Dealing with Large Losses at a Very Good Table

[dibbs]

I play NL and at baby stakes at that so take this with a grain of salt, but I think it really just comes down to tolerance.

It's kind of a cop-out answer, but basically, the more times you get sucked on (or have a great hand beaten by an improbable perfect hand), the higher your pain tolerance will be. After a while you won't see a hand as a win or a loss, only a correct move made at a correct time whose results on this particular hand are irrelevent.

In time you've seen so many swings you barely note them as a blip, be a machine whose purpose is solely to make the right decision, if you are properly bankrolled whether you win or lose this session doesn't matter. Become emotionally detached to your hands and your money, you invest when you have the odds to and as soon as you don't you let it go, regardless of how good your hole cards or the flop looked. You don't have to play to get even, you already are even. Once you reach this mindstate where the results don't matter to you and you are concerned only with making the correct decision, you can swim in these games a lot longer where you'll make a great deal of money overtime, even though there will be swings.

Bounce from these games as soon as you feel yourself steaming or tilting, you obviously have this self control which is a great thing to have. Carefully analyze hands from these tables to make sure that what you did was your average game and not steam or mal-adjusted play to awful opponents.


Sorry for the ramble, good luck.

[RydenStoompala]

[ QUOTE ]
40bb is substantial,

[/ QUOTE ]

No it is not. It is 10 bb per table. It's a rounding error. I don't know how you build a 5K bankroll, start multitabling at 5-10 and think a 40 bb swing is something that is troubling. I am confused by the original post.

[Tommy Angelo]

"How do you guys relax the mind when in a situation like this?"

By practicing the relaxation of the mind when not playing.

Consider the extreme and consistent ways you would prepare your body for competition if you were a professional athlete. That's how I view my mind when it comes to poker.

Tommy

[matt42s]

[ QUOTE ]
It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while you just loose, loose, and loose, you know?

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't want to be one of those spelling guys but am really curious as to whether this is a joke, typo or more interestingly - some kind of non-freudian slip.

[jskills]

Welcome to my weekend. I must admit it does drive me insane when this happens. You just reload and say to yourself, "there's no way I should be losing here" and keep playing. Sometimes it just doesn't work out the way "it should".

[GreywolfNYC]

[ QUOTE ]
Read Mason's "Do big pots mean great games?" The title may be slightly different, but I'm close. It's in one of his essays books or GTAOT.

He emphatically states that the sort of game you described is NOT great. It's fun, but the swings are enormous, and the win-rate is not that good.

The skill factor goes way down in importance because pots become so large that the muppets' great weakness, staying too long, becomes less of an error and may even be justified. The pot odds justify staying with almost anything, making the game more of a gamble than Mason and most other conservative players would like.

Bluffing is so common and the pots are so big that you are forced to call or even overcall with weak hands. You can't bluff.

All in all, those games LOOK much better than they are.

Regards,

Al

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree. I am constantly amazed when I hear 2+2ers talk about how "juicy" a particular game was and then learn that they dropped two or three racks in record time. I have played in many loose, wildly aggressive games and have experienced the big ups and downs that come with them. I've learned to adjust my play in these games and I understand how hand values change when 6 or 7 people are seeing every flop for at least three bets. Nonetheless, I find these games cause a lot of stress and create a lot of difficult decisions without really making up for it in terms of profit.

[z80x86]

[ QUOTE ]

All in all, those games LOOK much better than they are.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you for the thoughts Dr. Schoonmaker. I'll look for Mason's essay next time I go to the bookstore. I'm not a fan of the larger swings.

[axioma]

"How do you guys relax the mind when in a situation like this?"


valium.

[z80x86]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
40bb is substantial,

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't know how you build a 5K bankroll, start multitabling at 5-10 and think a 40 bb swing is something that is troubling. I am confused by the original post.

[/ QUOTE ]

I may not have worded my original question correctly. I was just wondering what kind of strategies 2+2ers used to keep a level head after losing large amounts (absolutely, not relatively) of money to what some may consider suck outs.

Maybe a little background might give you a better idea of the forces that were playing a role in my original post.

I'm 18 years old and a recent graduate of my local high school. I will be working towards a Computer Science degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this fall. I've been studying poker seriously for several years, but have lacked the discipline to be successful online.

I was pretty much just sliding through the last couple weeks of school, while worrying way too much about some girl that I went out with a couple times. Of course when I finally start liking her, she stops liking me (2+2=3???). Decided to give online poker another shot as a way to keep me occupied after school as well as for the money.

Cashed in $160 dollars and have built that up to $5000 by steadily moving up the limits while doing some bonus whoring.

Losing 40BB, $400 dollars in this case, is pretty significant for an 18 year old. I'll probably desensitize myself to the scale of this limit in another week or so, like I have in the past. And from what has been posted, the "great" games I was struggling in, maybe were not so great for me after all.

Thank you for all the thoughts! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[toots]

Dr. Al:

You can always be counted on to come up with something that was just outside my awareness.

Thanks for being so smart.