Pros, what's your biggest downswing?

[Dreamer]

Hi

As already stated by others bad streaks happen.
If you are a winning player good streaks happen also.
Although 44000 hands with a 0.1 BB/100 winrate is too few to know what your "true winrate" is.
We can draw some conclusions.
You can download a free simple Excel spreadsheet I put together.
http://dreamer5.topcities.com/index5.html

It tells you that after 44K hands at 0.1BB/100 there is a 95% chance your winrate is between -1.39 an 1.59 BB per 100 or a 99% chance between -1.86 and 2.06 BB per 100.

Although this is very few hands to judge performance what we can say is that its highly unlikey your game will put you in the 2.5 BB/100 range that you started out winning at.
If you play with the numbers you will see the number start to converge as you play more hands.
Saying that anybody with 50K hands under their belt who wins at better than 2.5BB/100 is almost certainly not a losing/lucky player.

D.

[Vaftrudner]

Believe me, I feel your pain. I think it's a thin line between winning and loosing, just make a few mistakes here and there every hour and your edge is gone. And that's sure more prone to happen when your close to tilting all the time.... I quit for a while, thought it all over, looked around until I found some softer games, started out with a "clear mind" and finally it turned around and I've been doing fine after that. /v

[SA125]

[ QUOTE ]
Yesterday I was seconds away from taking a 5 iron and smashing this computer to smithereens.

[/ QUOTE ]

I have no idea what you look like, but somehow I pictured a guy in a tee shirt with a club in his hand and it had me laughing pretty hard. Probably because I can relate to it.

I'd offer advice, but managing the dramatic swings of online poker is possibly the thing I'm worst at in my life. Especially 4 tabling 6 max.

[AlwaysWrong]

Hi Lestat,

Reading through this thread a few things came to mind. In one post you mention that one of the things you're good at in live play is hand reading. This is a great skill live, particularly against a regular lineup of players, as you probably face live. You might win an extra pot a session just knowing that a certain player will fold to a turn bluff raise in a certain situation. You probably win a few extra bb's per session off of thin value bets because you know your opponents well enough to know you're ahead and will be called anyways. You probably save a simliar amount making laydowns that require a high degree of certainty to be correct folds. All of these little things add up for you in live play, and could more than make up for any systematic errors in your own play.

Online is much less forgiving, especially when you're four-tabling. Four-tabling online is really just being a robot, implementing a set strategy that you know will be profitable in the long-term. Yes, you have PokerTracker to allow you to adjust to opponents and make better table selection, but for the most part you play a formulaic strategy. If you have carried over significant systematic errors from your live career to your online one, but cannot carry over the edge you gain from knowing your opponents inside and out, you will inevitably lose money.

What I'm saying here is that it's possible for you to be a long-term winner live and a long-term loser online.

If I were you I would scale back to 1 or 2 tabling and go back to the books, try to really put your technical skills under the microscope.

It is certainly possible to have a 300 bb downswing while being a winning player, as several people here have attested to. However, IT IS VERY RARE. The people here who have these downswings typically have hundreds of thousands of hands under their belt with one or two of these huge downswings. You have 50,000 hands or so. You could be a winning player on an unlikely downswing, but the more probable explanation is that you aren't a winning player, or that you are only a marginal winning player.

Assuming that you are a losing player and trying to fix your game cannot hurt you. Assuming that you are a winning player and just getting unlucky can lead to ruin.

[faustusmedea]

I am just now coming out of (keeps fingers crossed since you really do not know until you can look back historically) a 330BB downswing in the 15/30 after beating it consistently for a little over 1.5BB/100 over 30k+ hands. Just a little above breakeven after 3 months of hard work....

I have a VPIP of ~17/TA a little over 2. Since the streak, I have tightened up considerably preflop and have dropped to around 14-15 and unfortunately feel I am playing a tad weak/tight after the flop now due to the swing.

Obviously I feel like crap, but I have played for a lot of years. I just began playing full time last year and this really caused me to soul search, spend a lot of time in the books and of course on the forums. I have also gone back through my PT hands and found a few leaks that I have worked on and that has been a very good exercise.

For me, the thing that ultimately has kept me feeling OK about the game have been large MTTs. I took a first in the Paradise 50k this week for $11k so that essentially wiped out my losses from the streak and banked additional funds. Its almost as if February never happened, though the mental scars are still there lol. Right now, my next issue is to seriously look at my game and make some decisions about whether Limit play is really my strength or whether I should spend more time on NL tourney play.

[URMeowed]

[ QUOTE ]
Four-tabling online is really just being a robot, implementing a set strategy that you know will be profitable in the long-term.

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I think four-tabling is about the limit you can play AND still focus and pay attention to most of the action as long as you are using 1600x1200. I honestly don't know how these nutsos are 8+ tabling but then again, from my poll last month, most players playing that many tables are only doing it in the micro limits up to 3/6. Once you get up to 15/30 and up like me, playing any more tables than four is bankroll/flucuation suicide. But that's only cause my little cat brain can't process that much information so quickly.

Meow.

[AlwaysWrong]

Well obviously it depends on the person. I'm pretty slow, and play 3 tables full or 2 tables short. I don't like to have two hands in play at the same time very often, and 3 is a disaster for me.

But I hope you'd agree in general - that playing multiple tables makes you play MORE robot-like and makes you less able to make opponent-dependant decisions.

[Joseph Busti]

His VPIP is between 17 and 19.

[34TheTruth34]

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To assume that your winning results at live poker would carry over to online is like a champion tennis player assuming he would be great at ping-pong.

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I like and agree with almost everything you write, but this is a horrible analogy.

[TStoneMBD]

i disagree with everything he writes, but i find this analogy to be quite accurate. it may be a little dramatic, but gets the point across well.