Persevere

per·se·vere
1. a. To persist in or remain constant to a purpose, idea, or task in the face of obstacles or discouragement.



So two days removed from taking an absolute pummeling at 6/12, I was left with no one and nowhere to watch the Colts/Titans game after work...how about some cards? Lovely idea.

There was a new 6/12 game running and they had an open seat. Awesome. Or so I thought. I bought in for $300...and then added $200 more...and then about an hour later $200 more. Aye. Yah. In for three and a half racks ($700) and there didn't seem to be any inclination that the beats would stop.

I'd say I won three pots in the first few hours I played, two of them were flop continuation bets that didn't get called...so yeah, the chips were most definitely not flowing in. It's hard not to think negatively when your big cards are missing and you're getting beaten by "set-up hands."

Most players have a stoploss, that is, a certain amount of money they will designate to lose in a session and then when they reach that point they will take a break or quit for the day. For LHE, the standard stoploss is about 30BBs (at 6/12, this would be $360). I was well above 40BBs, but I have never really bought into the idea of a stoploss. If I'm not flustered, I'm still playing correctly and I have a good table...well I won't be leaving anytime soon. My plan was to weather the storm and wait for a decent run of cards. Technically you can lose forever, there are never any guarantees that a run of cards is coming your way, but luckily for me things turned around.

I won a couple big pots with AK, and I could feel the momentum start to swing back in my favor. I lulled around -$300 for awhile, then made a quick run and found myself down between -$120 and -$180 for a few orbits, then I made another run back close to even. Obviously these jumps are spaced out across a few hours of play, as I'm just giving you an idea of how hard it can be to climb out of a hole once you get stuck.

I know I've said before that it's a good idea to seperate yourself from the results, but after climbing out of a $500 hole and getting close to even, I'd say around my 6th hour of play that night I had a fantastic mix of feeling relief, happiness, and pride. Things continued to get better at that point as I started scratching into the black; I was actually in the positive! A couple killpots later I had a tower of red chips, about 450 of them ($900). Nevermind the fact that I had bought 350 of them five hours earlier.

Slowly but surely the fishier players left the table and left me with some decent players and a couple of guys who actually play for a living, so I saw that as my cue to exist. I called my friend Aaron to talk to him about the session, and we agreed that sometimes after a day of getting crushed, crawling back and churning a small profit after going through hell can feel more rewarding than just sitting down and crushing without resistance.

Stay tuned for an update from Friday night where I played with my pal Tony for a bit. He got to witness me turning the second nutflush, putting in three bets with it on the turn against three people, then get crushed by a four outer on the end. Good times!