I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that poker is a frustrating game. In some sense we all know and acknowledge this, but because of the way that poker media is saturated with the winners of huge prizes, it’s easy to lose perspective. It can feel like the same people are constantly winning, and if you hold your own results up for comparison to the combined winnings of the best 100 or so players in the world, you’re going to come away feeling awfully inadequate.

You don’t hear about it when these players are losing. You don’t know how much they were stuck or how much makeup they were in before their last big score. Most people are a lot more vocal about their wins than their losses, and they tend to keep their frustrations and doubts to themselves, or at least private within a small circle of friends.

Yet every player, no matter how good, experiences loss and frustration a lot more often than he or she experiences great success. And I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one for whom these experiences are accompanied by anxiety and doubt. Am I actually any good? Is the game passing me by? Am I dead money at these stakes?

I certainly don’t mean to hold myself up as one of those “best 100 players in the world”. But I’ve been a professional for nine years, this is my eighth WSOP, my lifetime ROI in WSOP events is through the roof, and I continue to astound and disappoint myself with how wrapped up I can get in short-term results. Coping with frustration and playing through doubt is a big, if rarely discussed, part of being a successful poker player. These things have been an integral part of my WSOP experience so far this summer.

It began with so much promise. For the first time ever, I planned to play not just the main event but roughly a dozen preliminary events as well, with buy-ins ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 and even a pot-limit Omaha eight-or-better event for good measure. I’ve played the main event for seven years running, but this time I was going to get the full experience: rent a car, rent a condo, play the side games, and just generally spend three weeks fully immersed in poker.

It was great fun looking over all of the tournaments going on throughout Las Vegas and putting together a tentative schedule. Of course, I hoped to make so many day twos and day threes that I’d have to skip many of the events on my list. The possibilities were endless. The package I put together sold out within hours, and I set out for Las Vegas flush and about as excited as I’d ever been to play poker.

My first event was the $1,500 six-handed. Barely an hour into the tournament, with blinds at 25/50, I opened to 125 with K7s two seats off the button, and the big blind called. The flop came 765r, he checked, I bet 175, he raised to 475, and I called.

The turn brought a 3, he checked, and I bet 725. I had an aggressive image, especially with this player, and thought I could be called by worse made hands and also charge 8s and overcards. He moved all-in, laying me roughly 2-1 on a call.

On paper this looks like an easy fold, but I got an overwhelming aura of weakness from him. I don’t consider myself a “feel player”, but I’ve rarely experienced something this strong at the poker table. I went with it. He flipped 84s, and that was the end of the beginning of my WSOP.

I don’t go with my gut like this often, and when I do I’m right more often than I’m wrong. I do believe that, especially in live poker, it’s possible to pick up subconsciously on information that can lead you to a conclusion that is correct even if you can’t articulate why. Still, it’s hard not to feel ridiculous when you trust that voice in your head and it proves to be so wrong. What does it say about me as a player if such a strong feeling proved so inaccurate? How was I supposed to trust any of my reads going forwards?

Next up was the $1,500 Millionaire Maker. I ran my starting stack of 4,500 up to about 10K without much difficulty, and then I got all-in with pocket deuces against Aces on a 5529 board. He rivered a 5 and I spent the rest of the tournament short-stacked.

Never interesting, short-stacked play is especially bland when you’re ten-handed. My eventual elimination felt more like a mercy killing.

It was more of the same in the next day’s $1K. We started with just 3,000 chips, so there wasn’t much time to run up a stack before the blinds were nipping at my heels. There was more ten-handed nittiness, and eventually I lost a flip.

I was at least looking forward to getting some more play in the $3,000 shootout, where we started with 9,000 in chips and blinds of 25/50. But someone flopped a set against my Aces in a four-bet pot, and it proved to be my shortest tournament to date.

Walking back out of the Rio barely an hour after I’d arrived, I was struck by the stark reality that this could be my entire summer. I wasn’t guaranteed any deep runs nor even any cashes. Of course, part of me knew that whiffing 13 or 14 tournaments wouldn’t be a wildly anomalous losing streak even for a top player, but you don’t show up in Las Vegas thinking that it’s going to happen to you.

