Emotional Investment

I’ve been playing a lot of poker online this past year. My career for the 4 years before that had been largely live poker, with online satellites making up the bulk of my online play.

When it comes to live poker our emotional investment is very high (or at least mine is!) Quite often, you’ve travelled some distance to play, especially if it is a higher buy in competition. Often these trips of mine saw me travelling abroad to a new part of the world to explore, increasing the excitement and emotional investment of the trip overall. Busting a live competition, especially one of a high buy can be pretty disheartening. It involves travelling several hundred miles, being away from loved ones and spending money on hotels and expenses all with the goal of making a big final table and a big pay day. When that dream doesn’t coalesce it is quite understandable for our emotional state to be less than perfect. But that’s ok. In fact I think it’s perfectly healthy and from that disappointment we can come back stronger and more determined than ever to tackle the next exciting live competition.

However, this emotional state is definitely not healthy in the online arena. Currently I am playing 12 tables at once at peak times, and those 12 tables are carefully selected across a number of sites to allow me to play in the best value competitions going on any given night. Whichever night it is, there will always be 2 or 3 competitions that are so much juicier than the rest. Within those 12 tables, a number of them will be smaller buy in, smaller guarantee tournaments that are important to my bottom line, but won’t have the big pay day up top, or quite the same prestige that comes with making a final table of one of the bigger buy in tournaments.

Here’s where that emotional negativity from busting out becomes such a real problem. When playing live, that emotional state is absolutely fine to embrace and learn from because you don’t have another commitment unless you want it. If there’s a side event you can take 10 minutes, grab a coffee, tell your bad beat story to some poor passer-by and dive back in somewhat refreshed. But online, if you bust the two or 3 biggest competitions of your night and your emotional state suffers for it, you’ve still got a number of tournaments to compete in. Your aces get cracked or your bluff goes wrong in a $200 online competition, and now you get dealt AQo on the button facing a 3bet in a $20 game and have to make a well thought out emotionally neutral decision? Not an easy task!

Here’s the thing though, if we don’t play that $20 game to the best of our ability after busting the “important” games of the night then our overall return on investment on the night gets absolutely hammered. In the worst cases of this phenomenon, I’ve heard of players who literally tilt away their last few small buy ins. But look at it this way, $20 is 10% of $200. What would you give for a 10% increase in your return on investment in that $200 game?

Here’s what I’ve come to realise: The last tournaments of the night are the ones that are the most important, not the tournaments with the bigger buy in or the best guarantee. The last tournaments of the night are the ones we have the chance to make final table runs at. Even if a top 3 finish will only just cover our buy ins, that is so hugely important for our bankrolls and our overall bottom line. They are also the most challenging emotionally. If we can beat that negative emotion that can stir up from busting out of the other competitions, and buckle down and make the best of the smaller competitions then we’re in a position not just to have a winning session, but we are in a position to beat and to continue to beat this maddeningly complicated, ever evolving, wonderful game.

We’re always going to bust a huge percentage of the tournaments we play. I just looked up one of the best online tournament players. On one website they have won 50 tournaments out of 10,000 and made close to a million dollars profit doing so. Put that another way, this player wins a tournament 0.5% of the time. Is this player griping every Sunday when they bust out of the Sunday million? Or are they shrugging their shoulders and maximising their efforts in their $22 comp?

One tip I got from my friend Steven Van Zadelhoff is to consider selling action for the bigger buy ins of your evening. If there is a large discrepancy between your biggest buy in and your smallest than the weight of importance in your mind will heavily lean towards the bigger buy in. A way to counteract that is to sell a portion of your action in the bigger game, to bring its effective buy in for you closer to your smaller games. Not only is selling action often a sensible course of action for bankroll management purposes, in this instance it can also help reduce the emotional volatility involved when playing online.