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.

A poker player must learn to deal with many kinds of frustration. At this point in my career, I find it easy to shake off bad beats. My job is to get my money in good. Whatever happens afterward is beyond my control. The element of luck is what makes the game so exciting and what gives amateur players a fighting chance against much more skilled opponents, so I’ve got no reason to get upset about it.

A somewhat more complicated case is when I make an extremely strong hand when someone else holds something even better. In last month’s article, I recounted a hand from Day 1 where I made a high flush but lost to a full house. Perhaps I could have cut my losses a bit more than I did, but I was guaranteed to lose something. Again, it’s just part of the game.

I still struggle with being “card dead”, especially in live poker, where the pace of play is so much slower than online. The early days of the WSOP main event actually give players a lot of room to wait out a cold run of cards, but psychologically it can be very frustrating to fold hand after hand.

Boredom can lead to big mistakes, so I understand why some players more or less shut down part of their brains by listening to music, watching moves on in IPad, or even smoking marijuana during breaks. I prefer to cultivate the mental discipline to push through the boredom, because there’s actually an awful lot to pay attention to even when you aren’t in a hand. Your opponents’ betting patterns, physical and verbal tics, and general demeanor can provide valuable information if you’re paying enough attention to take it all in.

The frustrations with which I still struggle the most are my own mistakes. When I play a hand badly, I feel responsible for the misfortune that befalls me. Of course in some sense I am, but I also wonder, aren’t mistakes, like bad beats, an inevitable part of the game? Who can play high-level poker perfectly for days and days on end? I aspire to accept that mistakes happen just like every other kind of bad luck and are in some sense beyond my control. I’d like to accept them with the same equanimity that I now shrug off bad beats and continue to play my best going forwards.

The trick is to maintain the drive to get better, to avoid repeating the same mistakes, without blaming yourself for those that have already happened. If you get mired in reprimanding yourself for a prior mistake while you’re still in the tournament, you only increase the chances that you’ll make another mistake soon.

I believe this last sort of frustration played a role in my departure from the 2012 WSOP Main Event on Day 2.

Table 1

I was happy enough with my starting table. As usual, I found the seating assignments in advance and researched my opponents. Only three seemed to be professionals. Two of those had extremely short stacks, and the third, a young Hungarian, was seated to my immediate right, where I could keep my thumb on him.

Sure enough, the first three hours went well. I didn’t win any big pots, but having begun play with more than twice the average stack, I didn’t need to. I quietly accumulated another 10,000 chips without any tough decisions or big confrontations.

I did play one hand very strangely and ended up showing it down, which probably influenced my table image. I raised A4s in first position, and only the button called. He was a young live pro from Chicago, and the sense I got was that he was a good level two thinker. In other words, I expected his play to rely heavily on what he thought I had, but I didn’t think he would give me credit for making a tricky play based on what I knew I was representing to him.

The flop came QJJ rainbow, giving me nothing but a backdoor flush draw. I checked, he made a small bet, and I called. Although there was a chance Ace-high was good, I wasn’t intending to show it down. I thought my opponent might well have a medium pocket pair, and that if I check-called the flop and then bet the river, he’d give me credit for a Q or a better pair than his.

The turn was a 4, a very small improvement that didn’t change my plan. We both checked the turn. So far, so good.

A second Q on the river changed everything. Now that I could beat a medium pair, I checked planning to call a bet. He checked behind, and I had to show my unconventional flop call to claim the pot.

On the last hand before our table broke, I had a minor confrontation with the other big stack. The Hungarian and I had mostly stayed out of each others’ way, him not opening too many pots and me “rewarding” him for that by not putting too much pressure on him when he did raise. It’s important to note that this isn’t collusion, – we never made an explicit agreement – merely mutual self-interest. There were easier spots at the table that could be attacked with less risk, so we both found it beneficial to avoid playing a big pot with each other.

With the floor man hovering over us with an armful of chip racks, the Hungarian min-raised to 1,200 from the button. I, sitting in the SB, looked down at AJ. It was simply too good not to raise. I made it 4,200, the BB folded, and the button called.

