Trading Job

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. While I’ve been in Toronto, I have been playing hundred hour weeks and so I haven’t had much time to update the blog. To be honest, when I’ve been back in Chicago, I have had plenty of time to write but I’ve just been pretty lazy and unmotivated.  I think this has been largely due to being in the middle of my longest and largest poker downswing. Since Black Friday, I have really been struggling at the tables, even moving down to $1/$2 at the end of my last trip. Over the few months I’ve been in Canada, I think I’m down something like $25k even after bonuses.  I did lose $50k at $25/$50 in 3000 hands and run $7k under expected value, but it’s been discouraging to say the least. That’s over about 700 hours of play and 650k hands. That’s certainly a longer downswing than I ever thought possible for a good winning player. I find it difficult to write as any kind of authority on poker when I have those kinds of results over that kind of sample. That being said, I know how well I understand the game and how good I can be when I’m playing my A game. It’s just a matter of playing that A game more consistently. 

Anyway, I do have some big news. While home in August I interviewed with a trading firm in Chicago and they extended an offer to me at the beginning of October. After a lot of contemplation, I ended up accepting the job and I start on Monday. For me, the decision to give up poker in favor of trading was not an easy one and definitely bittersweet. 

On the downside, I will be taking a pretty massive pay cut and will have to follow a way more rigid schedule. I am certainly not looking forward to waking up at 5:30 AM every day or going to bed at 10PM every night. I am by no means a morning person and I honestly can’t even remember the last time I went to bed before midnight. I also hate quitting poker when I feel like I still had a lot of potential to improve and when I was getting pretty close to getting Supernova Elite again. Not to mention ending (or at least suspending) my poker career on a large downswing isn’t exactly the ideal way to go out.

However, I am VERY excited to be living in Chicago again. I think Toronto is a pretty cool city, but I honestly think Chicago dominates it in every respect, and that’s without even considering that my girlfriend, most my friends, and family all live in Chicago. I’m also excited to learn a new industry and apply the skills I’ve learned through poker to trading. I’ve always been very interested in trading and based on everything I know and everyone I’ve talked to, it seems to be similar to poker in a lot of respects.  I was actually going to write a future post comparing poker and trading so now I will feel even more qualified to do that.

Before wrapping this post up, I’d just like to touch on downswings in poker (since I’m ending on a large one). I think a large portion of the general population think playing poker professionally is A. not a “real job” whatever that means or B. a pretty cushy job where we get paid lots of money for clicking buttons (which is at least partially true). However, I think that people severely underestimate the emotional toll playing poker professionally can take on you and how difficult it can be to run bad (“get unlucky”) for an extended period of time and still make the best objective decisions without allowing emotion to cloud your judgment. There aren’t a lot of people in the world that can work 40 hours in a week, lose $10k, and still show up Monday with a clear head and confidence in his/her own abilities. To be honest, I’m not always sure I’m one of them.

While I certain was running very bad during the time I spent in Toronto, I definitely don’t think that is the main explanation for my more than disappointing results. I think it really was a combination of a lot of factors. In retrospect, I don’t think playing 100 hrs/week was the best choice for my results. I wanted to make sure I achieved Supernova Elite and wanted to spend as little time as possible in Toronto to do so. I think in a way I lost sight of the trees for the forest. I had this overall big picture goal of getting SNE and instead of focusing on the minute details that make a great poker player successful, I was just worried about getting as many hands in as possible. Instead of thinking about how to play each hand in the most profitable way, I just auto-piloted and assumed my results at the table would take care of themselves. In a game where your success is based largely on your ability to pick up on the tiniest pieces of information and to identify the most subtle shifts in your opponent’s strategies, I don’t think anyone can really play 100 hrs/week on their A game.

  

Additionally, I think playing those kinds of hours makes you more emotionally fragile (at least for me). Usually, if I’m running bad I will take an hour off and watch a training video, or review some hands, or even just do a workout. I’ll do something to keep myself calm, confident in my decision-making and in emotional control. In Toronto, I felt so much pressure to just play as many hours as possible that I would just try to fight through the run bad without ever really taking a step back. I think that was my biggest mistake and the biggest factor in my poor results. I think spending that much time at the tables and living that unbalanced of a lifestyle is very suboptimal for a poker pro. It breeds bad habits, shatters self-confidence, and can lead to inconsistent logic. So I guess my point to professionals out there is that balance is extremely important to poker results, not only within the game, but also in your life outside of it.