Odds of a 100bb downswing?

[hemstock]

Assuming 85% of your decisions have a positive Expected Value (or the less negative one), what are the chances of a 100BB downswing happening? What about a 200bb downswing?

And how many hands are concidered a good sample size that you can tell your hands are going normal.

Over the last 3 days


That's 8 hands that have a positive expectation and are my biggest losers.

Also, is it weird that most of my game is playing to come back from a downswing. It's like I'm playing 4k hands to get to a point X slowly slowly, and then in the next 1k-2k hands I'm losing everything I've been builting all those 4k hands before so easily. My point is, I'm trying really hard to get to some point, but when a downswing hits, everything is collapsing very very fast. Why don't upswings happen at the same rate?

And one last question. Generally, what's the ratio between downswings and upswings? If you are playing for 10 days for example. In theory what would the ratio be for losing-winning days?

[r3vbr]

thats a very common problem...
it's not as hard to happen as you think.
and it's likely that you may win a little over lots of hands with say QQ and then lose it all over a big hand.

your problem is almost certainly not knowing when to lay down big hands and cut your losses. you should know more often when you're beat and lay them down i think

good luck

[Jacob_Gilliam]

In response to your second question, it obviously depends on how many hands you play per day. But a good player (say 2BB winner per 100 hands), with a typical SD will generally have a winning session over 100 hands a little bit less than 60% of the time.

[BigBiceps]

The odds of 100BB downswing in the scope of a poker career is near 1, no matter how good you are. Also, FWIW:

You might be misplaying AK.

You went to showdown 7 times and only won once. You can fold AK on the turn if you have nothing, that will save alot of money in weak games (it looks like you are playing 0.5-1 Limit)

[Sykes]

100bb downswings are seriously nothing. the best players in the world go for more than 100+BB Downswings

just keep playing. be worried when you lose 300+

[LetYouDown]

Part of your problem might stem from the fact that you have a 45% VP$IP with 8-3 suited. But that's just a guess.

You need to stop thinking in terms of upswings and downswings, and bankroll targets.

Get PokerTracker to rate your play so far, what symbol does it give you? A happy face? A sad face? A little telephone?

[Decessus]

It gives me a falcon after 70K hands.
What does that mean? How should I improve it? Playing low stakes NL full ring :O

[masse75]

You've played 70K hands, taken the time to store them in PT, and you don't know how to use it?