There's a concept in speculation--whether you are trading options or playing poker--called "risk of ruin". It's basically a mathematical formula that determines how likely you are to go broke given a certain amount of starting capital (or bankroll, for gamblers) and a certain risk level. The bottom line of risk of ruin analysis is that if you want to speculate, you better have enough of a cushion to be able to take the inevitable losses before you start winning with any regularity. In other words, if you go to the horsetrack with $100 and decide to gamble big all day long, your risk of ruin is pretty damn high. On the other hand, if you hit the casino with $1,000 and play nickel slots, then there's a pretty good chance you'll leave the building with something other than your clenched fists in your pockets. You might not get rich. You might not make a dime. But you probably won't be ruined.
So if somebody had told me on the drive over to training tonight, that I'd spend ten minutes doing specific drills with a 185 pound purple belt, another five or six minutes in free sparring with that same purple belt, and then asked me how I think I'd do "working on my top game" in preparation for next week's tournament, well, you wouldn't need to be a math whiz to calculate my risk of ruin for the evening.
I'm not going to dwell on it. I've had lousy training sessions before and I'll have plenty more before I'm finally carried off the mat kicking, screaming and bleeding. And, as Rebecca reminded me when I got home, I don't need to carry a negative attitude into a tournament less than two weeks from now that I desperately want to win first place at. But my lousy performance tonight is more than a little hard to choke down, and I'm pretty sure my voice cracked more than once before I figured I better get the hell out of the academy before I embarassed myself.
There are a lot of specific things to mention. Tommy as usual had some constructive and positive things to say--some of which he's tried to tell me before. But I don't have the presence to get into it right now. There's an argument that Mamazinho is putting me with tough guys because he thinks I'm good enough to not be matched up with, well, not so tough guys. Sort of like how he got on my case a little bit after my last tournament loss: if he didn't give a damn, then he wouldn't have bothered getting upset.
But if I'm not going to start punching holes in walls, I'm not going to waste time making lemonade out of lemons, either. It was what it was. A week of good training, a couple of submission victories on the 30th and, except for this post, tonight won't even be a memory.
