I have a serious problem - anybody ever try hypnosis?

[BusterStacks]

What if you had say, $3000, would you be worried about losing that at a 1/2 game? No? You'd be amazed at how quickly your problems disappear when you have a huge bankroll.

[DataMiner]

[ QUOTE ]
Maybe the best advice is to set a goal of hands played per day. In fact, 1000 is probably a good start. I'll try it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Please don't do this. What happens if you're down at the end of the 1,000th hand? If you're afraid of losing, will you never play again? Will you break your rule and play until you're even? This is just a recipe for disaster.

Based on your $7 comment, I'm not even sure that playing a limit that's low for your bankroll would help.

I haven't read that tennis book, but you might want to give it a shot. Who knows?

[Spicymoose]

You just have to change your mentality. You KNOW you are a winning player at $5/10. When you play, you will win some, you will lose some, but everything will contribute to that long run win rate. When I play, I try (and this can be hard at times) not to worry so much about whether I'm winning or losing (unless I think my game is off), but just try to push foward to the long run. If you are confident that you will win at least 1BB/100 hands at $5/10, then just think as you are playing "I am winning about $5 per table per hour." Sometimes you will do much better than that, and sometimes you will lose, but 500k hands from now, you will be up at least 50k. Play to reach those 500k hands (Oh yeah, and for fun).

[Mayhap]

[ QUOTE ]
I am scared to death of losing.

[/ QUOTE ]
This bell tolls for many of us of course.
To deal with fear effectively, we have to move to the penultimate fear and that helps us re-frame things. The penultimate fear is death of course. It is a good place to go, the reality that our lives will terminate. Going there, we can look at things with a lifetime, life-span context. We can have a detachment as if we were reading the story of our lives.

Here is an example passage from such a story:
Joe played poker. He saw that poker was like an ocean of money where the tides would flow in and then they would flow out or they would simply be neap. Even though these tides were the most natural and inevitable things, Joe feared the ebbing tide. It distressed him. One day he realized that all he had to do is simply take note of the tide flowing out and use it as a reminder to retreat from the ocean front and go home and cook a lobster and have great meals with family and friends. He learned to welcome the ebb tide. He found that the ebb tide was an unmistakable omen that the tide would once again be flowing in.

/M

[dogmeat]

Nice story. Thank you.

Dogmeat [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]

[gaming_mouse]

Mayhap,

Nice post, but I have to tell you: you are using the word "penultimate" incorrectly. It means "second to last." It's not just a fancy way of saying "ultimate."

gm

[Mayhap]

Thanks for pointing that out GM. It will not be my penultimate faux pas with that word :-)
Thanks again,
/M