They get depressed, they stop going out and seeing people, and keep blaming others because of the mistakes they make while steaming.
A very important question is: how can this be defeated? Will time solve it, and how much will it take? Can we avoid thinking short-term and keep focusing on long-term results? Can we keep thinking in ‘Sklansky-dollars’ and not concentrate on all the buy-ins that we just lost? It surely does take a huge effort to stand up after the fifteenth losing session and call it a day like nothing happened.
As these questions are very-very hard to answer, the only thing we would state for sure is, that, although we will probably never be able to forget all the unlucky hands/bad beats/bad decisions of the past, we are in control of the future.
Another two questions come to a lot of players’ minds when pondering about these things, one of them being: Does this parallel-like relationship between our performance and our attitude mean that we are gamblers? And, consequently, are poker professionals completely in control of these phenomena?
You would probably think that players like Sammy Farha, Barry Greenstein or durrrr and Ziigmund are always in complete control of the situation (we all know that Phil Hellmuth is an exception here). Well, it turns out that they are not gods either.
This idea has been proved right when stumbling upon one of Doyle Brunson’s older blog entries, saying:
"My phone rang and a friend of mine called and said Sammy Farha, Gus Hanson, David Benyamine, and some amateur had been playing in Bobby’s Room for 36 hours. I made a mad dash for my car, broke every traffic law getting to the Bellagio, and proceeded to play ten hours and lose over $400,000. That wiped out my eight game winning streak and put me in a bad, bad mood. The games were 2-7 Triple Draw, Omaha Hi-Lo, and Pot Limit Omaha, and I was tortured all night long. Finally, at 12:30 a.m. I just picked my chips up and spent a restless almost sleepless night in my bed."
Well, it looks like good old Doyle is just as human as ourselves, and he gets just as affected by a losing streak as everybody else. He couldn’t even fall asleep.
In the end, it all comes down to our capability of handling things, as this whole phenomenon is just a (very important) part of poker.
Vincent Van Gogh: Threshold of Eternity
You should never feel like this because of poker. Vincent Van Gogh painted this picture in 1890, when the symptoms of depression were first discovered at him. It was the same year that he committed suicide.
