The worst run of my life- I need some help guys!

[mak_662]

J.A.- I agree that the cards are not obligated to work in your favor just because the odds are in your favor...it's true that in a perfect world it would, but we must think realistically. This does not mean however, that you should not play odds with positive returns. And furthermore, you will never be able to type enough words on this message board to explain when to lay down KK. Laying down KK is done after a serious amount of time playing. And its almost never done within a loose/passive lower limit game. The emphasis is on the word almost... Younger players tend to rely on their "luck" or "intuition" when they lack true experience. If this "luck" or "intuition" tells them that its a bad idea to play the KK (even when raised or reraised) they will truly be making a bad mistake 96% of the time.

[J.A.Sucker]

I'm not talking about laying down KK here, or not playing cards with mathematical edges. There's something else at work. I think you are totally misunderstanding my point.

[mak_662]

Kind of curious as to your point then...

[bernie]

_

[Noo Yawk]

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Kind of curious as to your point then...

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Hi Mak,

The point is that you can frustrate yourself and allow bad habbits to creep into your game. There are going to be runs in your career, even if just for a few weeks, that are so horrible you won't believe that this is happening to you.
You start getting overly aggressive or too passive at the wrong times. You miss bets, you lay down winners, your opponents take shots at you instead of fearing you like they once did. It starts getting worse when you play too many hands preflop, and push them too hard. The habbits you got rid of that made you a winner are starting to come back. Some people jump into bigger games to recoup large losses and get stuck further. Some stay longer and play tired when they should leave. Your small edge, and as Sucker stated it is REAL SMALL, just turned into the negatives just by falling into a few bad habbits.

I just came off a run like Sucker did, and believe me, tightening up and playing straight forward poker is the only way out. Drop down in limits, play shorter sessions, leave with a few small wins, whatever gets you back into the game relatively healthy. It will end, but if you try to force something to happen, you may bust out before you see the light at the end of this very dark tunnel.

There is no way you can win in the long run, if you believe that probablity and your genius poker skills are all you need. All players believe they are great. That's the beauty of poker. It's the ones that can play their way through the downtimes that will survive.

This is where your education really begins. A great player will have bad runs, but they won't last nearly as long, or be nearly as bad as the ones a mediocre player will have.
I don't want to speak JA Sucker, as he is a much more experienced and capable player, but I think this is the Gist of his post.

[Blarg]

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Quote:
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Poker is a game of very thin margins; thinner than most of us would ever like to admit.


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Yup. Kind of another way of saying it's a game of the very long run.

My post had a lot more than that.


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Never said it didn't, or that I intended to address your entire post or was in any way trying to refute anything in it. I was agreeing with you.

What I was getting at was that no matter the other considerations involved, if you're on a thin margin in a game of chance, it makes the long run even longer, probably much longer than most people think. You need the long run to even things out if you're just ahead by a sliver per hour; otherwise chance will intervene often and significantly enough to rapidly readjust your profile from short term winner to short term loser. A thin margin means you don't have a big cushion of profitability built up over the past to average things out when you suddenly get a really bad streak unless you've managed to make that thin margin really add up to something by having played and won for a long, long time. A bad day, week, or month can quickly wipe out a long period of running good if you're only making a big bet or two per hour.

How you go about getting and maintaining your edge is a subject I wasn't addressing there, but I do believe that you are right, and that many if not most people don't think how long the run has to be in a game where there's a thin margin of profit and a thin margin of error. That's why we get so many people here talking about going pro after a couple of months of play, or saying that since they averaged 7 BB/hour in the 5k hands they've recorded, they feel that it's quite fair to extrapolate that they'll maintain something close to that level of profitability forever. And that's why so many people seem blown away and get turned around by losing streaks, start to steam at the table, think about quitting, even start playing superstitiously, etc. Bad streaks may not feel all that normal, but they're extremely normal even for the best players.

All of us need a very long run in a game where even good players are basically grinding out their wins; and poker is pretty much a game of thin-margin, long-term grind.

[BarronVangorToth]

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Hey i need some serious help. I am a young poker player but contain a reasonable amount of experience... I live in Utah where it is hard enough to find a good game. This last week i foung a great game with a lot of loose players. But it is No limit and they are insane. In the past week i have had pocket aces twice and all in pre flop and both times were called. both times players flopped three of the kind. Similiar with kings. Plus many more hands i have been raped on. It has changed me to a more timid players because everyone is going insane pre flop.


1. What can i do to get out of this terrible roll?

2. Does anyone know where any good Utah games are?

[/ QUOTE ]



As someone said above, Aces don't always win. I played a lot of hours yesterday and got Aces an inordinate number of times -- FOUR -- and raised pre-flop with them each time, got it down to one or two people to the river and ... lost.

0-4 with Aces in one day.

The sample size is the problem -- I know most of the time Aces are good; yesterday, I had them four times and they all lost. It happens.

It's basically like every other "bad beat" story -- it's a game and sometimes, like in life, stuff will happen you don't expect.

Oh, well, that's what makes it fun.


Barron Vangor Toth
www.BarronVangorToth.com
"Bad Beat Stories = Bad"

[Cosimo]

I think the first thing you have to learn is how big the long-run is.

It takes 10,000 hands for a good player to have a strong (99%) chance of being ahead. It takes 100,000 hands to have a strong (95%) chance of your results accurately reflecting your skill. It's perfectly reasonable to have a run of -300 big bets at some point in your career--not because of poor play, but because if you play long enough, you'll hit the rare cases.

There's a lot of chance in poker. That's why it's gambling. There's skill involved too, but if it wasn't for the chance, all those bad players dumping their money to us would never be there.