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This is SUCH a good point @AceQ963 ! Someone asked me about bankroll management last month as a recreational player, and they were beating themselves up because according to their stats they were losing 3-4 Big Blinds per hundred hands, and felt like they were failing at poker because they weren’t a “winning player”. I gave them a couple of tips about their play in the blinds, told them that if they were losing 3-4 BB/H then they were actually doing great for a recreational player, and asked them to review their budget for some other hobbies they enjoyed spending time on.
The next time we spoke they told me that they used to go to the movies 2-3 times a week with different friends and they had a reloadable card that got them points at the theater for tickets and snacks. They loved going to the movies, and the expense was easily worth the fun they had, it was a trivial investment in their leisure time. But of course now (summer 2020) they hadn’t been to the movies in months and had crunched the numbers on their ‘movies’ budget – around $400/month including snacks etc. In poker terms, their monthly movie budget was roughly equivalent to 200 big blinds in their local b&m cardroom, or when playing online it would be more like 2,000 big blinds at the stake level they prefer to play.
Next time we talk – maybe they’ll see it here! – I’ve crunched the numbers and figured out that if they were losing 3.5 BB/H they would have to play 57,143 hands in that month to lose the same amount that they were spending at the movies. If they were playing one table online and playing an average of 100 hands/hour that would mean they got roughly 571 hours of poker entertainment that month for the equivalent of their movies budget. I decided they would get about 25-40 hours of leisure time at the movies for the same expense if you counted hanging out before or after with friends. That’s a pretty stark comparison! Of course the leisure time you spend with your friends at the movies is differently valuable than the leisure time you spend enjoying poker and working on your poker game, but if you are a breakeven player or a moderately losing player that doesn’t mean you aren’t “winning” at poker. Are you “losing” at the movies? Of course not. You’re spending money to entertain yourself. As recreational players, that’s the same way we should be thinking about poker. Would we like to be a “winning player”? Of course! We all want to be the best at everything we do, and we should all want to be constantly improving. But don’t let that get in the way of ENJOYING this great GAME that we all love so much. Great post @AceQ963 you win the internet today!
