Could you have kept on going?

[BeerMoney]

Well, we've all hit a downswing of -150 BB's at some point if we've played long enough.. (I've hit downswings of -250 BB's I'd say.)

But, my question is this. If you hit this kind of a downswing when you first started playing, do you think you'd still be playing? How many of you could handle this? Did any of you experience a terrible run when you first started playing that was not necessarily attributable to poor play?

I don't think I would have gone anywhere near poker if I experienced this kind of crap luck when I first started.

Beer.

[FrankieFish]

[ QUOTE ]
Beer.

[/ QUOTE ]

[FrankieFish]

...and no, I honestly don't think I would have wanted to keep playing poker.

[JoshuaD]

Since I've started playing, I've always played poker vs players who were even weaker than I was. I've never been a losing player. I'm pretty sure that if I was a significant loser I'd have lost interest in the game.

[DeanCarl]

I'll take the other side of this one. I took a HUGE hit wheen I came back to playing poker (back from a LONG time ago when stud and draw was the name of the game). My first 2 bank rolls when phtttttt so fast it made my eyeballs wobble. /images/graemlins/laugh.gif But I decided to chock it up to the "learning curve", backed off a bit, did some reading and then "kept on keeping on". And, while I'm still not very good at this game (been playing aout 9 months now), I am getting better.

So I just keep chuggin' along through all the ups and downs and hope I learn enough, someday, to make a little money and have some fun with all this.

Dean

[BeerMoney]

I wonder how many good players go bust their first few times and decide poker just isn't for them..

[smoore]

I lost lots of money before I actually learned how to play poker. I can't chalk it up to a "swing" because I knew crap about playing, but I knew that. Had I thought I knew what I was doing and lost 150 or 200 BB at the start I would have quit.

[Nomad84]

I've had a good start with online poker, but I was already reasonably confident in myself based on my success in our (fairly solid) micro-stakes home games. If I had taken a big hit when I first started, I'd have definitely kept going because I am confident that I am better than a 10 BB/100 loser in the long run, and that's about how much I can make up easily with bonuses. I know that my play can and will improve, so if I can just not lose more than the bonus for a while, I'll be happy. Fortunately, almost 2K hands under my belt and I'm running at 5.7 BB/100 so far, so I think I'm off to a better than average start /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[memphis57]

I started my online career with a 25,000 hand, 574 BB downswing. Since then I've won back 375 BBs in 12,000 hands and, while I'm not out of the woods yet, I think I have finally turned the corner.

I read SSHE and this board before I even started. I made a couple decisions early on that probably made my loss worse than it would otherwise have been, but also helped me bear it better. First, I decided to ignore all the advice about table selection and just play whoever came up at random, under the theory that my goal was to learn how to beat the very best that .50/1 could offer, so that I could move up in limits. Second, I decided to experiment with the SSHE advice, not just blindly follow it. I took it for my base point but deviated when I got the urge, until I convinced myself it was the best way to play. (Note: I now have a tremendous respect for the book, as it has proved right so often.)

So, anyhow, my first 100-200 BB of loss most likely came from playing badly. After that, another 200 BB or so came from sticking with some extremely tough tables during bonus-clearing periods, on some of those days when all Party turned into a rock garden with the TAGs clearing bonuses. The rest I think was a bad run of cards, coupled with my still not being very good.

I had several +100 BB runs all through, from the very beginning (started with $125 deposit + bonus at Party, ran it down to $4.50, then came all the way back to $120 and then lost it all), but each time it lasted 1000-2000 hands at most and then I followed with even bigger losses.

If anyone cares, I posted a couple of whining posts during the stretch that you can find in the archives. I don't recommend it, as I think it was just the run of the mill whining drivel you can see everyday here, except I think I always kept my head, admitting that at least some of it had to be my lack of skill which I would keep working on and that, and that any bad run of cards would turn one day.

All in all, I think I learned my basics far better than I would have if I had started out with the +375 run over the first 12,000 hands. I still do a lot of things wrong and have a lot to learn, and I'm planning to stick with .50/1 until I make up the rest of my deficit before I move up in limits (and read another few books).

So, back to the OP's question, why did I keep going? Well, for one, thanks to the bonuses, I never went negative overall. If I had, I think I would have stuck with it, but it would have been much harder. Second, I'm very competitive and I've always been able to beat the average in any game I took up, from age 3 on, so the more I lost the more determined I became to learn how to beat it. And third, I was highly motivated to learn the game for some external reasons that I won't bother to go into here. #2 was the biggest reason, though, i just couldn't bring myself to admit I couldn't play this game.

Dam, this answer turned out almost as long as my losing streak.

[Michael Davis]

Yes I would, because I did, and it wasn't because of bad luck.

-Michael

[aLOWdAkING]

Yes, the game is just too addicting.

[Toddster18]

My first 4 or 5 attempts at online poker netted me a loss of $600 or so, if I remember correctly, between the NL25, .50/1.00, and $5/$10 SNG's. By the last one or two, I discovered 2+2. My play got better. I have always hated losing, and couldn't stand that thought of losing and leaving. I think thats what kept me persistent.

I eventually deposited a legitimate starting BR, and haven't looked back since.

-Todd

[JonLines]

Hell, I would of quit if I had endured a -5BB at the beginning! I started poker with the last £30 in my bank account, with 2 months until my next student loan came through, and about 3 weeks till I had to pay my next lot of rent (looking back, spending my student loan on holidays to Amsterdam, Stockholm and Rome... probably wasn't the best idea). By 'started poker' I mean, I read my first book, and thus, actually knew what I was doing. I played the £1-2 limit game on William Hill. -15BB and I was flat broke! Yeah I know, looking back it was very silly, but luckily for me, this was around a time when Will Hill had £30-40 average pots on these limits! (Those were the days....). A solid 11 days of poker, +500BB later, and I could afford to eat again. So far be it from would you have quit if you had a -150BB at the beginning, but if I had anything other than a +100BB run it would of been the end of my poker days.

[Lawrence Ng]

The very first year I played, I lost over 10k in about 7 months (about 500 BB at 10/20 live). I bought some books, read RGP, 2+2 and improved my game a zillion fold and haven't looked back since.

Lawrence

[onegymrat]

Hi Beer,

I don't think most players would continue if their start was disastrous. This would certainly turn everyone off.

I don't think I would have gone anywhere near poker if I experienced this kind of crap luck when I first started.

This statement is hard to analyze, since new players are discovering how to play optimally, and poor playing will be attributed to their losses in almost all cases. And to paraphrase what author John Feeney maintains, when most players go on these so called "bad streaks", 95% of the time it is bad play that brings them these results, rather than bad luck.

[djoyce003]

Honestly, probably not. I started off with $100 at party and got a $100 bonus. I was down to $20 bucks when my bonus kicked in, back to up $20. Then I started winning playing .5/1. Started to get my roll up...got it up to 400 or so and took shots at the 1/2, fluctuated between $250 and $400 for a while and the 1/2 and .5/1 games. Eventually started really winning and now I multi 5/10 6 max and have the roll to take some shots at 10/20 and have cashed out a few thousand. Had I lost that first $100 I probably would not have kept playing, mainly because my wife probably would have screamed if I wanted to put more money in.