Horrid downswing...maintianing confidence?

[sethypooh21]

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you have to be honest with yourself and rate your play against your opponents, because you can play great and lose or play awful and win.

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This is what's getting to me...maybe I was just playing terribly and running lucky for a long time...

[oreogod]

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Try 10-handed for a couple days.

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I agree. Then again, Im not much of a six-max person as of yet...I know there is a little less variance though. [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

[BusterStacks]

That's bad, but I've had worse. It sucks sooooooo bad but you'll get through it and make a post like this one in the future.

[pyroponic]

I don't know if this helps, but i've recently created a journal for my move up. I can tell you that i've had to deal with a lot of variance, and in addition I had an immediate downswing when I first started. You can find it at:

John has gambling problems

By the way, 6k hands is not that much at all. If you feel you are a winning player and you have 1000 bets, then i'd log another 20k and see what happens.

[vinnox]

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...I took a pot or two from you, and I just remember you going off on how the whole table were morons, especially me.

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If this is true then he probably is a long term loser.

/mc

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You've never met a long-term winner that doesn't handle suckouts well?

[pyroponic]

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You've never met a long-term winner that doesn't handle suckouts well?

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Depends on what you consider long-term. A long-term winner should not get frustrated by a few suckouts. A 200 BB downswing, however, is an entirely different matter...

[naphand]

I have to say that when the downswing debate was taking place some months back (the one strip alludes to here wrt 300 BB swings) I still felt 200 BB was a pretty horrible swing. Well it is if you are being short-termist. If you have enough roll and look back over your results using PokerGrapher you will those 200 BB swings as little blips in the graph, nothing more.

That said, a 100+ BB negative run (if over just 2-3 sessions or moreso in 1 session) and I have to be actively conscious of any deterioration in mental state. Major tilt is easy to spot, I overplayed 1 hand yesterday after 2 hours hard-ground profit was eaten up in 4 successive bad beats for the seciond time in the session. Immediately saw it for what it was, and back in control for the next hand (good thing was everyone on the table put me on tilt and I got paid off quite well for the next half-hour).

If you have been playing more than 6 months and you cannot catch yourself blowing off chips (one of the big clues is reaching for the keyboard to call other players morons etc.) then you need to spend some hard thinking time sorting yourself out mentally. No excuses. If you cannot manage these spots, then stop and take a break as others suggest.

The real problem is subtle-tilt, where you miss value bets or overplay by just 1 bet (calling when beat or raising recklessly). This is where most of the damage occurs and possible longer term damage to your game. Subtle tilt is more likely to occur in protracted downswings, when hard work gets you nowhere or you just get no cards/beaten up.

Use these downswings to work on your game even harder. If necessary play less and analyse more.

Get to the stage where you are not looking at your results. Recently I had two 300 BB downswings in one month. The first I hardly noticed until I checked on PokerGrapher. Of course I knew I was running bad, but the extent of it was never a problem. I recovered then hit swing two....during which I played less and read/analysed more. The result (perhaps) was the longest upswing of my poker career.

strip is right about the 300 BB thing. It is frustrating but it is normal. You have to learn to cope with it.

Of course strip is not right about everything...I seem to remember some comment about Oz crushing us "Pommies" at cricket, something about "inevitability". I think even strip would have to nod to the brilliance of Pietersen and that catch by Collingwood. Taste of your own mate...

2-0

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[chezlaw]

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This is what's getting to me...maybe I was just playing terribly and running lucky for a long time...

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This is the toughest problem. The doubts creep in and its hard not to wonder if you have ever been a genuine winning player. Everyone (anyone disagree) goes through this when they hit new highs in their downswings.

In the end only experience can help. You can only recover from so many downswings before they become mundane.

chez

[stripsqueez]

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Of course strip is not right about everything...I seem to remember some comment about Oz crushing us "Pommies" at cricket, something about "inevitability". I think even strip would have to nod to the brilliance of Pietersen and that catch by Collingwood. Taste of your own mate...

2-0

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oz has drifted from $1.50 to $1.62 to win the test series - harmison, collingwood, and pietersen are my new best freinds

it could be that you pommies actually have a team that can put up a fight for the ashes but i doubt it - its way more likely that andrew symonds wasnt the only member of the team to get horribly pissed and come home late - tactically you have probably made a mistake by winning the first inconsequential 1 day game

stripsqueez - chickenhawk

[kiddo]

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The real problem is subtle-tilt, where you miss value bets or overplay by just 1 bet (calling when beat or raising recklessly). This is where most of the damage occurs and possible longer term damage to your game. Subtle tilt is more likely to occur in protracted downswings, when hard work gets you nowhere or you just get no cards/beaten up.

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100% true for me. When the bad run is long its really easy to make the style u use when u start a session bad at a table (bluff less because they never seen u hit, call a little more because they are tricky against the guy running bad) to your default. When u dont get bad cards anymore u suddenly find yourself not folding enough (because now they are less tricky) and not bluffing enough (because now they believe u).

At least I think this is what happend to me in march-april this year when I put up a show at every table possible with my Never-Ending-Bad-Run-Tour.

This subject is very hard to talk about without being abstract, it is hard to know excatly whats the problem, and how we should make this subtle tilt go away. But as Naphand says, this is something we must think about.