I agree that PLO is an insane variance game and it doesn't matter much how much you are up or down on a session. I would argue that looking at a graph of your session allows you to draw some conclusions or at least validate a bit your estimates of how you played/ran. Even without assuming that to be true though - if it doesn't matter how much you are up or down on a session then why ignore it anyway? Why can't you look at how you played the hands and become process oriented while still knowing how much you made or lost for the session?

I see zero downsides to looking at your results and overcoming the effect it may have on your emotions or mental state to work towards a stronger position where you can simply look at how well you played and work on playing better. If you don't look at your results for a period of time however I can see some potential downsides.

1) What happens when you do eventually look at your results? Let's say you don't look for a month. After the month you feel like you have played well and improved yet your results are really terrible. You may second guess yourself and it's a lot harder to think back to some of the earlier sessions and know that you played well than it is to look back at a session you just played and look at how you played and regain confidence in your abilities and rating.

2) What happens if you want to go back to looking at your results after every session, or even during the session? This can be particularly handy if you are taking shots at higher stakes games or if you are playing on a tighter BR than usual. You may be ill prepared for this scenario, especially if taking shots or playing higher than normal since the swings will be even more brutal than you are used to. And "not looking" may not be an option if you are practicing sensible BR management.

3) There will be times when you can't avoid knowing the results. Live poker and tournaments are two examples. If you have been ignoring looking at results for so long and having good progress at becoming more process oriented, you might not be prepared for when you do see your results. In such cases I feel like your emotions would still be tied to the results rather than your performance as you would have lacked the experience of playing while looking at results and still being process oriented.

Like I said before I used to think the same way as you - and I definitely think that not looking at results is a much better solution to looking at them constantly and having them affect you negatively. But I still think the best option of all is to evolve your mental game to a state when you can look, or not look, and it's all the same to you. It's like there are two pathways that lead to the goal of being less results oriented and more process and level of play oriented. You are going down one of them (not looking at results) and it will be beneficial. But why not go down both paths? Where looking or not looking arrive at the same destination and over all makes you that much of a stronger player.

thanks for the thorough answer Roy.

i agree that there are exceptions to this case which you pointed out, especially so with BRM reasons. live poker is an obvious exception.

obviously the goal is to become insensitive to results and that's the ideal situation. for vast majority of the people the emotions swing right along with the swings in the graph (graphs in general are mostly for entertainment purposes in my opinion, since the results are in no way path dependent) therefore i choose not to look at them for the time being. hopefully i arrive at your mental state at some point, right now i'm not there and look at results less often than earlier.

..and you can go through your hands right after session and see if you played them well or not. i go through sessions (marked hands) everyday, just ignore the total result.

ROY FOR PRESIDENT

played w him on day 1, i feel ya, surprised he beat browndog hu (lolhuploobv)

I like to check my results about every 5 minutes, but the purpose is more to see my ev adjusted and other numbers as a gauge of how I am playing.

You guys are weird. No software is going to tell you your expected value of sitting down at a poker table. You're expected winrate over a 2 million hand period is going to fluctuate quite a bit due to all kinds of factors. If after two million hands you're in the red, either a few shots didn't go well, or you're not playing games that you beat.

I'm on the worst run of my life atm, this hand sums up what is going on. SB, your a hero





Had a session yesterday where I got it in AAxx vs AAxx pre 3 times, villain scooped all 3 pots (3/6 like all 2k pots). Beyond funny

I'm posting here because I really like the posts between you and Roy. High level stuff and I want to add to it. I say that because I don't want you to think of my post as being too nit picky. I think accuracy is critical and want to further encourage your mental game work here towards that end.

The goal is not to be insensitive to results. If you took that idea to an extreme it wouldn't be what you're end goal should be here, and I'm sure that's not how you intended it. Often when describing a goal in the negative it doesn't give you enough direction for what you do actually want. What you want is to have more of your focus on quality/process than results, especially in the short-term. It's not black/white. Results are important for many reasons, including as Roy said, they provide another form of feedback to help you know what the heck is going on in your session.

I think you're smart to be realistic about your mental game capabilities at this time. One suggestion as you move forward is to look at the reaction you have to results as being a test of how far along you are in your progression towards mastering being more process/quality focused. As work to increase your skill in focusing on your poker skill, over time you'll notice a difference when you look at total results. It'll become less intense because your skill of focusing on skill has increased.

It's hard to evaluate progress in the mental game, so it's really important to nail down something specific to judge progress. Your reaction to looking at total results is a benchmark that you can use to compare how well you're progressing. I'd suggest keeping track of it, so you can see that progress more clearly over time. Then, it'll also get easier to know when you can push yourself a bit to look at total results more frequently - which for you is like moving up in stakes in the mental game. Your reaction to results when you do look more frequently will help to see what's gotten stronger and what weaknesses remain. Both of which help you to determine what to work on.

I believe that many players overestimate their insensitivity to short term results.

When i read this i come to think of a couple of quotes by Taleb.

"The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions."

