Striving for?

One of the finest cash game players in the blog-sphere, The Law School Drop-Out, posted quite the eye opening post the other day.

Before we get to that, we need to put in perspective just how good of a player he is. He has been crushing the 30 /60 Limit game for more than a year. He’s also started tearing apart the 10/20 NL cash game on Party Poker. His most impressive feat, IMHO, was to exceed his self imposed 40 000$ in 30 days challenge when he managed to win 50k in 28 days!! Unreal stuff.

He had recently talked about moving up to the higher 80/160 limit and earn his stripes there. Unfortunately, it started with a 20 K loss. This was followed by a 10K drop. Followed by a 12k’er.Finally, one more 5 digit loss.

All in all, our poor friend lost 60 000$ in the span of 5 days playing on-line poker.

Read that line again.

That’s more money lost playing Poker than my GROSS salary for the year.

Although our friend has recouped 2/3 of his losses already, it does make one think. What are You/I/We hoping to achieve by playing this game? Could you/I psychologically handle such enormous losses in such a brief period of time?

I’m not a gambler at heart. I can’t stand –EV games since they're, well, -EV. I don’t see the fun in pissing away money bit by bit. Poker is somewhat of a medium in all of this. A skill game where $$ is awarded for your good play. Games where you can, to a certain extent, minimize the effects of luck on your results. Having fun while earning money, it can’t get any better than that.

Yet, at what point does Poker stop being a game? Where is the fun when the weekly swings are as big, if not bigger, as your yearly salary?

My initial goal, when I started playing this game somewhat seriously, was to become proficient at all the major types of games (Hold’Em, Stud and Omaha). How do you define proficient? I figure beating all these games consistently at the 10$/20$ level should make one a solid Poker player.

Will that truly be enough though? Human beings are greedy by nature. I don’t happen to escape that rule either. Whenever I’m running well at any level, I already start looking at the bigger tables trying to spot some juicy action. Although I have yet to be punished for taking those shots, it does seem to show that my inner greed seems to be yearning for more.

Only time will tell if the noble quest for perfection will be overtaken by the naked ambitions of greed.