Nick is a cash game player, content creator and part of 888poker’s Stream Team. Each week he shares his thoughts and experiences as a player dedicated to the daily grind. This week he looks at how losing at the tables can actually provide the spark you need to set yourself up to win…
Last week, I spoke about bankroll challenges and a personal experience with my own, The 10NL Challenge, where I am trying to win $1,000 only playing $0.05/0.10 cash games. A lot of my time on the virtual felt over the last three or so years has been absorbed (read: wasted), on trying to complete it, and this has had a few meaningful repercussions for me as a poker player.
Unfortunately, playing 10NL cash games at the best of times isn’t the peak of theory-based poker. There’s a lot of sub-optimal play (some of it from me), but more specific to my own case, there are a lot of people that just find it really funny if they can beat me in the most ridiculous manner possible due to my fragile mentality and proneness to earth-shattering tilt.
Needless to say, a lot of them have managed this spectacularly over the course of my challenge.
What often results is a poker experience quite unlike any other, where nothing deep you’ve ever learnt about the game really matters all that much. As a by-product, a lot of the fun that comes from battling at the tables and trying to make ‘good’ plays is sucked from the game. For example, I spend most of my time at 10NL trying to figure out if my current opponent is likely to slow-roll me on the river.
Here’s a quick update on my challenge progress this week.
Rediscovering the passion
After a particularly woeful session in the challenge last Tuesday, I decided to take the rest of the week off playing 10NL to give myself some time to calm down.
Now, it’s not often you’ll find someone playing 100NL to give themselves a break from 10NL, but that’s exactly what bankroll challenges can do to you.
As my session started, and to my surprise, I discovered a long-forgotten energy and passion for the game. I still ran horrendously, as is customary for my brand, but I was finally being put in spots that were tough to figure out. And as I was tested more and more by the regulars in 888poker’s 100NL SNAP pool, I realised something quite jarring: I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.
I’ve been playing 10NL for so long that studying has felt futile, and I’ve gradually been pushing it back on my list of priorities.
Understandably, a lot of my time in a regular week is spent around poker, either streaming, playing or preparing a YouTube video. It just made sense to shelve the studying to avoid any possible burnout, given I didn’t see the value in it anyway during the trials and tribulations of the challenge.
Why we play
A lot of players love poker and get into the game for a multitude of reasons, be it financial, mental or social motivations. Maybe your reason is something completely different and, given my experience in the past week, I think it’s important to reflect on why you play the game.
Personally, I’ve always loved competing, and I hate to lose, ever since Mario Kart on the Nintendo 64 when I was 6-years-old. Poker was my outlet for satisfying my competitive nature, and that’s something that I’ve lamentably disregarded in recent years. As I was getting destroyed by the 100NL regs, that competitive spark reignited inside of me, a feeling that I could be better than what I was offering.
But it wasn’t an uncomfortable feeling, more an epiphany. If I can help it, I don’t want to find myself in that situation again, where I don’t have the first clue how to respond in a hand. I want to recapture the feeling of working hard on my game, and seeing it bear fruit on the tables in the form of my thought process.
I’m certainly never going to have all the answers, but I want to give myself the best possible chance to do exactly the thing that drew me to this brilliantly brutal game all those years ago: compete.
Feature image by Yaoqi/Unsplash
Follow Nick on X, Instagram, Twitch and his YouTube channel.
