Negatives

For those of you who work out with weights....*chirp*....*chirp*....then you may have heard of a term called negatives. In any weightlifting movement, when you lift the weight against the force of gravity, that's called a positive. Bringing it back down is of course a negative.

Physiologically, the human body can handle more weight while performing a negative than a positive. During a negative, you're only slowing the weight's decent, while during the positive, you have to overcome the gravitational force on the mass. Pretty simple, eh?

Weight trainers sometimes purposely do negatives with weights they could not possibly handle otherwise in an attempt to "shock" their body into growth. If you're stuck at a plateau, sometimes performing negatives breaks down your muscle fibre more than your normal workout would and growth is induced.

What the hell does this have to do with poker? *more chirping*

For me, I seem to be stuck making a move from the .25/.50 NL games to the .50/1 NL games. I'm way up this year at the former, and way down this year at the latter. Because I refuse to be stagnant and linger at the .25/.50 tables (statis == death), I definitely feel a need to succeed at this next level.

My poker negative was jumping to the 2/4NL game for a bit.

For whatever reason, when I jump levels, my poker brain has a difficult time adjusting to losing sessions, even losing hands, that are effectively double what I'm used to. My game plan was to jump to 2/4 for a couple of sessions, numb myself to the swings, and drop back to the .50/1 level and achieve a comfort level that has eluded me thus far.

What have my results been so far?

Umm....negative.

My first session was at Party Poker where I unceremoniously dropped my $395 buy-in. My second session at Full Tilt saw me recoup a little bit for +$143. Overall, I'm down, but I hopefully have experienced large enough swings at 2/4 such that .50/1 will seem like .05/.10. We shall see how my little experiment pays off.

I knew going into this deal that I could lose a fair amount of cash, but I was treating it in terms of being an investment at better play in the long-term. Time will certainly tell.