ITH Poker Forum

[internet]

I'm asked a lot what to do when things are going bad. This is the nature of the game and happens to everyone. I've had many bad runs before!
Here are some tips to think about...

- First, recognize the signs. Losing streaks are a good time to reevaluate your game to try and identify leaks and areas to improve. Yes, maybe you are not getting good cards, but the first thing you need to do is evaluate your game. Is there something you can do to improve your game. Study your Poker Tracker statistics backwards and forwards and compare your stats to the winning players. What statistics seem out of align? Everyone always has areas of improvement.
- Read the Bankroll Management chapter in my book. Understanding the fluctuations that can occur in this game is the first step to being able to control your emotions.
- Whenever you are in a really bad run, try taking a break for a couple of days or maybe even for a week. Whenever you start to expect bad things to happen, this can just feed onto itself as you begin to make poor decisions. For example, you might become more passive allowing an opponent to stay in the hand and draw out on you because you didn't bet or raise at the right time.
- Try reading Zen and the Art of Poker. Discusses some things to consider to help control your emotions.
- If you tend to tilt easily, avoid playing multiple tables.
- If you tend to tilt easily, set stop losses. I normally don't recommend quitting when you lose a certain amount in a given poker session. As long as the game has some weak players you will win in the long run. Therefore, I don't set loss limits. However, if you tend to start playing poorly, playing more hands, and calling more often than you should just hoping to win that one big pot, setting loss limits may be a good idea for you.
- Never try to get back to even in a poker session. I used to do this all the time. It's late at night and all I wanted to do was go to bed even. When you think like this, you'll play a few more hands than you should and make bad calls. You can always get back to even tomorrow or the day after. I try to think of my results in terms of months.
- Don't dwell on bad beats. I don't think it is a very good sign that since I opened new Forums there are more posts in this Forum than the Poker Strategy forum.
- Finally, thank the poker gods for bad players! Bad beats are a good poker player's best friend. When they make a bad call and get lucky, think about all the money you are winning when they make those calls and don't hit their hand. For example, if your opponent is an 11 to 1 long shot and is only receiving 6 to 1 pot odds, you WANT your opponent to call. You WANT your opponent to try and give you a bad beat. This is the reason poker is profitable...your opponents make unprofitable decisions.

Hope these tips are helpful and that we see more rants than raves!

Matthew

[martek]

Post deleted by moderator.

[mchilger]

Oops, more raves than rants...except when you're at my table,

[bazooka_joe]

talk about a rut...after days of running well, things have turned with a vengeance...very tough day today, with the last straws being getting beaten out of big pots by a gut shot and a two outer..both by the same maniac player. on the last one, as I made my river bet into the maniac I actually glanced at the total in the pot so as to quickly calculate how much it would bring me back for the day. but even as I was calculating, I had the fleeting thought...don't count your chips before they've hatched.

I think it's just my nature that I evaluate my play after every losing hand, always trying to think of alternative ways that I may have played the hand. hind sight is 20/20 of course, and it's important to give yourself a break, but on the other hand it's clear that I did make some errors and my three hundred dollar loss easily could have been a 250 loss had I made some better decisions. it's not fun to admit this..much easier to blame bad luck....one mistake I constantly make is assuming that in the absence of any other information, a player plays pretty much as I do...so for example there was one hand today (this was my first brush with the aforementioned maniac who had just sat down) when I raised first in in late position with pocket 77 and this fellow cold calls..flop comes all big cards
I fire once, he calls.....on the turn I'm desperately trying to come up with a hand that *I* would have called with on flop after cold calling a preflop raise...and I couldn't think of one that would allow me to bet...so I checked...big mistake..he bets the turn, I fold, and he turns over 9, 3 of hearts...yikes..talk about eating humble pie...and he wasn't nearly done with me as I've said..

so, moral of the story...the only thing I can control in poker is my own play. if I do that well, the rest will eventually take care of itself...

[legaleagle97]

don't count your chips before they've hatched.

huh?

What do your chips hatch into?

Anyway, Joe, stay off tilt. Take a break from cards for a while.

[bazooka_joe]

I knew it was a bit of a twisted metaphor when I wrote but I thought well, maybe no one wll notice. I should have known better

[robrobrob]

My chips hatch into money.

rob

[bazooka_joe]

pursuant to what do do when you're in a rut...after another losing session last night wherein there seemed no out too remote for an opponent to catch, I decided to opt for a name change. some sites don't let you do this, but party has no problem with it apparently. This of course is no more than superstition, right up there with asking for a new deck of cards (I hate when players do that in the casino...such a godawful waste of time)...but it made me feel better. I also moved down a notch from 5-10 to 3-6, figuring to lay low till the storm clouds pass.

