objective world that you cannot broodforce your way out of using the right attitude. That is the definition of insanity. Doing things over and over again and expecting things to change.
I also dont fully understand what you are trying to achieve. Why are you mad at me. Do you care if I win or lose? Probably not.
I have plenty of opportunity to become what I personally define succesfull in life. Smart businessmen had their great succeses but also fields in which they flatout failed. So they change the branche or the field they are working in.
I find it sadening that you have that attitude and underline it by a inappropriate of swearing that serves no purpose. You can prove to yourself how easily the games can be beaten by playing NL25 for about 100-200k hands. I do not challenge you to do this, but I suggest you make that experiment and see how far you can go.
"Nick Howard once said, that how you do poker, you do rest of your life and i really belive that and thats why im writing this. You can run away from poker, start something else, maybe even find something that will be more suitable for you, maybe something with way easier field to overcome, but that wont resolve a problem with you having wrong perspective about how things really are. "
I find this quote highly unprecise and unsatisfiying. It is basically mumbling something about mindset but not how to change it. It doesnt question the reality of the games nor that even recreational players can beat you if they get lucky. Nick Howard also cannot prove that he is winning. We still have yet to see a graph. And the fact that he is pushing his training programm so hard is that he might not win at all or being so stressed out by variance that he doesnt play as much poker himself.
It took me alot of introspection and going back and forth in my head- what and how should I approach things, but I rather make a cut now rather than molding in selfdeception for another couple of years. I dont blame poker I dont blame anyone else, many things are just based on luck or coincidence and it is unproductive dwelling on things that cannot be changed.
Attitude is something you cannot force, but something you can learn.
There's whole book about it - 'Mindset' written by Carol Dweck. Reading this book was a milestone in changing my own perspective.
If there are any negative emotions from my posts, its propably because when i see your struggle, it's very much resisting with how i felt not that many years ago and it just reminds me how unsatisfying that was. I might not care at micro level if you win or lose, but i just wished that someone would inject right perspective into me way earlier so i wouldnt waste majority of my youth at being depressed and helpless. Not saying that its you are in life, but i can definetely see that in your attitude towards poker.
So i could've said 'GL', you would feel good for a moment and that would be it. Its not like there is something wrong in it, but since i read a lot of your posts from like 1-2 years timespan, i thought that i it might be helpful to write what i really think.
And then i induced great post from ZenFish, so that should be enough of a purpose.
You can download any huge HH from PokerStars to see that there are guys that are consistently beating these games.
Watch recent archives from this stream- https://www.twitch.tv/pokerwithriske - pretty well documented bankroll challange where host is beating microstakes at zoom PokerStars. You just choose to dont see it, but examples of guys beating the hell of microstakes are all around you.
Again, plenty of materials how to change your mindset at the market - recomend you again 'Mindset' from Carol Dweck and then 'Talent Code' from Coyle, 'Deep Work' and 'So Good They Cant Ignore You' from Newport, Zen already recommended 'Peak' from Ericsson. 'The Art of Learning' from Waitzkin is also gold.
GG dude! Maybe you`ll be back when RIO launches. Never say never! :)
For inspiration:
Interview with limitless on Pokerstrategy.com (Oct 2017)
limitless on Joey's Podcast Jan (2017)
Limitless also started playing 4 years ago and built his way to Stars high stakes, starting out with free rolls. Then $2nl, playing $100nl after a year, $5-$10 after 2 years and high stakes after 3 years.
So during the time OP was struggling to get out of the micros, this guy started at the very bottom and worked his way to the very top. And for the first couple of years he was a professional handball player and had to find time for poker in between daily training.
What you describe in this thread is not happening (at least not yet):
Poker is crumbling due to GTO and finite skill gap.
Psychological research also suggests that the human species has tremendous potential for learning and growth, but it needs to be done in the right way (read Peak by Swedish researcher Anders Ericsson for more about that). So you have probably not reached your skill ceiling either.
If I may speculate, I believe you have been working in unproductive ways for the last 4 years and that you have hit the ceiling for what your current method can achieve. If that's true, you should change your method or quit.
Declaring failure may hurt your ego less than admitting that you have been wasting time working in wrong way. Or maybe you have too rigid ideas about what good poker is all about, so that it will be uncomfortable to start over in a new direction.
Quitting is maybe the right thing to do, or maybe not. But you should not blame it on games being too tough, or that the community is approaching a skill ceiling in the near future. Nothing points to this, quite the opposite.
Just an example of things happening:
Recently a new solver appeared (Monkersolver). It can solve multiway scenarios and PLO as well. The smart and driven now go "Multiway NLHE/PLO solver, you say? Hmm ..." and get to work with it. Then there's those who ignore it and continue to bitch and moan that the games are getting tougher by the day.
Which group do you think is largest? Can you see that the advanced software tools are not killing the games, but creating tremendous opportunities for those who can use them best? The average poker player isn't using them much (and if he is, he isn't using them well) and he never will.
(Sure, everybody and their grandmother is using Pio, but running sims and staring at grids is not how you learn with Pio. I conjecture that the average Pio license holder is using the program at something like 20% of capacity).
I am not complaining about games being tougher. Players make tons of mistakes. Any motivation improves tough when you filter for your biggest losses and all you see is pretty sick coolers/ suckouts and nothing in between.