I bet 4,800 on a 442 flop, more or less for value. Although I would’ve been glad to see him fold, I actually thought he would float often enough that I could profitably bet and then either bet again or check and call a bet unimproved on the turn, depending on what came. He called.

The turn was the 7, and we both checked. I didn’t see much point in betting the T river, so I checked again. Now the Hungarian bet 10K, which was about one-third of the pot. Believe it or not, I was tempted to call. I really wasn’t sure how wide he would value bet, and although I expected his bluff to come on the turn, he may have been tricky enough to check air on the turn planning to bluff the river if I checked again. I didn’t know enough about him to say, but I was getting awfully good odds and my spidey sense was tingling.

Then again, some of his floats could have paired the Ten or even the 7. I reminded myself of one of my rules for the early levels of the WSOP: err or the side of conserving chips. I folded and went to meet my new tablemates.

Table 2

My second table proved similar to the first. The non-professionals were perhaps a bit more skilled, and the pros had more chips, but the player of greatest concern – a young Frenchman – was again sitting to my right. Unfortunately we played together for less than an hour before this table, too, was broken up. I did nothing of significance and left with about as many chips as I brought.

Table 3

My third and final table was not so welcoming as the first two. There were a few soft-looking spots, but also a very capable young Russian on my immediate left and a kid in his early 20′s raising often and playing well a few seats to my right.

The real threat arrived a few minutes after me: a young northern European with a mountain of chips. He lived up to the stereotypes and was soon caught raising 62s under the gun. He wasn’t a true maniac, though. Despite some unconventional plays, he had a good feel for what he could get away with and when people simply weren’t in the mood to fold to him. In short, he was exactly what I did not want on my left.

In some ways, he did make it easier for me to stay disciplined about not playing any of the string of bad hands I was dealt. The only problem was that I never felt comfortable at the table. At my first table, although I never won any big pots, I felt like the potential was there. I knew who the weaker players were and I knew what kinds of situations I was looking for. I also believed that no one was likely to give me a tough decision, so I felt comfortable just waiting it out.

At this table, though, I didn’t have that same assurance that chips would come if I waited. On Day 2, that’s actually not the end of the world. I could afford to go into a bubble, waiting only for the best of spots, and perhaps get blinded down a bit, ultimately finishing the day with a very playable stack even if I never won a big pot. Arguably, this is what I should have done.

Instead, I decided to pick a mark and try to take some chips off of him. My chosen victim was a Hispanic man in his early 30s who was sitting two seats to my right and seemed a little intimidated and amateurish.

I guessed that this was probably his first main event, my biggest hint being the way he sized his raises. At the 400/800/100 level, when most people were raising anywhere from 1,600 to 2,000, I observed him open to 2,500. Overly large raises often indicate a somewhat unsophisticated understanding of poker. Rather than fighting for pots and looking to win as much as possible with both value bets and bluffs, these players believe in waiting for good cards and then doing everything they can to increase their odds of winning the pot, even if that means losing out on the opportunity to win more chips.

I later saw this same player raise to 2,000. Knowing that there were some circumstances where he would raise to 2,500, I guessed that he had what he considered a weak hand with which he did not want to commit too many chips. The player to my right called the raise, and I re-raised to 8,000 with whatever cards I held. They both folded, and I succeeded in my biggest bluff of the day, which isn’t saying much given how tight I’d been.

A similar spot arose shortly thereafter. This time the first player to act limped in for 800. My mark raised to 2,000 again, which with an extra 800 chips in the pot I interpreted to be even weaker than before. I raised to 6,000 with A7o, the first player folded, and my guy quickly called. Not what I was hoping for, but in all likelihood I’d still have opportunities to push him out after the flop.

The flop came KQ7, he checked, and I bet 7,500. Although I had a pair, this bet more or less turned my hand into a bluff, because if he called it, my pair would probably be no good. My 7s were simply too vulnerable to check, though.

My opponent quickly grabbed four orange chips, worth 20,000 altogether, and threw them into the pot.
For whatever reason, my gut told me that he was bluffing.

There are professionals who call themselves “feel players”, meaning that they don’t necessarily think explicitly in terms of odds, probabilities, and ranges. Rather, years of experience have given them a highly developed intuition for what will work, even if they can’t always articulate exactly why.