"My problem is that I am not rational and I am extremely prone to drown in randomness and to incur emotional torture. I am aware of my need to ruminate on park benches and in cafés away from information, but I can only do so if I am somewhat deprived of it. My sole advantage in life is that I know some of my weaknesses, mostly that I am incapable of taming my emotions facing news and incapable of seeing a performance with a clear head. Silence is far better."

"Finally, this explains why people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit."

"Since my heart does not seem to agree with my brain, I need to take serious action to avoid making irrational trading decisions, namely, by denying myself access to my performance report unless it hits a predetermined threshold. This is no different from the divorce between my brain and my appetite when it comes to the consumption of chocolate. I generally deal with it by ascertaining that there are no chocolate boxes under my trading desk."

"In the markets the recommendation would be to ignore the noise component in the performance. We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures."

Really interesting read from Taleb. I got a whole new perspective of my life after reading that book.

^ nassim is the man. went to one his seminars, brilliant stuff. too bad he is such a private person and stopped updating his blog a couple of years ago.

thanks for the clarification and tips Jared. i have been thinking about these things quite a bit lately and happy that you jumped in and put some light on this. i do keep a journal and i am following my progress quite closely but the process of climbing up the mental game takes time to have major effect, much longer than i thought it would.

BBV's IQ is becoming to high, so l'm going to lower it with some trash

Grabbed by Holdem Manager
PL Omaha $20(BB) Poker Stars
($2,255)
Hero ($2,000)

Dealt to Hero A 9 A 5

Hero raises to $40, raises to $120, Hero raises to $360, calls $240

FLOP ($720) 4 4 A

checks, Hero bets $280, raises to $1,559, Hero raises to $1,640 (AI), calls $80.50

TURN ($4,000) 4 4 A 4

RIVER ($4,000) 4 4 A 4 7

shows T 6 5 4
(Pre 38%, Flop 4.8%, Turn 97.5%)

Hero shows A 9 A 5
(Pre 62%, Flop 95.2%, Turn 2.5%)

wins $3,999

Arg, and was having a very bad day before this. Surprisingly, I didn't get upset at all, two weeks ago I would have wanted to my head through the wall.

are you ever good here?

all the $ went in w/ other guy drawing at 1 out

Yw, glad the timing worked out here. Great to hear you're already working so closely on this. I wonder though, as you look back on your progress if you still think it's happening very slowly? It's possible you've made a lot of progress and just get caught thinking too much in the short-term. In which case, just keep working in the way that you are, and realize that your expectations of how quick the process should be are unrealistic. But, if you haven't made as much progress since beginning to work closely on your mental game, that may be an indication that you're not digging deep enough into the problem to resolve the underlying causes of your mental game errors. If that's the case, then making progress is much harder because these underlying issues hold your progress back. It's like trying to run with a bungee cord attached to your waist. In this case, your mental C-game is holding back the speed of your mental A-game (Inchworm).

I do realize this is a hard thing to resolve these underlying issues, but it that's also why it's so valuable if you can figure it out. Have you done a mental hand history? If so, feel free to post one here or PM and I'll give you some feedback on it. There may be something your missing.

Fwiw I've worked with Jared like 4 or 5 times. With each lesson, especially when I went back and reviewed what we went over, I felt I improved significantly. I haven't needed a lesson since then. Also my mental leaks are diff. from your standard tiltymonster so that could be why I needed so few.

If you any of you guys are thinking about it and can afford it, I highly recommend getting some sessions from Jared. I blogged about it a couple years ago and reviewed 1 or 2 sessions I think.

I don't even remember most of what Jared said or what we went over, but what he does explain to you is very clear, concise, and it sticks with you, or at least with me, on the subconscious level. I've always felt progress and have felt way better after our lessons. Haven't needed one since.

thanks again Jared. there's (naturally) a lot more to it than i've discussed here, so i'll shoot you a pm a bit later. it may become a rather extensive message so if it takes a lot of time for you to prepare an answer, i'm happy to reimburse you. cheers

meh

lol i read the board as 444 hahaha

yeah tough break johan but dont worry you will bounce back

meh indeed, how much in buy ins?

Sucks , I lost 30k at 3/6 and 2/4 the first two days off the month and have managed to just get in profit for the month today. Fk this game , gl getting it back

win 3.5 BB/100 over two year period
switch skins for better rb
break even for 6 months, running ridiculously bad and not just from an EV standpoint
go back to original skin
profit

very interesting!
i made exact same experience with ipoker.....

Hi guys, how are you?

How many people did recover from a downswing of 80-150 bi in today's games?
Last year, I lost around 25-30% of my bankroll on 400-2k. I had a huge downswing and tilted many buy-ins away - you know it. I have the majority of my money invested, bought an apartment (which I rent out) and had to pay taxes.
I have nearly finished my masters and I am not sure to deposit again. (I haven't played for 6 months and haven't played for 9 months seriously).
I am not sure if it's worth the hassle to play again. Do you know a lot of people who overcame big downswings / losing phases?
I have spoken to a few good players on European sites and they all said that the state of the game is significantly worse than 1-2 years ago...

I had that mindset as well. It is very bad for your game and for your head. Don't focus on every $ in every hand.