In poker, we use the word stuck to talk about how much money we're down. You might say, "I'm stuck $3,500 this session." Or, "I'm stuck $60,000 this month."
Today, I want to talk to you about getting unstuck.
When you're stuck, you've lost some money – fair enough. And in poker, we have another word for that: a downswing. Over a long enough period of time, the two end up meaning more or less the same thing. I've lost $60,000 this month. I'm on a $60,000 downswing. Same idea.
I've made videos before about how to deal with downswings. But the idea I want to talk to you about today is a little different.
You know how this goes
You're stuck $60,000.
You put in the work. You play well. You start clawing it back. Now you're only down $30,000. That's real money recovered – but it doesn't feel like winning. You're still down. You're still in a hole.
You keep going. Stuck $30,000 becomes stuck $18,000. More progress, same feeling. You're not building anything – you're digging yourself out.
Then a bad run of cards on a given day, and you drop $15,000.
And it hits instantly: Ugh. I'm still in this downswing. It's still happening to me.
The thing about downswings
That downswing only exists in your mind.
I was reminded recently of a passage from Tommy Angelo's Elements of Poker. It's on the back cover of the book, and I'll share it with you now.
All of my good streaks and all of my bad streaks of every length and depth have had one thing in common. They did not exist in your mind. They only existed in my mind. And this is true for everyone's winning and losing streaks. None of them actually exist. They are all mental fabrication, like past and future. Everything that ever happens happens in the present tense. But how can you have a "streak" in the present tense? You can't. And therefore, if you are in the present tense, which, in fact, at this time, you are, then at this moment there is no streak in your life. There is no inherent existence to streaks. The streak is there when you think about it, and when you stop thinking about it, it goes away. It blossoms and withers, all in your mind. And when your mind invents a streak, you believe it exists, because you believe what your mind tells you. But the truth is there is only the hand you are playing.
As long as that downswing is in your mind, you're stuck.
You're stuck in the sense that you're down money. And you're stuck in the more literal sense, too – stuck on the idea that the downswing is real, that you have ground to make up, that as you make progress, you're still down.
Resetting your watermark
The main way I dealt with downswings over the course of my career was something I'll call resetting my watermark.
A watermark is the line water leaves behind when it rises and then falls back. If you've ever seen a river flood and then go back down, you know what I mean. There's a stain on the trees, a line on the rocks, marking exactly how high the water got at its peak. Long after the river is back to normal, that line is still there, quietly holding onto the high point.
The term gets borrowed in finance. Hedge funds use "high water mark" to measure their performance against the peak of an account. If the fund drops, the manager has to bring it back up to that previous high before any new performance fees come online. The peak doesn't move down when the value does. It just sits up there, waiting to be matched.
In poker, we so often measure ourselves against our high watermark. You start a session, you win $1,200, and then you lose $1,000 back. And in addition to being up $200 on the session, you're also down $1,000 from your peak.
In a year where you've won $80,000 at the tables, you might have been up at one point at $130,000. So now you're on a $50,000 downswing.
The most important part of dealing with a downswing, to me, is resetting that watermark.
One of the things I work on with people in Beyond the Game is long-term goals. Long-term vision, long-term goals, all the way down to short-term goals. And each time we go through this process, there's a boost of motivation that's near universal. People who set these goals make plans. They build in new habits. They work toward those goals. It's a natural process, and your body feeds you dopamine as you go after them and see yourself making progress.
The problem is, the goal of getting unstuck isn't a very exciting goal. It comes from a place of pressure. And the process of going from down $60,000 to down $18,000 doesn't reward your mind and body in the same way. It doesn't lead to the kind of mindset you want to have at the table.
This isn't only about dopamine and the work you do away from the table – because sometimes people really are driven by downswings to work harder. It's more about mindset and attitude. About how quickly you can go from feeling okay to that Ugh, it's still happening to me mindset we started with.
How I actually do it
When I reset my watermark – usually on a short break from poker, when downswings are especially brutal – I wipe off the high watermark and I accept my current bankroll. My current circumstances. I take inventory.
I look at where I'm at with my bankroll, but I also look at the games I have access to, and the abilities I have. A lot of the time, even though I've lost money over the course of the downswing, I've kept getting better. I've learned things. I've made new connections. I've found new opportunities in some way. There's positive in there.
And I take this chance to re-evaluate my plans and my goals. Because part of what's so hard about downswings is that the other thing we get stuck with in our minds is the idea that our old goals aren't achievable anymore. Where we saw ourselves going before the downswing is not where we see ourselves going now. Sometimes the new circumstances don't necessarily require a new plan, but they'd mean a new plan is the best one – there's a much better way to go about things from here.
So taking the time to step away, stop measuring myself against the high watermark, and look at my situation now – it's a much needed reset. From there I can decide how to spend my time and energy, what games to play, what my plan is, what I'll do if things go better from here, what I'll do if things go worse.
Now run it again
You were stuck $60,000. You reset. You took inventory, set new goals, made a plan. Your current bankroll is your new zero.
You put in the work. You play well. You start winning. I'm up $10,000. I'm up $20,000. I'm up $30,000. This is exciting progress. I'm doing great.
You keep going. You get to what used to be down $18,000. Now you're up $42,000. Things are going really well. The hard work is paying off. The planning is paying off.
Then comes the bad run of cards. You lose $15,000.
And this time, it doesn't feel like Ugh, here we go again, I'm still in this downswing. No. Now you've had a lot of winning behind you. You have that confidence. The setback is just part of poker, but you're mentally equipped to deal with it – because you're not stuck in the frame of mind you would have been stuck in, had you not reset your watermark.
The takeaway
So the next time you find yourself stuck $2,000 at the poker table, or stuck $10,000 over the month, keep this in mind. Push the idea that this is a streak out of your mind. As Tommy told us, it isn't.
It might take a while before you earn that money back.
But you can get unstuck immediately.