Some people will tell you, especially if they’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, that you should always listen to your first instinct. I don’t believe that. There are a lot of reasons, frustration chief among them, why your gut might mislead you. And if your opponent bets 2,000 into a pot of 8,000, your gut might tell you you’re beat, but is it really so finely tuned to know that you are beat more than 80% of the time?

Personally, I believe in taking intuition as a starting point and then submitting it to some back-of-the-envelope analysis. Although everything it tells you is in theory quantifiable, it isn’t always practical to perform such analysis in real time.

So when my gut told me he was bluffing, I ought to have asked questions like, “Is it better to call or re-raise? If you call, how will you proceed on a blank turn? On a club? If you re-raise, what’s the best non-bluff hand you can expect him to fold? Is there any risk of him re-bluffing you if you re-raise?”

I ought to have asked those questions, but instead I simply ruled out his strongest possible hands. If he had KK or QQ pre-flop, he would have made a larger re-raise, and there were only two 7s left in the deck, so he was quite unlikely to have a set. Thus, I concluded, I could re-raise and represent a set myself.

The problem – well, one of the problems – with this analysis is that even if he doesn’t have a set, he isn’t guaranteed to fold. KQ for top two pair is a very possible holding for him that he wouldn’t fold. He might also re-re-raise all-in with some sort of big draw such as AJ or AT.

Anyway, I reraised to 36,000, he very quickly moved all-in, and I had to fold. Quick as that, I’d lost more than half my stack and now had only 31,000, barely what I’d had at the start of Day 1 before playing poker for 16 hours. I felt pretty stupid.

As I said before, I’d ideally accept any loss, even one of my own creation, as simply a thing that’s happened and move on from there. In reality, though, it’s nearly impossible to resist the temptation for immediate analysis. Now I started asking all those questions I should have asked before pulling the trigger on the bluff. Part of me wanted to forget about it and move on, but another part insisted on playing it over and over again in my head to try to determine whether it was actually a good spot to bluff, not that it mattered now.

Perhaps because I grew up in the age of video games, I feel like I ought to just be able to hit the “undo” button when something like this happens. Can one moment’s indiscretion really have cost me so many chips in this tournament that I’d waited all year to play? It didn’t seem right. I wanted to go back and load a previously saved game from the time when I had an above average stack.

This is understandable but dangerous thinking. The desire to undo the past and win back chips very quickly can only result in reckless gambling. Try as I might to silence the doubts in my head, they weren’t going away. At this point I probably should have turned to my crutch, the IPod I keep with me for situations like these when I need to distract myself. It’s best if you can keep your full attention on the table, but when your mind is wandering anyway, better to listen to music than self-criticism.

Perhaps 20 minutes later, six players folded and it was on me holding KTo on the button. I raised to 2,000.

The small blind folded, and then the big blind, the semi-maniacal northern European, re-raised to 5,200. It was easy to say, “That guy’s crazy, he could have anything, just go all-in and hope for the best.” I still don’t think it’s the worst play in the world. But the difference between a good loose-aggressive player and a true maniac is that the good player knows how to use his image to his advantage. He probably expects me to be steaming from my recent loss and eager to try to win a pot, and he knows that I think of him as extremely aggressive. Given those facts, I actually have my doubts about how often he’d re-raise here without a hand good enough to call a shove.

At the time, though, the part of my brain that wanted to get back to where I was before silenced the part that was trying to sound an alarm. I moved all-in for 29,000, and my opponent quickly called with AQ.

He was ahead, though not a massive favorite. The thing is that when you’re in that frustrated, just-want-to-get-back-to-even mentality, you care less about the downside of losing – in your mind you’re already a loser – and more about the possible upside. If I’d won this pot, I’d have nearly as many chips as I did before that expensive bluff.

I did not win the pot, though, which meant that the World Series of Poker was over for me. I couldn’t tell you what place I got, because it doesn’t matter. When there’s no cash prize to be paid out, the tournament officials don’t keep track of such things. There were no tax forms to fill out, and no one to congratulate me for a job well done. The only acknowledgments of my departure were a “good game,” from the guy stacking what had been my chips and the dealer’s cry of, “Seat open! Table 42!”