There is an interesting lesson that I had to learn early in my online poker journey. There is a simple fact that when you are a cash game player, your losses matter more than your wins. This is just the way it is. Often when I was playing with a more limited bankroll, I would consistently complain about how bad I would run or how much I lost that session. I was living in a dorm environment I would say, “I lost X amount of dollars today.” After a while, they started to add up that I was either worth several million dollars before attending college and had since lost it, or more likely, I was never recounting my big wins.

The reason for this was probably many-fold. For starters, I probably felt too boisterous bragging to a bunch of fellow college students about winning large amounts of money. I also was too busy complaining about my bad beats and losses to ever get a good a word in about my conquests. The main reason, however, was losses just matter more.

When a poker player loses money, not only is it one step closer to having a goose egg for a bankroll, but it is also a greater percent of your new bankroll than the same dollar amount as a win would be. A simple mathematic example can be used to illustrate this concept. Let’s examine two scenarios where the same amount of money is won, and then lost.

Scenario A: You have a bankroll of $10,000. You play mostly $1/$2 no limit, and have some decent success. You sit down at your normal game with $200, and right off the bat everything is going great. You pick up aces and take down kings. You hit a big draw against two pair and before you know it, you are up $1,000. The game breaks and now your bankroll is $11,000 after the great session you just experienced. This $1,000 gain now constitutes a certain percent of your new bankroll ($1,000/$11,000 or about 9%).

Scenario B: Your bankroll is the same $10,000 as before. You play the same limits but this time the session goes horribly. Every hand is torture and you decide to cut your losses after $1,000, one of your worst ever. This $1,000 loss now constitutes a different percent of your new bankroll ($1,000/$9,000 or about 11%)

What we can extrapolate from these two scenarios is simple: Every dollar you increase your bankroll by, the next dollar will constitute less of a percent increase than the previous dollar earned. Conversely, every dollar you lose will constitute more of a percent decrease than the previous dollar lost. The marginal value of a dollar earned is less than the marginal value of a dollar lost. This means that losing really does matter more to you than winning, even if the dollar amounts appear equal. Not only this, but your last dollars gain even more value because once your bankroll reaches zero; you will no longer have the capacity to earn more dollars at a later date.

How do you, as a poker player, leap over this giant hurdle backed by that pesky devil mathematics? Many players don’t, and eventually end up broke. But you can avert disaster by being strong mentally. Learn to celebrate your wins. Eventually, when your bankroll is big enough, both the dollar you win and the dollar you lose will be such a small percent of your roll, that the fact the dollar you lose matters a minuscule amount more than the dollar you win will make no difference. In the meantime, you have to psychologically force yourself to emphasize the dollars you win as much, if not more than the dollars you lose. Once you can give yourself this boost, the dollars you win will start to far outnumber the dollars you lose, and neither will make a difference to your bankroll.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Poker Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.