Running Bad, gettin Depressed(!)

[Jimbolito]

Nothing new just wanna get it out and maybe here some similary experiences.

I´m playin 3-6$ at mostly at Empire/Party. Have so far just over 200 hours logged at this level. After about 150 hours my winrate was near 0.5BB/h per table (2 tables) wich isn´t good at all, but then It´s to little hours to make sure. And now after 50h more I´m layin around 0.2BB/h per table.

Iv´e been x-posed to many badbeats and a couple of downswings. But the last to weeks have been like crazy. Gettin outdrawn all the time, gettin cold cards. Like havin 10% seen flops for several days. And when you finally got your good cards they dont hold up.

Like today, got K-K, I raise got a couple of callers, flops a set, and someone plays his 4-flush x-tremely aggressive and rivers me out. Stuff like this happends all the time.

I´m down like 100BB in a few days, and yes I know it´s nothin strange with that. But it really doesn´t feel natural. Everybody at the table win with there weak and medium holdings, and I loose with my good,great and monsters, for 2 weeks!

Someone x-perienced this and now got a good winrate over a long period of time?

Just want some comments from your own running bads, cuz this is really gettin to me, but o far I dont think it has any impact on my game.

Thanx!

//Jc.

[Blarg]

Thinking a 100 BB loss over a period of a few days is particularly bad or distressing probably is a sign that it your bad streak probably actually is having an impact on your game. After 200 hours just at this one level, especially online, surely you've experienced something like this before?

Your win rate isn't good. It looks like there are probably some holes in your game. Your feeling that things aren't natural probably helps confirm that.

How many hands have you played at 3/6? And at other levels?

[ChicagoTroy]

How many hands have you played at this level?

Your win rate suggests that modest wins and break even days are turning into losses without much help from the cards. If you're having a hard time with low limit poker, there are some holes in your game you need to address

[juanez]

I went down 80 BB in just under 600 hands last night and was steaming about it all day. This after being down about 50 BB the previous 2 days. I went through Poker Tracker today and checked out my play. I played my normal game, which calmed me down somewhat.

My VP$IP, PFR and Agro Factor were practically identical to the other 25,000 hands I've played at this level and before the last few nights I was at a pretty steady 2.75 BB/100 win rate. A few bad beats, but not any more than normal really. Cold cards, very few draws of any kind coming in, very few sets hit, and top pair getting crushed hand after hand. I almost bought into the Party conspiracy theories. /images/graemlins/smirk.gif So, I guess it's just been a bad run (I hope), like everyone gets on occasion, right? 130 BB in 3 days still stings pretty bad though.

OK - 2 beats did make me mad, but I guess they weren't "bad" beats:
Twice in one orbit I get KXs in the hole and hit the 2nd nut flush ON THE FLOP. Sure enough, both times an opponent had AXs in the hole and won it. They didn't suck out, they just flopped the nuts and I flopped 2nd nut. Ugh.

We'll see what happens tonight. Good luck Jimbo! /images/graemlins/cool.gif

[Jimbolito]

[ QUOTE ]
Thinking a 100 BB loss over a period of a few days is particularly bad or distressing probably is a sign that it your bad streak probably actually is having an impact on your game. After 200 hours just at this one level, especially online, surely you've experienced something like this before?

Your win rate isn't good. It looks like there are probably some holes in your game. Your feeling that things aren't natural probably helps confirm that.

How many hands have you played at 3/6? And at other levels?

[/ QUOTE ]

I cant say how many hands I played at 3-6$ cuz I dont have PT, I only record my wins/losses and time played (using StatKing now). But it´s 200h+, so that would be somewhere between 10.000 and 14.000 hands I guess.

And I also think my game is good enough to make 1BB/h per table. I mean you dont have to be an Einstein to bet the low levels, or Am I wrong? My game maybe isn´t great, and I surely have leaks.

I play tight preflop, under 20% sen flops, that much I can say. I play by the odds, dont chase draws I dont have odds for. Know about checkraisin,semibluffs, and rarely bluff.

