[Closed] My Story by nickvdb1990

Minimise pokertracker and don't look at your account balance for a whole week. Don't think about hands in terms of money; think about hands in terms of what you think is the best decision at any one time.

Poker is a game about decisions, not money.So every time you make a good decision, you win, and every time you make a bad one, you lose. You simply need to be a lot less results oriented.

I like to think I'm actually pretty good at that. I can also mix several stakes without a problem...chips are big blinds to me, not dollars.
Anyway, that's how it was at first, but after $1.5k I seem to have hit some kind of boundary where my buffer was depleted and it was hard for me to take any more variance.

Not looking at my account balance for a whole week is what I actually planned to do before I started up NL25 again. But I felt it wasn't going good and just gave up after 3k hands.

I guess when enough time passes, you'll see me back at the felt.

Well it seems like your main problem is your tilt control. Seems like when ever you lose a few stacks you tilt away some more. No one can help you much with that but yourself. If it makes you feel any better many people have the same problems as you.

However your downswing really isn't that big considering your running bad for only 30k hands. Thats not that big of a sample size. And you might of been on an upswing and are not as good as you think you are. You're not the best player on your limit as you seem to think. If you would be you wouldn't lose 40+ stacks in 30k hands. Overrating your skill can also be a problem.

And according to your graph this is your first downswing. It will be easier to handle the next one. But if your not able to control your tilt and are gonna tilt away your bankroll every time you hit a bit of a swing then there's no point in thinking you can play poker for a living. Mindset is the most important part of poker if your planning to do this for a living so you either have to suck it up and work on it or be a pussy and quit.
Thats up to you.

I'm not sure of what to think of your post, MatejM47. Have you read my whole post?
Allow me to explain myself either way.
Let's start with the part I agree upon: I probably overrated my skills when life was good. Like everyone does. That's why I took a shot at NL100. I can't imagine doing that again any time soon.

But about tilt control...I remain very calm at the poker table and whenever something makes me angry, the trigger in my head goes off and I blind out. That's the kind of tilt I am best at fighting. I'm not exactly immune to it yet but when it occurs, I know it. And I stop playing poker until I feel better.
The other kinds of tilt occur less suddenly and are therefor harder to spot, but I try my best and I stop playing poker when I feel I'm not playing well.

I also look at chips as the currency of the game, not so much the currency of life. I look at poker as being one long session, the result of an individual session don't really matter to me, let alone any individual hand.
And I think about bad beats like this: "it's not about how you lost the hand, it's about how you play the next"
So I am pretty confident that my mindset is at least okay. It's not perfect but I'm getting there.

O god. Im almost 20 years ( B-day 27 november ) and studying electronics too, 2 years till i graduate aswell. And the best one is that im on a downswing same as you. A bad month for electronic students eh?