And i was very judgemental with myself if I made a bad play and I knew it, fixed it, avoided repeating this mistake, yet results didnt change.
As for inspiration. Noone needs inspiration. Inspiration comes from applying knowledge that leads into positive outocomes, which makes you visualize further success down the road. Inspiration comes naturally and quickly fades if you are anything but delusional.
Limitless is only one example, and I respect and I admire his story, out of hundreds if not thousands of unheard stories of not succeding. I try to avoid the term "failure" as it is malicious in many ways. Look up "survivorship bias".
All the other stories are never shared or talked about. Because it is embarrasing for most to admit publicly. Noone interviews the losers or the just-getting-by players.
As for the micro challenge. There are a multitude of discontinued threads, video series and challenges. Just look in this forum. Most lasted 1 month. Doug Polk, selfproclaimed "best HU player in the world" couldnt beat NL2. NL2, not NL200. His challenge was completly inconsistent, jumping right to PLO50 out of boredom. Exactly what you shouldnt do.
As for solvers. There is no indication that solvers improve ppls game and results drastically. If there is a correlation , it doesnt indicate causation. Crushers like Ben Sulsky use it, but Sulsky also crushed the games long before it came out.
Also as terms of "skill". I cannot 5 bet jam AA better or worse than anyone else. I cannot bet /fold my straight better than anyone else if my opponent only raises flushes, anybody will lose in set over set scenrios. It is just the occurence, the coincidence that matters. You cannot decide the frequency of that occurance, you also cannot decide the frequency of being able to x/raise OTF. You have an array of hands, your range, that you going to play like this, but still, you cannot deliberatly decide that frequency.
Why are many ppls so ingorant to aknowledge, that despite their proclaimed expertise and experience, most big pots are rather naturally played out hands, in which noone of the players involved made a mistake. Look up your own database.
The only reliable income comes from spazzers, thats all. People who put money in the put with low chances of winning. It is that simple.
I understand the criticisms here from the perspective that there are clues that you may be experiencing common mental game issues. Also, consider the selection bias when exploring the longevity of online poker in a forum of committed poker-heads. For many reasons, known and unknown, there is a good chance that you have made the right decision and that it took courage to get there. Good luck mate.
I actually didnt want to respond anymore on this topic. But concerning the mental game issues: When I started playing cash games for the first, time, I beat the games easily, I probably didnt exactly know what I was doing precisly, playing way too passive pre and post, but somehow squeezed out a marginal profit over the first 100k hands.
Seeking to approve upon what I have learned, I add nuance to my game, be more balanced with my bluffs, more precise with my betting, more receptive to making plays I hadnt considered to be doing. Results started evening. Yet I kept going, trying to carve any edge I could find.
The mental game issues you are adressing developed over the last 2-3 months, as I finally realized, how much coincidence their is and that long run is a concept, that helps surpressing the compulsatory aspects of gambling in general, yet EV is fictional unless it manifests in results over the long term. There is no long term defined however. There are well respected pros that suffer downswings over 100k hands, altough they are in the game for so long. If there was a change in their results, wouldnt it have to be to the other side, since these player should improve naturally by experience. So how does one dissecet skill from variance?
Disharmonist -- We sort skill from variance with a robust evaluation process? You feel helpless with it. I understand this because I have experienced it. Learned helplessness I believe they call it. Our minds are tricky.
What is this mystical "evalution process"? Also my feeling dont matter. The game doesnt care, other players dont care, the world does not care. What matters are results. If there are no positve results. Poker is one of the most unrewarding things out there.
Of course its a right decision. Some people just don`t have it in them. If all of it starts to influence your personal life and behaviour its always better to call it quits. No need to push it to the limit, especially playing poker. That is when the bad things start to happen. Its good to be down to earth guy and just accept it.
Why don't you post all big hands you lost and we can see if they are really coolers, I bet many of them are not. The truth is if your not winning at 25z, an environment that has 1-3 fish per table, you must be constantly donking off. You don't need piosolver to beat nl25, you need to be able to play well vs fish and learn to explo fold vs the nut peddling nitregs.
Well, there is hundreds of hands. Maybe the issue is to play too many hands and slipping in a subtle way. I am pretty sure I can beat the game if I sat down, play fewer hands. But I see no reason to play for 5dollars/hour when the swings or 1 mistake can destroy it. I find it most reasonable to have higher goals than that. Call me a greedy bastard :)
Why not just move to tournaments?
Shame to see you go. You helped me a lot with my PLO game when I first started posting hands.
I wonder how many of you who replied stopped playing poker or moved up in stakes...
It's really sad to hear that from a player like you. Of course, I could argue with you that there are no boundaries in learning the art of poker, there is always something new to read or learn. But it is very important that you understand for yourself that you no longer want to improve, that you have reached your threshold of learning and mastering the game, as well as your emotions. I wish you good luck with your new achievements!
Good decision.
I don’t want to say poker is a scam, but people should refer to a variance calculator to see what they’re getting into before going pro, and appreciate the mental toll that not winning can take on you. There’s also an opportunity cost that arises when you are trying to get unstuck (or worse failing and just losing).
Think about it - it’s no accident that many have side hustles to supplement the income they derive from poker.
You can play live where the games are softer but that means sitting in a casino (ugh) and that is a different animal.
Best of luck.
thanks for sharing.. NC Cloud
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