20-40 in tunica; got my fat ast kicked.

[elysium]

hi astro

thank-you for the reply. you have always been one of the posters here whose advice i have respected the most. while just an annonymous lurker, i must have read every one of your posts, from archives to the present, studying each diligently. you astro, clark, and dynasty are the members here who first initiated me into this game and steered me away from the usual type losses we see newbies taking so often. before you, i didn't know how to post a blind.

i hope i can find some way of incorporating the possibility of an extended bad run into a winning strategy. it may not be possible. possibly, whenever the cards run badly, we may always lose. i just don't know. one things for sure, i didn't play 'bad run' poker. it caught me totally by surprise. toward the tail end of my trip, my game developed into a style played similarly by tommy and mr. sklansky; a style that i highly respected, but that i also felt took away a little of the flair and maybe even rated my opponent's possible holdings a little on the high end. i found the tough calls espoused by mason, and that i have made a cornerstone in my normal game, not quite so important as the bets saved by folding when the pot odds aren't there to give the call +ev. i think this has to do with bankroll considerations, but i don't know. those tough calls, although often -ev, often can win entire pots in subsequent hands, when your opponent doesn't bet his strong draw to foldout, and you would have done just that. i'll think long and hard before any changes are made in that area. i do think that a better balance can be achieved, but chit astro, i don't know what i'm doing when i tinker with strategy that has been given much more previous thought by better poker minds than mine. to tinker is to gamble.

my best guess is that opponent knowledge considerations are the make or break features of this game. one major stumbling block when on a bad run is that your perceptions of your opponents is slightly to moderately altered. a phantom type opponent knowlege seems to set in that finds me guessing rather than evaluating what my opponent's game style and betting action suggest. i don't know of any situations in which it actually happened, but i just think that my opponent's are more likely to be successful when running a play against me when losing. but what does that mean? for all i know, they are making no more moves against me then when i'm winning.

anyway astro, thank-you for your encouraging response. i'm sure that we'll find some of the answers to the questions posed by unusually bad runs. or maybe the bad run will just go away on its mathematical own. i know that i sure do hope so.

[JimmyV]

[ QUOTE ]
my best guess is that opponent knowledge considerations are the make or break features of this game. one major stumbling block when on a bad run is that your perceptions of your opponents is slightly to moderately altered. a phantom type opponent knowlege seems to set in that finds me guessing rather than evaluating what my opponent's game style and betting action suggest.... for all i know, they are making no more moves against me then when i'm winning.

[/ QUOTE ]

I've always said Elysium was a genius, and brilliant. But this thread proves that he's also a thinker of substance. That diamond in the rough is made of some hard hard stuff. Pure carbon of instinct and self-knowledge we would all, with our glycerides, our 'good' cholesterols, and our extended peptide chains, do well to strive to emulate.

Welcome back Elysium; you were much missed. I think I may begin REALLY reading this forum again now.

JimmyV

[SoBeDude]

Honest to God, I never thought it would happen to me. But of course I know better now. And for those of you who haven't had the rare pleasure of a 30,000 hand run of bad cards, let me promise you this--- it is coming.

This is unfortunately so true.

I've had small bad runs before that at the time I thought were the end of the world.

Then I had my REAL bad run starting in early December. What did Ely say? Like Fraizer in Manilla? That sums up the feeling pretty succintly. I had an entire month where I was getting popped on the turn almost every stinkin hand. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Everyone caught. Every straight and flush got there for them, and none got there for me.

To give you an idea with numbers how bad a run it is, look at my online win-rate with AA. historically I win with AA 74.5% of the time. For the month of December, my WR with AA dropped to 58% (a 22% drop in win-rate). I played over 10K hands in December.

I thought the bad run was over until I went to Tunica last week. I actually went from 10:00 am until 10:30 PM in a game without scooping so much as the blinds. At 30-60 nonetheless (I did take 2 significant breaks from the table, so it was actually like 8 hours of play without a pot). A friend of mine sitting next to me at one point said "ya know scott, sometimes tomorrow is another day". When I finally got up I was down 5K for the day.

The following day I sat in a wonderful 20-40 game. There were 2 other solid players in the game. One of these is a young Canadian kid who I've played with many times before. He is simply one of the finest mid-limit players I have ever met. He's in the top 3 in my book, mixing it up well, changing gears constantly, and reads you like your cards are face up. (in Vegas I once saw him raise a guy with ace high on the river, get called, and scoop the pot!) Early on, all 3 of us were doing great in the game. Then I went to dinner leaving my chips. When I came back from dinner I was up $1,100 in the game. By the time I left I was down $1,000. And what's funny is all three "solids" of us were in the same boat. We were all up big, and all left the table down a bunch. simply amazing.

