x0,000 Hand Slumps for Winning Players [graph]

[Xiphoid]

Four months ago I suffered a slump that I thought I would never see the end of. Variance, cold cards, and probably sub-optimal play aligned for a 20,000 hand slide that was completely uncharacteristic for me, as you can see above. I was under the impression that slumps only lasted a few thousand hands or 5,000 at the worst, but I was quickly informed by the crowd here that things could get much worse.

For those of you who have logged 100k hands, I'm curious about the following:

1) What's the longest slump (steady downward trend in your graph) you've experienced in your career?
2) How many slumps lasting 10,000 hands or more have you experienced?
3) Do you think these slumps are normal once every 100,000 or 200,000 hands?

Thanks to the inspiration of people here, I played through it and am on my way up again.

[checkmate36]

I don't have any of the info your looking for but just wanted to say thanks for sharing your chart.

As a newer player it helps me understand variance.

[Simplistic]

how do you make that chart? through PT?

[ChrisMonkeymaker]

Thanks for sharing your chart. Can you imagine how sick the slumps of a full-time brick and mortar major tournament pro's slumps would look like in a chart?

[Fabian]

I know this is not what you want to hear, but 20,000 hand stretches where you lose money will continue to happen and 200 big bets downswings will continue to happen. I'm assuming your a full ring player, if you played shorthanded I don't think your graph would look this nice.

Hopefully, every time this happens to you you'll handle it a little better. Good luck.

[DrGutshot]

here's my old 10/20 graph:
Note: I sucked for the first 30k hands so I don't really count those as a downswing because I wasn't playing good poker.


Depends on how you think of a downswing - you can find a couple different areas that could be considered ~25k hands of breakeven. I don't think there are many spots that exceed 10k hands of consistant losing though.





Here's my more recent 20/40-100/200 graph.

Again, regions that are ~15-20k hands could be considered breakeven poker. Not many constant losing runs >10k though.


edit: to answer your questions - combined both my graphs, I see about 6-8 10k downswings, with prolonged areas of breakeven. Yes, these are very normal, I would say within 40k hands you should expect a 10k stretch of breakeven to losing results. With a reduced variance style of play, this could be reduced, but overall bb/100 would drop as well.



-DrG

[DrGutshot]

[ QUOTE ]
how do you make that chart? through PT?

[/ QUOTE ]

you need to download pokergrapher, a program that queries your pt database to make a chart. Google it to find it.

-DrG

[iceman5]

Excuse the hijack, but do you know if theses a way with pokergrapher to ONLY graph a single limit even though you have multiple limits in the PT database that youre graphing?

[DrGutshot]

[ QUOTE ]
Excuse the hijack, but do you know if theses a way with pokergrapher to ONLY graph a single limit even though you have multiple limits in the PT database that youre graphing?

[/ QUOTE ]

pokergrapher is a bit quirky - this is the way i do it:

you have to select a different database, then go back to your original database. Then, the limits will be displayed under the options tab, uncheck display all limits and go from there. For some reason if you don't uncheck/recheck which database you want they won't appear.

-DrG

[iceman5]

I would appreciate it very much if you would PM me with a little more detailed instructions. Can you give me "step by step" instructions that a moron would understand please?