The key to success in life is knowing what you’re good at. Just figure it out, and you’ll have it made. Sounds easy, but just about everyone knows it isn’t. It takes a lot of exploration, experimentation, and trial-and-error to find out what you want to be when you grow up. Most importantly, it takes observation, the act of understanding what just happened to you, and then taking those experiences and making them a part of what you want out of life. This is also true in poker. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have started the article this way, right?
I get a lot of questions from people, and see a lot of posts, about “how do I build a bankroll?” or the even more generic “what games should I be playing?” My answer is always the same: “I don’t know. What are you good at?” It stuns me how often people flat-out can’t answer that question. They don’t have a clue. They will spend months and years wandering around the online desert, playing cash games, micro buy-in MTTs, 180-mans, single-table SNGs, sampling everything available to them at every site without becoming truly proficient at one thing, and therefore losing money at everything. Or they will play the same NL cash game for three months and lose, lose, and lose some more, without ever venturing off to see if they’re better at single-table SNGs or 180-mans or MTTs. Without observation and record-keeping, you’re navigating the Sahara without a map…on foot…carrying a leaky canteen…wearing a parka and sweatpants.
Every one of you will have a particular strength, a game that you can sit down and win. Even if you tell me that you’re the biggest donkey since they invented chips, you do. The worst player out there can find somewhere that, with a little bit of experience and a positive mental attitude, will be profitable for them. Finding your best game takes exploration, experimentation, and trial-and-error. Most importantly, it takes observation, keeping detailed records on your play. I’ve done that for my 3 ½ years of online poker, playing everything I could with the only restrictions being my bankroll and my imagination. At any time, I can go back and look through my data and know what my ROI is for various SNG buy-ins on each site, cash game BB/hr expectations, etc. I know what game gives me the best chance to make money.
I call this my “base camp”. I’m not a mountain climber or orienteering guy, as is easy to tell from looking at me. I’ve never been hiking in my life, and really don’t have any intention to try it. But the analogy is perfect. You look around the bottom of the poker mountain, you find somewhere you like, and you set up camp. You climb up a little bit, you spend some, can’t find anything good, retreat back to recharge and recoup. You take another path up the mountain, find somewhere you like, set up a new base camp. The process repeats itself over and over as you progress up the mountain.
Knowing my base camp at each point in my poker career has gotten me out of a lot of slumps, and allowed me to rebuild bankrolls several times without ever worrying about going bust. My current base camp is the $50+5 single-table SNGs on Full Tilt. I know that I have an ROI over 20% over a large sampling of those games in the last year or so. I know that I have good notes on a number of other players who are regulars in that game, and I have a solid read on the generic styles that unfamiliar faces may have. These SNGs are where I’m most comfortable and confident that I can win, and knowing that I have this as a fallback position allows me to be secure in branching out to try bigger or different games.
The difficult part of that situation is that your base camp is usually a level below where you want to be playing. As competitors, we always want to take a step up, challenge ourselves and make more money at the next buy-in. Sitting down to profit in the same beatable games over and over is called “grinding” for a good reason. It’s not called “funning”, because it’s not usually as fun as other games you could be playing. Over the summer, I withdrew a lot of my bankroll after a couple of big wins. I invested quite a bit of what was left in some satellites to the WSOP and a couple of WPT events, and some more in the Sunday majors. It was a challenge and a thrill to be doing that, but unfortunately, I didn’t see the results I was hoping for. After I stopped that, a terrible run in higher buy-in SNGs cleaned out more of the remainder than I was comfortable with. So I retreated down the mountain to my base camp, and I’m grinding again in a game I know I can beat until I’m ready to head back out of my tent to give it another try.
Rebuilding at your base camp takes a mix of ego and humility, two things that rarely go together, but must in this exercise. When you retreat back, it’s usually because the guys at the next level up the mountain kicked you in the head over and over until you tumbled down that slippery slope. Or the poker gods trapped you in an avalanche of bad beats and cold decks. Either way, you’re probably not feeling too good about yourself or your game when you get back to base camp. There’s no room in this expedition for pity or remorse. You need to take a deep breath, review your stats so that you’re 100% sure that you OWN this game, and then go do it.
However, you also need the humility to know that you need to stay at base camp for awhile. Make sure the frostbite on your toes and fingertips has healed and the boot print on your forehead has cleared up. You can’t just go charging up the mountain after the first night of winning again. Disaster is waiting to happen if you don’t give your subconscious enough time to fully process where your mistakes and problems were in the next level up, and incorporate new strategies into your next attempt. Take it slow; make sure your bankroll is healthy enough for the next levels. While you recuperate, you should be even more conservative with your money than you would be otherwise.
If I shake you awake in the middle of the night and ask, “What’s your best game? What can you beat?” you’d better be able to tell me. If you can’t, go figure it out. Know where your base camp is, and be confident that if you don’t have anything else going for you, you’re still ahead of most players with just that one fact in hand. I’ll see y’all on the climb to the summit.