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The Curse Of Partial Withdrawal
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Author: Marc Weinberg
Let's say you're up, I mean way up and you decide that reason should prevail and your safest course of action is a partial withdrawal. People, I'm talking about online poker here, get your minds out of that collective gutter. We are all familiar with a terrible curse in online poker, that great cooler of good fortune the partial withdrawal of your winnings.
You've played well in Sit and Go's all month grinding out $400 in profit. Then one night you dabbled in a little cash game action when you sat down with $200 in a NL $4-$4 ring game and emerged two hours later with $750. Bouyed by your success you bought in to a multi-table event aimed at those tricky Europeans who frequent your online poker room late at night. You battle some slick player from Aarhus and take second, but he has to live his whole life in a place called Aarhus, so maybe it's really a wash.
Suddenly you have $2,000 in your poker account and $1,500 of that is pure profit. You take a step back from the computer screen and blink slowly. It's a mortgage payment. It's a week of smiles from the wife. For the first time all month you become vaguely aware that those digits in your online poker account have real-world intrinsic value.
You don't want to stop playing poker online, not tonight when you're in the best form of your career (and yes, it could become a career couldn't it?) - so you decide to partially withdraw some of those winnings and leave that inital stake in your account.
That $500 is your poker bankroll. The $1500 is on its way back to your NETeller account, and all is good and right with the world. You go back to that No Limit table, and sit down with $150.
Very first hand you get dealt KK on the button and get into a firefight with a crazy Big Blind who pops you with A9. The flop comes 9-2-3 and you cannot believe how fortunate you are when he moves all-in. You call and even when a 9 comes on the river there is only a moment of anger.
But somehow by the end of the evening the $500 is $5.75 and you are thinking seriously about cancelling the withdrawal and bringing back your $1500 from that space between your poker account and bank account, which has never felt smaller or worse to step into.
This is the well-known curse of withdrawing some of your online poker winnings, but rather than only being a superstition I would like to advance a psychological explanation. Because as we all should know, poker has much to do with psychology. It's tough to prove, but our attitude seems to influence those coin-flip situations. Those guys who wait for the sky to crash down on their heads are rarely disappointed while the Steve Dannenmann's of the world (too many 'n's? sic is all I have to say in that case because it's late and I'm not Googling him for the spellcheck) smile and enjoy themselves and...they win those coin-flips.
Well, it seems like they win those coin-flips more often than not, or maybe thye just handle the losses better. The bottom line is they are happier with life in general and poker variances in particular. Our attitude when we are left with a smaller amount in our poker account after withdrawing the winnings is quite complex (two things are happening simultaneously, which qualifies in my world as quite complex) and has a negative impact.
You start to play with a free and easy style. It's the free-money syndrome. It feels like it doesn't cost you anything if you lose so you don't have the same intensity when you play. But the second problem is that you also have a smaller bankroll and you're aware of that shrinkage factor. If you play free and easy and you're still backed by a big balance it can improve your play. But now you've hobbled yourself and you feel that it is free money. In some sense these two factors combine to encourage you to burn money off.
Wow, how's that for a spectacular rationalization? But it does have some truth to it, at least in my experience. The solution is simple: Full withdrawal and then start again on a new day. Cash out completely and when you make another deposit you can have the mentality of starting from scratch. OR don't take it out at all. Go for the brass ring and keep that entire bankroll in play. This is a much riskier strategy and you'd better be ready to commit to poker if you go that route. Was this entire article one big euphemism? It felt like it...
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