The only thing I can comeup with is maybe I´m not aggressive enough. Like I mostly dont Raise in BB with A-Ko and A-Qo.
And I dont RR often with A-Ko preflop neither.

And I also stopped raising with A-To first in in MP. It feels wrong to put more $$ in the pot when you dont know if your gonna hit the flop or not. And as you miss more often than you hit, I´´ll rather save some bets with these cards, than throw the $$ away.

And I got about 100h at 0.5-1$,100h at 2-4$ where I made about 1BB/h.

Comments?? /images/graemlins/confused.gif

[ChicagoTroy]

If you can't measure it, you don't know. You could have huge leaks and not know, I certainly did. Get Poker Tracker.

[joseki]

Buy PT!

[stoxtrader]

[ QUOTE ]
Buy PT!

[/ QUOTE ]

seconded. it's a must.

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
I mean you dont have to be an Einstein to bet the low levels, or Am I wrong?

[/ QUOTE ]

Not to beat most of the other players, but to beat the rake. The rake is so high at these levels that it can eat you out of house and home. So you still need to be a solidly winning player just to break even and get a little ahead.

[ QUOTE ]
maybe I´m not aggressive enough. Like I mostly dont Raise in BB with A-Ko and A-Qo.
And I dont RR often with A-Ko preflop neither.


[/ QUOTE ]

I think you may have analyzed your problem perfectly right here. Especially against players who often call with any ace, any two flush cards, and the like, even for a raise, good hands you are not raising with are hands you are wasting your equity and potential earn with.

An AKo has equity from the BB, and often enough equity to easily justify a reraise, especially if there are not many people in the pot and if those that called did so from late position, where your hands can be much safer to call with and you can expect opponents to often have weaker hands than they would if they called up front.

If you get even one guy out, that's one less opponent you have to beat out to claim the pot, and one less guy who might get lucky and keep you from winning with even an unimproved hand. And if you win, that's more money in the pot for you. AK is a hand you'll do a good amount of winning with.

You also get information by preflop raising and re-raising your strong hands. While calling a raise may mean nothing at these levels, cold-calling your raise or your re-raise marks a player as someone whose play deserves careful watching, in that hand and beyond. And not necessarily because he's good. If you get to see his cards at the end, you can learn a lot about someone's level and style of play by seeing what he cold-calls with. That will help inform the rest of your play at that table that day, and on later days. Heck, it can even help populate your buddy list with terrible players you can seek out for profit for many weeks to come.

You're definitely not going to be making the return you need to make if you can't even push AK hard. Nor is being too passive going to give you the table control you need to get away with your bluffs when you do try them, or keep people from raising you when you've made a mistake or gotten unlucky and they actually have the better hand.

Have you checked out Ed Miller's starting hands chart? He recommends calling and raising with a lot of hands, and a lot of them worse than AKo. I've found his book and his starting hand guidelines too to be very helpful in ramping up my aggression and my profits. The thing is, even though you may play less than premium hands sometimes, that doesn't change the fact that so many of your opponents will be playing even worse hands than you, pushing them harder, and calling them to the river just hoping to get lucky. A less than stellar hand can still scoop pots -- especially if you get an aggressive image that makes people want to fold before they get in trouble instead of a passive one that lets them feel that if they call you, the most they will lose is a couple of bets.

You really should get Pokertracker, too. It's such an immensely useful tool. So many of the top players here use it; that should be recommendation enough. If you can afford to play 2/4 and 3/6, you can afford Pokertracker.

As to ATo, some will always raise with it, but the least you want to do is not NEVER raise with it. Your decision should be positional and dependent on the particular players and the number of players you are facing. Raising with ATo UTG is one thing, but when it's, say, just you, the cut-off and the blinds, raising with ATo is almost required. You probably have the best hand, and would be happy to just win the blinds, too. Either way, raise! Attacking the blinds is a good thing to work into your game, and can add to your stack very quickly.

[Jimbolito]

Thanks for your replys guys. Iv´e thought about PT several times and know it´s a great tool. And I can afford it. The thing is Iv´e tried it ones, the demoversion, and it is always something wrong, you get error messages here and there and I just hate it.

