Playing a losing game

Tournament players are a mentally sturdy bunch. We have to be.

Even the best, the most successful, the most profitable ones spend most of their lives losing, on a downswing. Every so often, the winning ones bink a big enough score to wipe out the days, months, or years of losing, and then some. Because that’s what winning looks like when you’re a tournament player: the occasional jackpot to erase the steady drip of losses.

an outlier in a sea of disappointing outcomes

This was my fourteenth World Series of Poker campaign. Going into it, I had ten pretty hefty losing campaigns, two roughly breakeven ones, and one jackpot. That jackpot was big enough to ensure that I’m a pretty big winner at the WSOP in total, yet it lives in my memory as an outlier in a sea of disappointing outcomes.

An inauspicious start

In my first three or four WSOP campaigns, I failed to register even a single cash. It was such an inauspicious start to my career that when the time came to head to Las Vegas for my fifth WSOP, I didn’t bother, choosing to spend the summer at home playing online with the London Olympics on in the background.

2015 was the jackpot year I hit my high score ($300,000). The further you get into a career like this, the more you realize that you’ll lose more often than you win. The best mental approach, I believe, is to hope for the best while expecting the worst. You have to write your buyins off mentally before you land in Vegas, and regard any cashes as a welcome bonus. This prepares you not to go off the rails if you make a bad start.

That said, it’s definitely easier if you get off to a good start, as I did cashing four of my first five tournaments. It definitely feels better when you’re not behind from the get-go, but it is just the start. Last year I cashed my first four tournaments at the series… and then bricked the rest.

This year

This year thankfully was not a replay of that. I continued cashing consistently throughout the trip, ending up with a total of ten cashes counting satellites and the one daily Deepstack I played. That certainly made it easier to stay positive through a grueling campaign of 10am starts and 1am end-of-plays.

There were many complaints about the long relentless days but if anything I kind of enjoyed the slog and felt at an advantage to players not used to such long sessions.

I made a conscious effort to eat as healthily as I could

I had made an effort to get there in good health and physical fitness, and this definitely helped. It’s impossible in my experience at least to stick to routines as healthy as my home ones on trips like this, but I made a conscious effort to eat as healthily as I could, prioritize sleep, get some exercise every day (I even got out for a few runs), meditate, and minimize my alcohol consumption. This allowed me to feel energized right up to my last event, and even if I left Vegas feeling quite drained, that’s also a positive as it means I gave it everything I had.

Staying motivated

The fact I never went more than a few events without cashing undoubtedly made it easier mentally to stay motivated, although as the trip went on and the one true deep run eluded me, a tinge of frustration crept in too. I don’t think it ever affected my play, and when I reviewed my play after every tournament a familiar pattern emerged. I almost always built a stack in the early stages very rarely failing to get up to three to five times starting stack while stacks were still deep, but then the sustained run good needed to go really deep in a big field event eluded me and a few lost flips or bad beats later I bust either shortly before or not too long after the bubble.

The first part (building a stack early) was particularly heartening as I’d be the first to admit this has historically been the weakest part of my game. It’s something I’ve put a lot of work and study into trying to address in the last couple of years, so it was good to see that work yielding results.

Main frustration

The biggest frustration is of course the fact that I have yet to cash a WSOP Main Event. It’s a remarkably bad record, but it is still just a sample size of 14. Many better players than me had similar runs at one point in their careers, and I’m told it has been more than a decade since Mr. White Magic himself Phil Hellmuth cashed the Main. It’s of course entirely possible I could go another 14 without cashing, and if that’s the case so be it. But I’d obviously prefer to see the same situation as when I broke my Irish Open duck and cashed four on the bounce.

I don’t know how many more shots at the WSOP Main I have

I don’t know at what point my age will start to adversely affect my performance and prospects. I don’t feel I’m at that point yet, but as I approach 60, I have to concede that may not be true for much longer. I don’t know how many more shots at the WSOP Main I have, but I look to Irish legend Donnacha O’Dea and am optimistic.

When I played my very first WSOP Main all those years ago, Donnacha was there on the bubble with a starting stack which he navigated into the money. He was already older than I am now at the time, yet as I walked back with my VegasSlotsOnline peer David Lappin early on Day 4 with the bubble looming, we ran into Donnacha, still there, still with starting stack roughly. And he still cashed.

If you want to read about my 2023 WSOP Main Event performance in more detail, I wrote an article on the subject last week.