Downswings, emotions, losing, lonliness and beats

[ElSapo]

I'm sticking this in psychology, but mods, feel free to stick it in BBV if you like...

Holdem Hi: 990 enumerated boards containing 8s Tc 9c
cards win %win lose %lose tie %tie EV
7s Jh 941 95.05 28 2.83 21 2.12 0.961
6s 8h 28 2.83 941 95.05 21 2.12 0.039

Sometimes, you just want to see the numbers laid out. So you take the beat, plug it in, make sure there really was only about a 2% chance of losing, and try and say "it can't get worse." But, of course, it can, because it can happen again. And it will, eventually, just hopefully not today or tomorrow.

And sometimes it does.

I posted a few days ago in this thread about my last four months playing to pay the rent. I don't really consider myself a "pro," since I'm actively looking for a job and all that, but I guess that is what it amounts to.

Anyways, the last few days have really made me want to think more about the frustrations that go along with professional playing, and the ups and downs we all have to face.

Playing professionally over the last several months has given me, at times, a profound sense of lonliness. I don't know how else to describe it. After a bad day, or few days, I just get this feeling that there's no one out there who would both understand -and- care.

That's the key, of course: Caring and understanding. Plenty of my friends care, I suppose, but they don't really understand. And the people on these boards certainly understand, but we've all been there — so I know you don't -really care-, same as I don't really care about your downswings.

Empathy is hard to come by for the professional poker player, I guess.

How does anyone cope with this?

When my girlfriend has a bad day or week at work, she gets stressed or whatever, I understand. She can talk about it, I understand, I've had office jobs, and so on. But when the two-outers rain down on me I feel compelled to bottle it up. She doesn't really understand poker or online gambling, and of what she does understand I know there's a part of her that finds the entire thing sketchy and weird and on the fringe of things.

So who do you turn to? Or do you? Is it simply a matter of needing to be emotionally strong to do this job? Is it just necessary that your bankroll be large — not so much in proportion to a risk of ruin calculation, but a risk of emotional hell calculation?

Bad days and weeks and months happen. Everyone who's played any length of time has a nice big dip in their earnings graph somewhere. There's a stretch of cards, be it 1,000 hands or 10,000 hands or 100,000 hands, where you didn't make squat, where you lost, where it didn't seem like you were getting anywhere.

But pro poker doesn't seem to have career counseling, or even just a whole lot of shoulders to cry on. What do you do?

I get really lonely sometimes, doing this, and I look forward to getting back into a steady job. But then there are the weeks where all the draws get there, the graph goes back up, the numbers are green, AK stands unimproved, and so on. And I forget these bad days, where it's suddenly 6:30 and I have no idea where the day went and the numbers are red red red.

2% ... Maybe it won't happen again? And when it does, what do you do?