Uh ok, I think it's you who doesn't understand what I was saying.

I revert back to my previous example.
If you have a 300 BB stack, and have AA, and know that your villain has KK and a 300BB stack, and he shoves, would you call?

Obvious yes.

And the math still holds that you would lose some % of the time.
And some small % of the time, you will lose 2-5 times in a row, and be on a sick downswing.
They happen.
Good play, and even knowing cards can help, but wuill never prevent down swings.
And if you never have a down swing, you're actually not playing optimal poker.

So in other words, you believe that down swing can be avoided with certain style of plays?

yes for sure, you can eliminate it by table selection and proper mindset, etc etc

edit

lol Im so ****ing wrong ainec.

but basically whatever you can do to increase your ROI is also decreasing variance/losing sessions

I remember Chip Reese saying in a poker superstars interview that withstanding adversity and being able to adapt to the players at the table are the 2 biggest reasons he's a successful poker player. He said a lot of fantastic poker players will run bad for a day, or a week, or a month, and their game changes then they disappear.

When I think about limiting the frequency and duration of downswings I think of playing the highest quality poker possible by

1. Only playing when well-rested and mentally alert
2. Always making the most +ev play, even if it is "higher variance," since plays that are marginally +ev are more prone to downswings (a sort of paradox that causes the cautious tag to face longer downswings than the good lag)
3. Absorbing every ounce of information available at the table. If you're bored playing live poker then you're definitely doing it wrong unless you already have everyone figured out from playing with them a ton. Issac Haxton said something like that in an interview on pokernews. You must pay attention not only to what everyone does (betting action), but also how they do it (live tells), so that everything can be decoded if we're lucky enough to see our opponents' hands (or they tell us so that we can share in their success/misery). Even if we don't find out what they have we can still come up with a plausible interpretation for what happened which sharpens our reads.
4. Only playing when confident. Confidence enables us to think clearly and pull the trigger when it's time to make a creative play that exploits our opponents. Confidence issues can be dealt with by working on your game away from the table until you feel you've regained it. If at any point during a session you feel you're not likely to win $ then get up. If you truly understand your opponents and how to exploit them then confidence shouldn't be an issue. I think it's confidence that allows us to overcome the emotional weight of a downswing and keep making winning plays even if they don't work out for a stretch instead of turning to a cautious style in order to combat our "bad luck"
5. Avoiding auto-pilot. This goes hand-in-hand with numbers 2 and 3 above. I think auto-pilot is part of what contributes to online mass-multitablers' marginal winrates, which then translates to huge break-even stretches. It's amazing how your opponents' playing personalities "come to life" on a table when you give it your undivided attention. Combine that with taking the time to creatively evaluate every decision and your winrate increases dramatically, as does your rate of improvement as a player. I don't think it a coincidence that Ivey and Antonius both say they have trouble playing more than two tables at a time. Even durrrr times down online and takes a long time making live decisions

Whether or not a superuser has downswings is pretty irrelevant.

Any real player is having downswings.

If a player has a win rate that is high relative to his standard deviation, he may find that some downswings look like 'he didn't win as much as normal' vs the more typical 'losing session' downswings. Such players still could have awful runs where they actually lost money and/or have sessions where they play poorly.

Lets look at an example:

Playing 1/2, a superior player has a long term win rate of $25/hr and a standard deviation of $70/hr. Every hundred hours this player expects to win $2,500 with a standard deviation of $700 per hundred hours played. A three standard deviation downswing happens roughly one time out of a thousand, but the player is still a slight winner ($2,500 - 3 x $700 = $400). It would be plausible, almost likely, that such a player could never have a losing 100 hour session their entire lifetime - - - Assumng they could always play at their best.

This type of player almost never has a hundred hour session where they lose money without the cause being rooted in poor play or poor game/table selection rather than bad luck. For most long run winning players, a long stretch of losing session is a sure sign of poor play not bad luck.

It might not be common, but I expect there are pleanty of examples of no limit players who rarely, if ever, lose money over the span of a month.

DrStrange

Thats kind of like saying if you zoom out far enough while looking at a graph then it will appear to be a straight line with an upward slope.

There are still downswings there.

And I'm telling you this is just not possible in poker due to the nature of the game. In order for this to be possible we would have to be 95%+ to win in ever situation we engage in.

***snip***

I had detailed hand examples proving my point, showing consecutive bad beats which happen all the time in poker...

Given the structure of no-limit poker and that equity can change dramatically street by street and that all the money can go in on any street... It is impossible to guarantee that every session you have is a winning session...

Unless....

You view poker as ONE LONG SESSION!!!! And if you view poker as one long session then you will not be passing up on +EV spots that have variance...

After you track your play for a few hundred hours you should understand what I'm trying to say...

fairly certain it's 18%

Probably so. If you're playing play-money games on Zynga, you can probably make a profit every day. But if you're at a level of poker where you are playing at a level that maximizes your win rate the answer is no. Even professionals talk about having losing days, weeks, months, and yes, even years.

At what point is something considered a downswing? You don't know it is one until it has occurred. Kind of like the old philosophical question of how many grains of sand makes a pile?

If your graph swings down, it is a down-swing. Two losing sessions in a row is a downswing, if you track by session. Two losing hands in a row is a downswing if you track every hand.

What you are asking is, what is a significant downswing, and that is a psychological question whose answer varies for every player.

Poker is a game of small edges and variance leads to downswings

Poor play can exacerbate bad swings though

Fwiw I am 0/6 in my last 6 races in 1k + pots where it was between 60/40 - 40/60 where there was basically nothing that can be done. That is variance and there is nothing anybody can do to win flips.