Why couldn’t it? Even if I played great, it would take nothing more than a couple of coolers, a couple of lost flips, a couple of bad beats, and a bad table draw or two. Mix in the occasional mistake, and that’s an easy recipe for a lousy summer. I lost four tournaments, and already I could see the storm clouds gathering. This is how it starts. Every streak of 14 losses starts as a streak of 4. I took the rest of the day off and tried to get my head right.

The next day was the $2,500 six-handed, where I finally got both some play and some good luck. It started with a lucky table draw and a lucky turn card. Of my five opponents, only one seemed capable of giving me truly tough decisions. In our first pot together, I check-raised him with a gutshot, turned the nuts, and overbet the river to win a huge pot and cripple him.

I turned around and lost a lot of that with an ambitious semi-bluff that failed to deliver either a fold, a six-outer, or either of my back-door draws. Luck bailed me out again, though, when I got it in with 77 against AK and TT and flopped a 7.

After that I was rolling. The table got tougher, but I rose to the occasion. I made some good reads and picked off two river bluffs, one of them a check-raise from a world class player. This did a lot to renew my confidence after the disastrous call that ended my earlier six-handed tournament so quickly. I was proud of myself both for the reads and for having the courage to trust them despite that fiasco.

I didn’t want to jinx it, but with half an hour to go until dinner break, I had an above average stack, so I texted a friend and made plans to meet at break. Ten minutes later, I was out of the tournament. It was nothing spectacular: I ran AQ into QQ from the most (over)aggressive player at table, then AK into JJ.

Five events into the series, and I was yet to make a dinner break. What fun! Not only that, but I’d run well in this one. I’d been lucky with my table draw, sucked out in a big pot, nailed a gutshot and gotten paid off huge, and it still wasn’t enough. How much run good do I need to make the money?

Thinking that a change of venue and a smaller field might be good for me, I headed to the Venetian the next day for a $2,500 deepstack. Only 26 players were registered when play started at noon, and I didn’t recognize a single one of them, which seemed too good to be true. It was. By the time registration closed, there more than 90 players in the field, and the late registers were quite a bit tougher than those who’d arrived on time.

Worse, I was randomly pulled off of my table, full of on-time arrivals, to balance a table full of late registers. The level of pre-flop aggression was through the roof, making it tough to be card dead. I was playing extremely tight and still kept getting raised anytime I entered a pot, being forced several times to fold either a rare bluff or the very bottom of my value range.

I nitted it up as my stack dwindled. Still, I stayed patient and managed to keep my head above water for hours despite never accumulating more than 30 BBs. The best hand I saw during that period was AK. The first time I ran into another AK and chopped. The second, I ran into two other players with AK and chopped for an even smaller fraction of the pot.

Finally, the second-most aggressive player on the table opened with a raise from the hijack, the most aggressive called on the cutoff, and it looked like a pretty easy shove for me holding AJo on the button. They both had QQ, which is actually not such a bad outcome, but I didn’t get there and busted about half an hour before the end of the night.

Be careful what you wish for, I guess. As frustrating as it was to feel like I wasn’t even getting a toehold in any of the tournaments I played, playing for twelve hours and not cashing was pretty unpleasant, too.

If you’re in town on Saturday, July 6, make sure to come to the Annual 2+2 Party which is being held at the poker room in the South Point Hotel and Casino. We’ll be showing the movie Bet Raise Fold at 3:00 pm (in the lounge next to the poker room) and then Doors will open (so to speak) at 5:00 pm to the party with a buffet scheduled to be served at 6:00 pm. If you do plan to make it, please let us know in the RSVP thread in our Las Vegas Lifestyle Forum. The thread is located here.

In addition, also in the Las Vegas Lifestyle forum is a thread featuring an offer we have received for all 2+2ers from the Brazilian Steakhouse Pampas located in the Miracle Mile Mall that is attached to the Planet Hollywood Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. This is a terrific offer and the food is quite good – I should know since I’ve been there twice for meals and plan to go again. So, if in you’re in town, this is well worth considering.

Also at this time, the World Series of Poker is going strong in Las Vegas. This means that in addition to the games and tournaments at The Rio where the WSOP is located, there are lots of games and tournaments all over town. For those interested, there is much discussion in the appropriate forums.

Other than that, as in previous years, we at 2+2 hope to see all of you at the party. Feel free to stop by where I’ll be sitting and say hello not only to me, but to all the 2+2 team that makes our website and our publishing company possible. And a special thanks to the South Point Internet poker people and the South Point poker room for having us as their guests and making all of this possible