But I saw that you´ll soon be able to import hands stored on your computer, wich would make things easier. Anyone know how soon that´s reality? I know theres a BetaPatch, but that means bugs, so I´ll think I´ll wait.

The handhist. are being stored automatically anyway, right.

And the thing about it´s hard beating the rake at 2-4 3-6, what about 5-10? Cuz Im thinkin about movin up there soon. I got the roll and I´ll think I can bet the game, I just wanna have a good winrate at 3-6 first, just to be sure it´s nothin but a bad streak.

[Kevin]

During the second week in May, I went on a -254 bb downswing over 5,534 hands.

I was positive that I had forgotten how to play the game and everything before that was pure luck and nothing more. I reviewed the hands and found that, for the most part, nothing was out of the ordinary. However, I was not value betting hands like two pair when they were winners assuming that I was beat. I was pushing overpairs too hard out of frustration when they were cracked. I would not bet flushes on the end when the board was paired, assuming that someone was full, When overcards wouldn't hit and I would get CR'd (since everyone could see that I was running bad), I would 3 bet out of frustration instead of folding and going home.

Long story short, I lost 254, but probably 70-90 of those bb's were soley the responsibility of my bad play.

I am happy to say that immediately after it hit it lowest point, the two weeks following, I went on a 640bb upswing over the next 11,960 hands. At the end, my graph looked exactly where it should be at that point in time had I sustained my original win rate and not swung down or up.

During the upswing, I was still not value betting enough - especially early on because I didn't realize that I wasn't through the downswing and it taught me a lot. Treat each decision individually and let it net itself out over time. I lost 70-90 bbs too many on the way down and probably left 70-90 on the table on the way back up.

losing streaks suck, but as long as the games are good and you are making the right decision, the dollars will work themselves out.

Kevin

[Blarg]

You can do that with the latest patch on Party and its skins right now. It's a beta as you say, but even release products are rarely bug-free, so getting out of beta is no guarantee of anything these days. I've been using the beta patch for weeks, and am even using it now, importing watched hands I'm not even playing in and never lifting a finger about. Don't worry about the error codes if you don't want to; there's still plenty of good info even to be had. The patch seems quite stable. The only thing that makes it unstable is if you have a slow computer or very little memory, and never close out Party/skins. Then when you start Pokertracker up again and set it to import, it will read all the .hhf files and error files you have left over from previous sessions, and those 10k, 20k, or 30k hands and dozens of files can bring your system to a crawl. Just close out the site when you're done playing for the day, and then delete or move the error codes and daily folders from the folder where you have Party/skins installed, and you will start each day fresh and clean and fast. Takes me about 20 seconds to do at most, and I actually save all my stuff. If you just delete it, it's even faster. No big deal.

The hand histories are stored automatically while you are playing and the site is active, whether or not you have open tables. But once you close out the site, the .hhf files are deleted. You can tell Pokertracker to keep the hands you've imported or not; up to you.

I've never played 5/10 online, but I think people have posted that you pay less rake as a percentage of the pot in 5/10 than in 3/6.

If you're still shy about AKo and barely scraping by in 3/6, it is probably too early to think about 5/10, though.

[adamstewart]

[ QUOTE ]
And I also stopped raising with A-To first in in MP. It feels wrong to put more $$ in the pot when you dont know if your gonna hit the flop or not. And as you miss more often than you hit, I´´ll rather save some bets with these cards, than throw the $$ away.

[/ QUOTE ]

As others have already indicated, BUY AND READ "SMALL STAKES HOLD'EM" by Ed Miller. (You can order it off this site).

It's funny because the logic you've stated in the quote above is EXACTLY what Ed Miller contraindicates in his book.

I used to think this way too, and in my head it made sense. However, Ed's book helped me realize that my thinking was incorrect.

By the sounds of it, you're definitely lacking in the aggressive department - and so was I. Ed's book turned that around IMMEDIATELY, and my win rate has been amazing (<- subject to debate /images/graemlins/smile.gif) ever since.

Good luck!

Adam

[umdpoker]

well, i don't raise ato unless i'm stealing blinds, but not capping with ak preflop is very weak.