Fortunately my bankroll is quite healthy still, in spite of a month and a half long losing streak. But it has given me a healthy dose of reality.

I hope this ends soon.

-Scott

[astroglide]

fwiw i've had multiple -200bb+ swings playing online 15/30. multitabling, pissed and not playing my best. but it's worth observing that it's gotta be less discouraging to do it over the course of so many days playing 350 hands per hour than it is slowly and miserably doing it at a single dealer's pace and looking at all the players' dumb faces across the table. thinking in terms of number of hands, this [censored] happens. maybe it will help to think that your 2.5 months is a blip in overall time, because it really is.

[rmarotti]

Elysium et al.

I'm a little micro/small stakes weenie, but I lurk in these forums to dream of what may be some day. Your initial post and its responses have really helped me out psychologically and I feel I owe a big thank you to everyone here. I've been playing for about 2 years, seriously for about six months. In those six months i turned a 50$ .5/1 stake into a healthy 3/6 bankroll. MY game is obviously not on par w/ y'alls, but I took a recent crushing downswing that also made me wonder "Was I just a fish running hot?" It's been depressing (to say the least) to slink back into the .5/1 tables like a dog that got whipped. The frustration has been hurting my game, and the road back up has been much slower this time. The support and frank advice here has helped me clear my head, re-evaluate my game, and get back on the road to being a winning player. Thanks again.

[rory]

After reading your post, I quit playing 30/60 and dropped down to more emotionally comfortable limits. Thank you.

[Boopotts]

Another reason why I think you're seeing more good players take some nasty downswings has to do with the way the game has changeed in the past 4 years. Back in 1999, when I used to play up at the Soaring Eagle in Mt. Pleasant 30-40 hrs a week, I could go weeks without having a 30 BB downswing in a given session. The games were tighter back then, but the play was also much more predictable. If you had QQ, and the flop came K96, and someone bet into you you just folded-- no fussing, no deliberating... just get rid of your hand. In today's game, however, you've got to really think about it before you'll let that hand go, since a guy will usually bet with A6 (or worse) as often as with KJ. As a result, the game's a lot more volitile. I've been on 1000 hand run in the past two months were I've won 175 BB's, and that NEVER used to happen for me. But, on the flip side, I never went on 10,000+ hand break-even streaks.

There's going to be some changes as a result of this newfound volitility. First, the 300 BB rule is eventually going to go the way of the do-do. Personally I've never had a downswing worse than 170 BB's, but I'm sure that it's going to eventually happen. And second, it's going to become harder to play full time. Not because the earn is any worse, but because the variance has gotten so bad.

Re: the way the game has changed. To really get a feel for how differently the game plays today, a guy should thumb through the archives here, say back to 1998 or so. I remember how these boards were six years ago, and the advice that winning player's gave back then in many cases bears only the faintest resemblance to what you see now. Many of this board's more established members would have been laughed off of the forum back then, and many of the old posters would be laughed off now. It's really like a whole different game.

[SoBeDude]

but I took a recent crushing downswing that also made me wonder "Was I just a fish running hot?" It's been depressing (to say the least) to slink back into the .5/1 tables like a dog that got whipped. The frustration has been hurting my game, and the road back up has been much slower this time.

The first big downswings will always have you looking in the mirror for the fish. Once you recover, the second big downswing hurts a little less, and shakes your confidence a bit less as well.

With each successive downswing it gets a bit easier to handle.

After losing almost 10K in 6 days, I can say I slept very well each night. No nerves, no insecurities. I knew I played well and just ran bad and that was it. And I knew my bankroll was large enough that the loss didn't hurt me.

-Scott

[Mike Gallo]

Even more classic response.

[Bill C]

This is just an astonishing thread! It reads like some dark novel of pain and despair. As a johnny-come-lately, it makes me wonder what the hell I've gotten myself into.

I've been a horseplayer for over 45 years, and that game will teach you about ups and downs, but nothing like this! Family considerations caused me to move a yr ago to LV, where there is no track, and my methods basically require me to be at the track, so I sought a new game and wandered into Holdem. Fell in love!

But I'm terrible! (See yesterday's post about AQ). I nourish the thought that I can learn, get better, and have some fun and maybe become a decent player at mid-limits. I'm old enough that I probably should settle for that, rather than entertain larger aspirations.

These posts in this thread make me see that there's a lot more to it than "learning how to play" and then becoming a good playah.

God! It's almost like some evil force takes over and alters reality in some of these posts. Probability gets tossed on its head. Randomness goes out the window and some perverse gremlin dominates the river.

Elysium, I bookmarked this thread and plan to revisit it frequently. It is a trite phrase, "I feel your pain," but you, and others here, have written so well, I truly have felt it. I appreciate it.

bill