Ughh... I need some helpful respite...

Hey acerbikas,

Poker can be such a bitch of a game. It will do everything it can to screw your brain over.

I was ready to quit in August and almost as a last resort started reading Jared Tendler's 'The Mental Game Of Poker 2'. I started reading it (although I didn't think there could possibly be anything in there to fix my problems) and was enlightened within the 1st 20 pages. I went from a situation where mentally I couldn't even login to I looked forward to logging in.

If you look at the best players in the world, you won't find many (if any) mentally weak players. Mental strength becomes even more important as you move up.

Another problem can be 'residual negativity'. Every time you leave a session with negative thoughts, those thoughts will subside but they will leave a residue that is more easily built on in your next session and you could find yourself more easily frustrated and tilted with each subsequent session.

These thoughts have to be dealt with in a positive manner or in the end they will crush you, like it did to me.

Hope you find your answers

Laz

You have never experienced to lose 12 buyins in 5k hands?
You have to prepare for some bigger downswings. I ran more than 50 buyins below ev some time ago and on 2+2 theres one who is running 300 buyins (!!!) below ev.

12 buyin swings are absolutely standard. PLO is a game of alot of small edges. This leads to some serious swings. You have to get used to that.

There is a huge difference between losing buyins when your ev line shows that you did good and when you lose it all when your ev line shows you made a mistake. I actually rounded up the hands, cause that is how much i lost over the week. I lost 10 BIs in 1.2k hands, which is worse. I experienced 20 BI swings on PLO10 in a single day but when you are taking shots on a higher limit and get shut off completely and you do not know what happened and the ev line still shows your decisions were complete crap, then it sux bad.

This is true. And this ist mostly the toughest task to deal with. It can be a dowswing but it can also be bad play. But it cannot be determined with such a small sample most of the time.
The only way to handle this is to try to play every hand the best you can to release yourself from shortterm results.

You can lose 10 or 20 buyins in one session, and you EV line can go down that much too even if you good poker. So you need to be mentally good enough to deal with those.

I strongly recommend Mental Game of Poker (the first book). Second one should come after that.