Drift
If you're driving in a car and let go of the steering wheel the car will go to the right or left unless the alignment and tires are perfect. And there's no wind. This is drift.
If you're in a boat with the motor off or the sails down and don't drop anchor, your boat will follow the current. This is drift.
If you're lost in the woods without a compass you will walk in circles unless you know how to compensate. The strides of your dominant leg are longer and it's very difficult to walk in a straight line without landmarks. This is drift.
If you play poker your game will tend to gradually change according to your personality. This may occur over the course of a session or over a longer period like days, weeks, or even months. This is drift.
Drift vs Tilt
Drift is not tilt. Tilt is a sudden change in your game caused by emotion. Drift is a longer, slower and more subtle process. Tilt and particularly perma-tilt or life tilt can radically effect how you drift. But you do not need to be tilted to drift.
We are not naturally born as TAGs or sLAGs. We are made. Playing poker well is a learned skill. There are very few "naturals" and some aspects of poker can be counter-intuitive or only understood after considerable thought. This is evident in the way fish play. If you consider people who have not learned or study the game they tend to fall into two groups. Most are loose passive while a minority are loose aggressive. It's is extremely rare for someone to sit down, play and naturally assume anything resembling a winning style. The first thing most players need to learn is how to fold.
And drift is
not when you deliberately change gears in response to changing table conditions or a tournament structure, etc. Drift is a gradual, unconscious change in your play.
What direction is your drift?
We all set out to play a certain style. Generally for a winning player this will be TAG, sLAG or more rarely outright LAG. However, if we are not careful our play will gradually shift and regress back to our "natural" style. Over time, if we are not paying attention, our play can change dramatically. Your tendency to drift will often be towards the direction of your "natural" playing style if you had never learned to play properly. That will usually be loose passive or loose aggressive. However, in some cases your drift will tend towards the
opposite as you try to subconsciously compensate and wind up overcompensating. Much like people who find religion or find sobriety. They sometimes go to the other extreme.
If you can identify the direction in which you drift this goes a long way to addressing the problem.
An example of drift
A few months ago I switched from playing cash games full time to Double or Nothing SNGs. As a cash game player, I had encountered drift before but never named it or examined it as I'm doing now. But I was always aware of the fact that I tend to be a very aggressive player. And I would periodically need to adjust my game as it would gradually creep further and further away from TAG. I've been playing cash full time for several years. So my drift in cash games has been well under control for a long time. Over time, my game has gained discipline and my TAG/sLAG style has become more and more ingrained and closer to being instinctual.
However, a few months ago I switched to Double or Nothing SNGs.
With SNGs these habits have not become nearly as ingrained. The lessons of time are not as solidified. So my SNG game is far more susceptible to the effects of drift.
This is a graph of my last ~500 DoN SNGs:
You can see, circled in red, a break-even stretch followed by a down-swing.
That is the result of drift.
I expect that if I went back over my graph of the last few months I would find other similar incidences. But I'm highlighting this one and posting about it because this is where I realized what was going on.
How do I know this is drift and not simply running bad?
At the time I thought, "Wow, I'm running really bad" as my I lost as with a dominant hand all-in preflop for the tenth or fifteenth time over a couple days.
But then I realized - I should never have been all-in in most of those spots in the first place!
The structure of Double or Nothing (DoN) SNGs really clarified what was going on. Though at the same time, DoNs (and SNGs in general) can really hide it.
10 players play a Double or Nothing SNG. 5 players cash and double their buy-in (minus rake). The structure is essentially the same as satellites with an extremely flat payout. As such, the ICM for this game is extremely simplified. It doesn't matter if you finish first or fifth. As long as you finish.
So correct play is quite structured, formalized and as close to "solvable" as any poker game. Except of course that most players are not playing correctly. Which is where things get complicated.
This isn't a post on DoN strategy, but essentially play is a balancing act. You need to be aggressive enough on the bubble and just prior to the bubble as blinds start to get big to keep a healthy stack. However, each time you push or steal you risk being called. Facing an all-in even as a favorite is usually worse EV than your current EV from folding.
So you need to push enough to stay alive but not so much that your chances of being called get too high. There's great potential for equilibrium, however, there's usually players pushing too much and other players calling too wide. So the goal is generally to keep yourself alive long enough for someone else to bust out.
As I drift, my aggression increases. I steal more. Including stealing when I don't really need to. As an arbitrary example. Let's say I'm the third biggest stack and I have 8 big blinds. The big stack is to my left. The lowest two stacks have 1.5 big blinds and 1 big blind. It's folded to me in the small blind. I have AQ and I push.
This is where DoNs can be deceptive but at the same time illuminating.
This is a terrible push. However, most of the time it will work out fine and sometimes it will work out spectacularly well. Usually the big stack will fold and I'll take the blinds. Sometimes he'll call with a worse hand and I'll double up, gain a huge stack.
However, sometimes he'll call with a better hand, or win a coin flip or call with a worse hand and suck out.
Those are disasters for me because I didn't need to win the blinds or to double up in order to cash. Ideally I should just be folding and waiting for either of the two short stacks to bust out in the next orbit since the chances of both of them doubling up is small. And even if they do, my stack is still healthy and I can start stealing if need be.
In the short term, being too aggressive in this way can be rewarded. You will win a bunch of blinds. And against players who call too much you will wind up all-in as a favorite a considerable amount of the time. So if you run even to expectation, let alone well, your results will be very positive. And even if you run badly the deceptive part is that you can fool yourself into thinking you're playing well because you're getting it in as a favorite. But the point is that you didn't need to take that risk
at all in the first place.
This wasn't supposed to be a treatise on DoNs, it's just that the effect of too much aggression is really obvious here. However it is applicable elsewhere and with similar, potentially misleading results. For example, double and triple barreling too much will show great results when it works because you will win a bunch of decent sized pots. However, in the long run it can be huge spew and can result in nice downswings after a string of failures.
In cash games I have always, more or less, been aware of my tendency to drift towards more aggressive play. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that I have that same tendency in DoNs and it tends to manifest itself as stealing and pushing too much against players who call too wide.
Fighting drift
The most obvious solution to drift is to be aware of it. If you know you tend towards passivity, you can watch for it. If you know that in a long session you tend to get increasingly aggressive you can reign yourself in.
Practice and experience is a huge help. Drift is much more of a problem in new players who haven't yet completely internalized their style. Once a lot of your play starts to become routine you're much less likely to vary your play except according to design.
Lastly periodically reviewing and analyzing your play will help you catch drift. Drift can be slow and subtle. You won't notice right away that your PFR is rising by .25 a day. However, after several days it will be very clear. At the least, you should be looking over your stats and your hands on weekly basis. Over the course of a session or a day it's possible for your numbers to show considerable variation. However, even if your results are fine if some of your numbers are off from where they should be take a look and try to figure out why. As you are learning and incorporating new plays and new techniques your game will change and you should take that into account. But if your VPIP is two points off from where it was a week before and you haven't made any changes that should effect that you need to find out what's going on. If you WTSD is up a couple points, figure out why you're suddenly seeing more showdowns.
If you aren't making deliberate changes to your game and your numbers are changing there's a good chance you're drifting and you really need to be aware of where you're heading and why before you jump the median and head into oncoming traffic or your boat winds up too far out to sea.
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