Going through my toughest downswing. I seek help!

Posted by moll_web

Posted by moll_web posted in Mental Game

Posted 10 years, 1 month ago

Going through my toughest downswing. I seek help!

Hi There!

I'm what you would call an anonymous spectator at this site, but I'm still reading a lot of posts in the forum, and I've been playing a lot of poker in my spare time.

I won some tournaments. I've cashed a lot of times. The biggest cash being around 9,000 $.
I consider myself a decent player. I've been playing for 5+ years, and I've been watching a lot of training videos at various coaching sites, read a lot of articles and played a lot of hands. I'm constantly trying to improve my game and my attitude and mental focus when playing.

However, I'm currently going through a rough stretch, that has lasted since around October 2014. Since then I've won nothing. Zero.... Nada....

I've gone over my game again and again. I've checked hand histories through Hold'em Manager. I've experimented with different strategies, mainly in mid- and late game stages, but nothing seems to work for me.

I'm no more than average to Hold'em Manager, so I'm not quite sure where to check how good/bad I'm doing. I've read that an indicator is the ALL-in EV for "bustout hands only". When filtering for bustout hands in tournaments I get a somewhat break-even ALL-in EV line, but a straight declining negative Net-Won line, that's around a total of -7 mill. chips.

It seems as if every time, for the past 5 months when I've gotten all-in in tournaments I've been badbeatet out of it (exaggeration!)

So any help, guidance or advice to a pokerplayer, that's mentally knocked to the canvas?

6 Comments

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ZenFish 10 years, 1 month ago

What types of tournaments? How many?

Even for 180-man SNGs you can easily go on 200+ BI downswings and lose or break even for 1000+ games. For big field MTTs, the variance is much much worse. For someone not playing high volume, I can imagine a big MTT downswing must feel like eternal doom.

Educate yourself on the mathematics of your game. What kind of swings must even the best players expect fairly often, as a consequence of the variance of the game? (Swings are determined by variance and win rate.) When you know what is to be expected, and if your downswing can be shown to be not-too-unlikely for a good player, it will be easier to accept your situation.

Now, the fact that some swings are unavoidable does not mean we can automatically blame it all on variance. But if review does not reveal any big and systematic mistakes, then we should not panic when we are playing a high variance game.

Variance can take many forms. Getting the money in good and getting sucked out on is very visible, and a heartbreaking way to bust going deep in a big MTT, but that's not the only one. You can make a correct play and run into the top of your opponents' ranges much more often than normal. You can get dealt much less premiums than normal. You can get less BTN stealing opportunities because your opponents keep getting good cards. You can get less action than normal with your premiums because the others get dealt more trash than usual. And so on and so forth.

Some of these runbad components are visible, some are not. Those that you don't see can mess with your mind, because we try to make sense of the world based on what we can see, not what we can't see. And not everything is what it seems. Trying to separate your own play-bad contributions (that you can control) from the run-bad contributions (that you can not control) is very difficult when you get hit by negative variance from many directions at once.

Poker swings can be very cruel. If it was easy to handle adversity, more players would be winners. When negative variance hits you, think of it as an opportunity to handle it better than others would. Because trust me, most players handle adversity rather poorly. :-)

But some handle it well:

MajorCrimes 10 years, 1 month ago

Zenfish, you are a big asset to this forum man

TheRaulrus 10 years ago

Your thought process about poker is excellent, ZenFish. You definitely know how to break down a topic and answer it's questions precisely, and like MajorCrimes stated, you are a big asset to this forum for sure.