[bazooka_joe]

midnight and after a 12 hour day in the mines I can officially report that the name change did nothing to alter things. Beat after beat after beat. How is this possible I ask myself? How do the pros do it? I once asked a local pro at Foxwoods how he handled losing streaks...how he coped with say a bad month, and he said he'd never had one. I took him at his word, but sheesh. I lost out on so many big hands today in which I was in the lead. If I'd just won a couple of them it would have made such a big difference. I finally quit when I got gut-shot out of a huge pot in three six....capped preflop with four players in which I flopped top two.

Ah well, I know I'm just talking to myself here but if nothing else I'm working off steam pounding the letters in this keyboard.

[bazooka_joe]

oh yeah, and a couple hands previous to that I got beat out of a pot when I flopped top pair then got disconnected. Unable to protect my hand a good player ended up with another gut shot which she never would have been around for had I been in the hand to bet her out. if there's some conceivable way for me to lose the hand it seems I'll find it.

[robrobrob]

I think that pro at foxwoods was either lying or has not been a pro for very long.

Everyone will have a losing streak at some point.

rob

[bazooka_joe]

yeah, I have my doubts as well, but he seemed so sincere. Still....hard to swallow. It has been my experience in poker that mostly, it's just one long slog where one can be in a rut for hours and hours and hours..one doesn't necessarily lose lots of money during these periods..sometimes you just hang around essentially treading water. Then all of a sudden...boom...a huge winning streak. then it's over and back to the swamp with the alligators and snakes for hours and hours and the cycle repeats...I'm a winning player for every year I've been playing .about six years now, but the winning is never steady. it's sort of like the stock market thing where they've shown that most of the gain over the years takes place on just a handful of days. miss those days and you're profits are slight..

this am felt positive so moved back to 5-10... in two hours, I made back 90 percent of the money I've lost in my last losing streak which was of approximately 36 hours duration. dealt pocket pair upon pocket pair..all holding up...playing ax suited all over the place and cleaning up...getting paid off at every turn, winning every show down..what a dream, the absolute and complete flip side of the hell I've been enduring.

none of this is due to any great play on my part of course. I would say the key is to try to stay positive, stay off tilt, minimize your losses so that when the cards come back for you, you're not in too big a hole...

peace...

[mchilger]

Barry Tanembaum said in his presentation at Poker School that a pro will lose one or two months a year. I would have to get out my stat formulas to figure this out myself, but this has been my experience also (except for last year...yea!).

In an 10 hour session, one pot of 10 times the big bet can be the difference between losing 1BB an hour or breaking even. Two pots like these can change 1Bb an hour into a loss of 1BB an hour. Let's say you have three nut flush draws in a 10 hour session. You should hit 1 on average. On a good day you hit two and on a bad day you hit none. Add to this the nut flush draws your opponents play on you. On a good day they hit none, on a bad day they hit two. Oh I hate those days when I don't hit my draws and my opponents hit more than their fair share.

That is in a session. Look at the results over a month. Let's say you have 60 nut flush draws. You should hit 20 on average. If you only hit 10, you miss out on 100 big bets. Now let's say your opponents hit 30 of theirs. That's another 100 big bets. That's 200 big bets in one month making a normal winning month into a losing month.

These examples are just given to show what can happen in a month (I'm not sure exactly how many nut flush draws one should have in a month), but combine this with your gut shot draws, 5 out draws, 7 out draws, etcetera and you can see that a lot of fluctuations can happen even to the better players.

Those players who say they have never had a losing month have either not played very long or have been consistenly lucky over time to avoid a long bad run making them the exception and not the rule or are lying.

Matthew

[bazooka_joe]

The whole subject of good and bad streaks I find very interesting. They seem to have a life of their own. I really was interested to see that 1400 hour number in Matthew's book as the maximum number of hours a one big bet per hour 20-40 player with a standard deviation of 500 dollars could expect to go without making money..

It's nice to know that statistically speaking, a winning player mired in a terrible 1200 hour long slump can at least say well, I know that this shouldn't go on much longer..but then again, how true can this be? if every hand takes place independently of the hands before it, and we know that they do...who's to say that it won't go on for another 1400 hours?

Scary

[geormiet]

You realize that it is possible to be dealt AA 10,000 times in a row. It just has a very low chance of occuring. To be precise, 1: 220 to the 10,000 power. This is a big number!

There is no absolute guarantee that a winning player will at least break even after 1400 hours. But you have to pick a point where the probability is so small, it is virtually zero - I guess 1400 hours was that point.