I took a shot at a $30 husng the other night and lost it. I then tried a few $20s and lost them. After that had a go at some $10 4man shootouts and lost those too.

So all in all a $90 knock back. Pretty shitty, but nothing my bankroll can’t handle – if I don’t take these shots I’ll only progress very slowly, and that’s not good for my game or bankroll.

I mentioned the hit to S1ndr0me, and how when you lose it’s a much bigger hurt than the joy you get from winning – the two things don’t really balance. It’s not just my opinion it feels like this, I’ve seen plenty of other players (at all stakes) express a similar thing.

S1ndr0me then mentioned something that lit a lightbulb up over why it’s like this – he said that when he looks at his bankroll he’s very aware of the hours and thousands of hands it’s taken to build that roll.

I realised then that the reason why hurts > joy is that with our BR we’re continually climbing a mountain. We know it’s easier to slide down than climb up, and when we do slide down we have to reclimb the bit we just lost.

So effectively the $$$ we lose are twice the ‘value’ of $$$ we win, because we have to re-win that amount just to get back to where we were. When we see the number $90 lost, we compare it to where we should have been if we’d won that $90, and so relatively speaking we have lost $180 worth of value. Although we’re disciplined enough not to see it as cash, it’s still $180 worth of hard effort and risk. It’s $180 of blood, sweat and tears.

So what mental games can we play to get over this, and how do we reduce our ‘scared money’ tentativeness when taking shots (now that we realise it’s not scared money, but scared ‘effort potentially wasted’)?

Well, I’ve no idea. I’ll think about it, and perhaps Google around a bit. I’ve seen United113′s approach which is to give a set value to a match regardless of win or lose (based on your ROI), but I don’t think this works for me – firstly I don’t really grind enough games to get a valid ROI to see where I’m going, but also I think it would diminish my desire to win. I’m actually very aware that losing a match is putting my BR 2 steps back (just hadn’t articulated it before I guess), and I need that tension to make sure I fight for every game. If I take a bad hit and I’m down to $200 chips to my opponent’s $2800 I’m usually still very confident that I can swing it back (I’ve done it enough times to know I can, even though I probably lose from this point more often than I win). If I gave a value to each game win or lose then I would probably let those games go and my ROI would slip downwards. I have no intentions of becoming the Tim Henman of poker…