Lying Calendars

I refuse to believe that it's December. Stop your lying. It was the beginning of November, like, two or three days ago.

Managed to seal the deal on my first substantial losing month in awhile yesterday. I'm fairly meh about it, as I was overdue, but it's frustrating in that I was flush for nearly the whole month, then hit a pretty wicked downturn the last 3-4 days. Can't blame anyone but myself (well, obviously), as I know better than to play 6 max with the crazies on networks like Prima and Tribeca, yet for some reason I continued to do exactly that, play 6 max with the crazies.

In the long run, those tables have to be crazy profitable, but I'm really not in the mindset to be playing that high variance game right now, as I don't have a ton of time for poker these days, so it reduces things to a bit of a crapshoot. Multiply that by playing 20/40 and, well, it can get ugly pretty quickly.

I don't have the exact numbers, but I think I ended up stuck a little over $2K for the month as a whole. Not good, obviously, but not the worst thing in the world, especially when I knew I was playing with fire and out of element. 'Tis frustrating in that I was up about $3K for the month right before Thanksgiving, but them's the breaks.

I do need to work on getting some focus back, though, as far as what I want and expect from poker play. Part of the reason I was playing with fire at the 20/40 shorthanded games was pure, unvarnished greed, as far as playing what I knew wasn't my best game simply because of the potential rewards. The problem, though, is that as long as I'm playing poker part-time (and investing profits pretty aggressively), I'm much better off playing the low-risk, grind-it-out game.

That mindset has served me very well up to this point, but for some reason of late I've gotten offtrack, trying to hurry things and to force the potential poker rewards into something they can't be, given the limited time I have to play. While I know that slow and steady is the way to go, I've let myself be distracted by the bling lately.

Compounded interest is a beautiful thing, especially if you're in it for the long haul. Let's say you start up an online savings account with ING or EmigrantDirect. You deposit $100 to open the account, and every month you deposit an additional $100 in poker profits. We'll just assume that for the lifetime of the account you get paid an average 4% APY.

So every month you just put $100 in the account and merrily go on your way, using the remainder of your winnings to increase your bankroll for bigger games, cash out some of it buy toys or pay for vacations, whatever. Do that for ten years and you'll have $15,131.65.

If you fund the account with $500 and dump an additional $500 into the account every month, after ten years you'll have $75,658.23. Just from wringing out $500 in profits from poker, each and every month.

Which, to my hoarding monkey mind, is a pretty damn compelling argument for grinding out profits each and every month at the poker table. You can play absolutely break even poker and still clear over $500/month in bonus money alone, if you have a reasonable amount of time to put in at the tables.

So yeah. Need to stay focused on the long run, grinding my way to a much bigger payoff at a later date. Slow and steady wins the race.