Joel I think you and I should hit the road as a comedy duo. I set up the joke, and you deliver the punchline! 

Yes, unfortunately Joel is right, it is the nature of tournaments. By default we are usually losers, and the only way we get an upward sloping graph is by the peaks beating out the troughs. By default, our graphs are on the downward trajectory. In the case of the winning player, it is 2 steps backwards, 2 1/2 steps forward. For myself, I’ve got the 2 steps forward, 3 1/2 steps backward routine almost perfected.

Which in fact is a noticeable improvement on the 1 step forward, 25 steps backwards I had going on previously. At the start, I was even 5 steps back, 28 steps further back.

So I guess that is some progress.

I would figure for any SNG 45 person and <, 1000 games should give you a good idea for how you are getting on. 90 and 180 man MTT SNG’s I would want 2000 games, and the number of MTT’s you will need to gauge your profitability or otherwise is so large that by the time you reached it, you would be an entirely different player who would need to ask the question right on over again.

Check out the “Top 10 Sickest Poker Graphs” and you can see, in graphical form, the variance depicted. “latouche83″‘s graph takes the biscuit! Just because someone is a SNE and a 99.999% on OPR, this can mean jack (shit…oops!). Some guys luckbox early, think they are Ivey, and donk it all back. Others, like myself, are of pure genius Negreanu/ Cunningham/ Merson level, yet struggle early on, for years, before being repaid all that negative variance in a short space of time (like, tomorrow for me? Please?).

Tournament poker is notoriously brutal. Even confirmed winning players can go for a year or more breaking even, or losing, only to get it all back plus a significant +ROI in one or two tournaments. It is brutal stuff.

My guesstimate is that after 1,000,000 hands of tournament poker, you are still not a winning player? Only then should you start to even be thinking about getting depressed at your seeming lack of ability. And that is no exaggeration.

Yeah Darth, I hear you. 

But if I can give you the benefit of my experience for a minute…

It is an extremely dangerous path to walk to be relying on poker as a substitute for disappointment in other areas of endeavour in your life. I have been there, walked that road, and bought the T-shirt on the way down. It was a brutal path to tread, and when it went wrong, and poker ended up not being the answer to my professional woes, I ended up even more depressed than had I never found poker in the first place. 

I won’t bore you with my story, except to say that I had also lost my professional career, ended up in a job/ profession which does not challenge me mentally at all, and is pretty much a dead-end gig. When I took that job, I hoped and expected to be doing it for a year or two… three max., at which point I would re-enter my beloved profession. Unfortunately, when I started re-applying in my field, it was October of 2007…you can guess the rest. The world economy tanked, and I simply could not find my way back in. I could handle it for a while, but it went on and on…for years. I even ended up losing all motivation to be sending out my CV’s. It got to the point where I felt physically sick when I even thought about looking for a job. I became extremely depressed, I won’t say suicidal, but I do have some insight into how someone might end up getting to that point. 

At some point, I found poker online. And like you I read The Theory Of Poker. Before that I studied the Harrington On Holdem series hard, as though I were preparing for an exam. It makes me smile when I read you say that you feel because you read Theory Of Poker you have studied harder than the field, because this is exactly what I thought. But I was so wrong. When I finally got talking to the regs in my games, they told me they thought HoH was way out of date, they were more into training sites, and studying with software, such as SNGwiz. I was way out of touch before I even began. 

Whatever, the thing I would like you to understand, is that after losing brutally for years, I began to be at least able to beat the games sometimes. 

My inevitable first heater had me ecstatic. I remember driving my sister-in-law to the airport; I was on walking on air! I thought I had made it! There was no way the number of games I had won in such a short space of time could be due to good fortune. I had made it and I was able now, or at least imminently, to give up my detested job. To illustrate how I felt, there was a jewellers at the airport. I stopped off there and bought my eldest daughter a silver bracelet! When I gave it to her, I explained that all our worries were over (I was half-joking), and I explained to her that she was now the daughter of a successful poker player. I felt so happy.

For about a week.

The blind ignorance! What a stupid idiot of a man! What an out of touch clueless fool! The heater ended, and I proceeded, over the next six months, to plunge into the poker-graph abyss. It may sound silly to experienced players, it does to me now, but I was absolutely crushed by the slide. Not only had I lost my profession and not found my way out of my hated job, but even poker had deserted me, the field I had put so much work in to, and invested so much emotionally, had proven to be nothing more than a cruel mirage which was now even costing me money once again. I stole back my daughter’s bracelet, and sold it! (Ahhh! No I didn’t!). 

The point being, if you invest a lot emotionally in poker as a potential career, particularly tournament poker, then you need to understand it might well take years, so much effort, so much time, a lot of sacrifice even. And even then, at the end of it all, you may find you simply are not talented enough to make it.

I do not wish to dissuade you from trying to make it in poker, but I feel duty bound to persuade you at the very least, to manage your expectations.

(Oh, and btw, I was only having fun saying I am of genius level…I fear the opposite might be the truth).

Good man. If you want to private message me feel free. Sadly, I have a lot of experience in life in how NOT to do things! I will be able to tell you what NOT to do, and by default, you will succeed!

I am in fact only half-joking. If I were to tell you the story of my life, you wouldn’t believe it.

Suffice it to say, but in a nutshell, to sum it up: 

All I needed to do in my life, in order to have it very easy, at least relatively speaking, and to have a very respectable career and standard of living, was simply NOT to be a complete and utter total 100% pe-noid of the 10th dimension. 

I didn’t have to do anything special…I had done all the hard work…everything was set…it was easy.

Just don’t mess it up. 

It was completely, and utterly, beyond me.