So here I am now, about a month from my last blog post, starting to understand what all of the articles were talking about. There's a few reasons it's been such a long time since I last posted here. First, I took a week vacation to go scuba diving in Honduras. Then I just got super busy, putting in a ton of study hours and playing hours while forcing myself to keep a healthy eating and working out routine. But the primary reason I haven't been posting is because there is significantly less motivation to post when things aren't going well, and that's where things have stood for the last two months.
When I say things aren't going well, I don't mean that I'm broke or anything drastic like that, so don't worry, I won't be begging anyone for money anytime soon. So I guess compared to most of the horror stories I've read, things haven't really been THAT bad. What I do mean is that I've experienced one of, if not the most significant downswings of my poker life, and there's no telling when it will come to an end. I've gone weeks on end where I haven't shown a profit in more than one or two sessions, and it has been discouraging to say the least. The worst part of it all hasn't been the financial burden though, because like I said, financially I'm still in great shape. The hardest part has been the internal voice, which can be pretty damn mean a lot of the time. I've left the table telling myself that I'm not cut out for this, that I'm too far behind the curve, unprepared, and that I'm terrible at poker a painful amount of times, and that has made it really difficult to motivate myself to let everyone know how things are going.
But, that would defeat the purpose of this blog if I listened to those thoughts. The point of this is to share the whole journey; the good and the bad, and use it to hold myself accountable. So with that, my plan is to charge forward, and ignore my negative thoughts. Luckily, there are a ton of positives that have come out of this experience. It has motivated me to put in significantly more study time than I otherwise would have. It lead me to reach out to a poker professional to ask to be a mentor who has been an immense help. He has reassured me that learning new concepts will have negative impacts on my bottom line until I learn how to apply them correctly. It has also been a successful test of my resilience which is something that all poker players need to have in order to withstand the inevitable downswings they will experience.
So all in all, I'm excited to keep going. If there's one thing that I can proudly say I haven't lost, it's my excitement to go to work every day, and try to do the best I can. That feeling of loving what I'm doing has never died and is a constant reminder that this was the right move. So with that, I look forward to checking back in with this blog in a few weeks where I hope to have a more positive report or at least some fun stories to tell.
