Variance vs. Bad beat vs. Poor play

[docelk]

The Facts: Party, $1/$2, 200 unit loss in past 10 days (pocket q's lose to K's, two pair lose to straights, etc.)prior to that was winning---usual play fairly tight--

The Hype: May have loosened up a bit on starting hands since was winning up to two weeks ago, but not much

The Problem: When do you stop blaming variance and bad beats, and start blaming hanging on too long with second best hands and inability to read other hands---and how do you tell the difference?

[Webster]

I start at the 75BB range. It happened to me last week in 3 days. Just take a break - look at your hand histories, replay the hands.

Thats what the hand histories are for. I've found that when I win (like all of Janurary) I start thinking I'm good and can win with anything. It's called tilting /images/graemlins/smirk.gif

Tighten up, relax don't play so many drawing hands so long. If it's just a bad streak it'll end.

[Allan]

You mention loosening up a bit on starting hands. This is an error that is more profound than may seem. Add even 4 more hands per hour that are played in the wrong context and the post flop mistakes they might lead to and this will have an imediate impact on your win rate. This is also one of the errors that is easy to overlook as you struggle to try and find out what you are doing wrong postflop (which may be nothing). Tighten up and see what happens.

Allan

[Louie Landale]

Here's some fundamental facts of poker: [1] good hands tend to "improve" to solid hands and bad hands tend to "improve" to weak hands, and [2] Solid hands are easy to play well and weak hands are HARD to play well. Thus, AK will tend to make an easy to play top-pair-top kicker and JTo will tend to make a hard to play second-pair-weak-kicker.

I am suggesting that by "loosening up your standards" you are not only playing some losing hands, you will invariable end up finding your self in all sorts of situation that you will have no idea what to do: if you play JT and flop KT5 its real hard to play well when someone else bets; or even if they check. These situations may be "marginally profitable" for experienced folks but they are a disaster for inexperienced folks.

So only loosen up if you are SURE you will know how to play the hand in the likely situations in which you will find yourself later. Usually that means playing against easy-to-read opponents.

Fold right away unless you are confident about it.

- Louie

Yes, small pocket pairs are the exception to the above rules; but to compensate they don't "improve" very often.

[LetsRock]

It's hard to comment on such a general topic.

That said, hand reading is very player specific and can be an especially frustrating game on-line. I can't count the number of times I've watched some knuckle head play middle pair (or worse) very strong time after time, but the times my hnad is good enough make him pay for that tactic, he actually has the goods. Grrrrrrrr.

Chasing and hand reading is a bit of a guessing game - sometimes you read the situation right and it pays off; other times you completely misread it and it hurts. But the guessing game can be mimized by using your read on the player(s) in question to factor your decisions.

I'll also consider how I've been running and how they've been running. It's not mathematical, but it is worthey of consideration.