The $2,300 felt alive in my hands. I counted it twice. Three times. Twenty-three crisp $100 bills.
This was my poker bankroll to date, and it was way too small for what I was about to do: spend a week in Vegas taking shots at $1/$2 and $2/$3 vs. some of the best players at that level. One of the sessions would be livestreamed to an audience of hundreds.
Of course the bankroll money felt alive. It was about to multiply or die.
I had spent the last six weeks preparing for this trip, documenting my study and play in my monthly Strategy in Action episodes.
Every month I took a trip to the Sands casino to apply what I had been studying, and every session (except for one) I had walked away a winner.
When I realized this was not nearly enough volume to prepare for what I was in for, I started putting in more volume online at 10NL and 25NL and again walked away a winner after about 1,700 hands:
But there’s this pesky thing in poker called variance. Most experienced players scoff at anything less than 100,000 hands as an accurate portrayal of one’s poker prowess. In other words, I could still suck and poker and just be running good.
And I know I’ve been running good. Upon analysis, very few of my hands have been due to coolers or bad beats. For every one of those, there have been leaks to plug (which I outlined in the Red Chip Poker forum leak list challenge.)
I now had a laundry list of strategic concepts and mental game aspects to study. But as the Vegas trip drew closer, I realized I totally lacked the time to address them in any systematic way. I needed strategies that focused on my strengths as much as I needed to be careful about allowing others to exploit my weaknesses.
In the past, bringing specific concepts (“Don’t Pay People Off”, “Never Limp”) brought positive results. How could I bring one or two concepts that would ensure I was playing my A-game?
I thought hard about what made me play my A-game. Based on the results from my online play, I came to the conclusion that adversity instantly snapped my poker mind back into focus. This was no small feat. In earlier days, my reaction was to rage quit after making a big and costly mistake. I realized that there was a huge lesson to be learned in playing myself out of the hole during my first online session, when I dropped several hundred big blinds before pulling out the win over a three-hour session.
The feeling I had after bending the graph back upwards like that was better than dragging a big pot. I was really proud of myself for persevering through adversity, and really encouraged by how it snapped my back into my A-game.
The only problem was I didn’t want to have to lose in order to then win.
I thought about it some more. I didn’t have to lose to persevere. Just playing was persevering.
Hell, I should be really proud of where I am today. I had taken shot after shot at a game I was under-rolled for, and almost universally succeeded. While variance tempered the pride, I had somehow managed to put myself in a bucket-list position: playing the biggest game of my life with challenging opponents, livestreamed to a worldwide audience.
Just showing up would not allow me to check the box next to ‘epic poker adventure’, though. I had work to do.
I would draw on my history, standing tall and confident with the understanding that I deserve to be in this position. My A-game wins. My only goal for this Vegas trip is to play it.
Of course, the dictionary definition of perseverance is “steadfastness in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success”. That “doing something” wasn’t just playing poker. It was playing my A-game. So what exactly is A-game.
Upon further introspection, I came to the conclusion that while A-game is a hybrid of many different things, it’s best summed up in one word: Process.
It was studying James “SplitSuit” Sweeney’s Hand Reading Lab that I realized process is the source of A-game.
Every poker player has process at the heart of their game, whether it’s conscious or unconscious. For many, it’s just the process of selecting which hand to play from which position. It can be thinking about what the player to your left might do if you open-raise. It’s about hand reading, bet sizing, hand planning and contingency planning. It’s about when you look at your cards, how you hide your tells or create false tells. It’s in how you talk (or don’t) during a poker hand, what you buy in for, how many bullets you fire.
It’s absolutely overwhelming.
We think about chips on the table as a limited resource, but I started thinking I as a poker player should pay more attention to what I’m doing with the other limited resource — time.
On a river decision for all our chips, who wouldn’t want to press pause and go back to their hotel room for 30 minutes to study the situation and then make the decision?
The thing is, the decision we make pre-flop, or after the flop, is often the reason we win or lose that pot, and often determines how much or how little we win or lose. I realized each decision needed more careful thought and planning.
Process is constrained by time. I wasn’t going to be that player that tanked 5 minutes on a preflop decision. But I needed to pace myself, discover and detail exactly what my process was now, and where I could make improvements. I needed to codify a process, and be perseverant in following it.
We’re all trying to tell a good story with our lives. Win or lose, I was about to write a hell of a story. With perseverance and process leading me to play my A-game, I would truly earn the title of ‘Hero’, and have a great story to share with my fellow Red Chippers, and my friends and family back home (who still might not exactly understand what exactly I’m doing, but such is the plight of the strategic gambler.)
I realized the fear I felt facing a week of shot-taking in Vegas was more nervous excitement than anything else. My only fear was that I would not play my A-game, and hopefully now I had the tools to do so.
The proof is in the poker. See you in Vegas.
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