2009 Recap

2009 was a very humbling year. I've spent New Year's day trying to get my arms around what happened. At the beginning of the year, I was coming off my best year (2008), best quarter (QIV08), and second best month (Dec, 2008) of all time. I was feeling super-human and the whole "why am I going to work everyday" thing kept creeping into my brain. I would never quit my job to play poker but it's hard not to daydream about it when you're running good.

So I took a ridiculous amount of money to Biloxi in January and lost all of it. Welcome to 2009. I was playing in stakes I had never played before and thought it through ahead of time as a calculated risk. I was taking a shot and I had given myself permission to do, but in the process chalked up my worst month ever. To be honest, I shrugged it off. Then I repeated the "worst month ever" feat in my local $2-5 PLO game, which included 7 consecutive losing sessions of a week's salary or more. So now I'm in deep for the year.



Starting March 1st, I "sobered up" a little and actually recorded a net win for the remainder of the year but never overcame these first two months. Overall very humbling.

So I have two main points/questions about the year:

1) I'm continually amazed by the parallels between poker and finance. Expected earnings, variance, risk, etc. It's pretty interesting. The one that jumps out at me is the "crash" just when everything seems like it couldn't be better. Just when everyone is piling into houses and quitting their jobs to bet their life savings on the Carton Sheets infomercial they just saw on TV, the housing market comes crashing down, taking the economy with it. And just as yours truly thinks he has conquered the poker world? Just a different version of the same song.

2) It is really hard to get your head around what is going on when your poker results head south for the winter. I still honestly don't know wtf happened in 2009. Even my "winning" months of March-December were very, very mediocre. Certainly not worth the time that I put in.

A few thoughts:

a) The part that jumps out of my results the most is my local $5-10 NL results. I only played 21 hours and lost $7,500. This is simply a massive loss for the number of hours played. But in those 21 hours, the following things happened:

i) All-in preflop for $1,700 KK vs QQ. Q in the window.
ii) Re-raise to $300 preflop with AK, A on the flop, lose $1,400 to 2P (AJ).
iii) Lose $1,600 set-under-set
iv) Lose $1,200 to 83 after raising preflop, check-raising the flop with top pair, 3 on the turn
v) Lose $1,100 defending blind heads-up, flopping 2P, playing against a straight

So basically, one of these each session.

Continuing with my thoughts:

b) Is it the economy, stupid? Is the loose cash just gone? Maybe, but my buddies are shrugging this off and continue to win at very good rates. They might just simply be better than me but I wouldn't have agreed to that at any point prior to 2009.

c) Can I really just chalk this up to bad luck? I don't know. I want to. But a whole year? I wouldn't believe that BS from anyone else.

d) This last one is the one that bothers me. Am I just bored of this whole scene? I would have been a WINNER for the YEAR if I would have quit after 3 hours of playing and/or never played past 9PM. That stat would tempt one to agree, but all the bad shit just happened later in the sessions, right? Or no? Who knows.

I just really don't know. Frustrating.