Blog – swings and roundabouts. Mostly swings

Blog – swings and roundabouts. Mostly swings

Wednesday, 3 March 2010

“I've been very fortunate to start the year off hot,” Cole “CTS” South wrote on his CardRunners blog recently. “There has been a ton of action at very high stakes and I've had a lot of luck (hopefully some good play as well) on my side.

“I've battled in some serious heads up matches mostly against Tom Dwan, Ilari Sahamies, and Patrik Antonius.  They are all very strong players, and playing them has been a great challenge.”


Full Tilt red pro South wrote this when his 2010 earnings in the high-stakes cash games at Full Tilt Poker had topped $3.5m. It was also shortly before he had a disastrous Pot-Limit Omaha session against Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies and Tom “durrrr” Dwan, losing over a million dollars at $300/$600 and $500/$1,000.


Very strong players, indeed.


I read this news and it constantly boggles my mind how they can cope with the massive swings that playing such an expensive and aggressive game with such small edges between players results in. Winning $3.5m in two months (about half a million each week) is incredible, losing $1m in a single session is sickening.


Of course, whereas most of us would have killed ourselves, South simply wrote: “Today I got smoked by Ilari, he played great and got some nice cards too.  I am going to take a break for a day or two to look over the hands from our match and make sure I am happy with my play.  He's always in the middle of the action, and I'm sure we will play again soon.”
Right.


I remember playing $0.1/$0.25 and feeling like death when I had a session of 6-tabling the shorthanded games that resulted in my losing $160. I’ve taken the Dusty “leatherass9” Schmidt approach of not looking at the cashier now. It’s a lot easier to deal with a bad session if you don’t actually know how much you lost.


Join in with this thread on the Bluff Europe forums – what stakes do you play, how many tables, and do you have a daily stop loss? Or this one – what’s been your best and worst poker day?


See you on Friday. You stay classy, Internet.



Tags: Poker News, Blog, –, swings, and, roundabouts., Mostly, swings