Well it happened...
I heard some story about it too tho, i was laughing thinking no way it can happen to me because usually it happens at much higher stakes due to shorter winning rate and the aggressiveness of the stakes in question.
1000BB downswing in the past 5 months...
I almost quit online poker last week !
I know i am not a great poker player but still.
I just could not hit my fair share of draws and i was losing way too many 80-90% pot equity on the river.

3 toughts cross my mind:
I was thinking i was not as good as i thought,
the competition got way better in an amazing short time frame or
the site i was playing on had some superuser accounts ( i was really starting to think about it, the way it went...)

Than i decided to give it 1 more shot 3 days ago and in a few hours i just got around 200BB back.

Still shaking tho but confidence seem to come back bit by bit and it really start to went well when i just stop focusing on the money and just try to play good poker.

Of course in a downswing you surely play badly some of the time and i think i was just trying to win too many pot instead of just accepting the variance ride and make good folds.

And for the newcomers, yeah 50BB - 100BB downswing is nothing once you experience that ****ty 5 months period that i lived.
So hand in there and dont sweat about it even if it reach 200BB if you know you are a winning player.

I hope no one experience this but if it ever happens to you just know it will pass and i feel for you ( unless you play at my table ... )


Anyway, it is going a bit better but was wondering if anyone did suffer such a huge downswing ?

I would be very interesting to know what would of been the chance that happening for a guy who runs at least at 1 BB/100 hands tho !
Even 0.75BB/100hands would be interesting to see if it does make any significant difference .

Gl at the table, yes luck sometimes seem to play a crucial role .

downswings suck - hang in there!

i don't think i've had a 1000 BB downswing - i just looked in one of my databases (970k hands - the rest is on some other drive somewhere) and i have some 500-700 BB downswings as well as lots of ~300 BB ones. i always adhered to a fairly strict stop-loss, and would take days or weeks off often, so i think that probably helped a bit in avoiding catastrophic drops. it looks like my longest breakeven stretch was about 120k hands. my overall winrate was about 1 BB/100.

i don't have the links any more, but there are some variance calculators you can use online to see how likely certain swings/results/outcomes are. i'm sure 1000 is rare but possible. it's important to consider game quality - are there legitimate fish in your games or are you just battling regs? the biggest swings are most likely when your winrate is ~zero. it's also important to honestly consider tilt/mental game/etc and if that was any factor in things.

Babar is wise.

Montreal,

Good luck man. I'm glad to hear that you gained some of it back. Just the simple fact that you managed to go through a 1kBB swing without going broke shows much discipline in bankroll management. I'm nowhere near as good with my roll. So you got that going for you.

What's the rake like at the stakes you've been playing? Could be that the rake is so high that it makes your chances of having huge swings go way up.

Remember that it's just a game and it's supposed to be fun. This helps me through the tough times. Much like when I'm stressing over a chess position. I tell myself "It's just a chess game." Then I'm free to enjoy myself win or lose.

You cant be honest about your game during abnormal losing streak. Just impossible.
If you want to play nevertheless, maybe it's not a bad idea to play other form of poker

Hey Montreal,

It happens. Live I managed to lose 155 bets in 19 hours of blown out 20/40 over a weekend. In Vegas in 2015, I lost 8k in 2 days of 20/40. `

One thing I've mentioned before (to lots of people, not just the circle of poker friends) is that it's shocking how much one can win when their premium hands just hold up routinely, and a few good draws come in. Conversely, when premiums are going up in flames and you're whiffing.

Like get yourself in an aggressive game and flop the NFD 10 times. There's a 1.35% chance you'll miss each time, and you're check folding or hitting payoff cards in huge pots constantly.

One thing worth doing is inspecting your DB for results, from the short term downer and overall. Are you missing value a bunch? Are you paying off big street raises hopelessly a ton? PT4 can also calculate your luck distribution around making big hands (flushes, straights, sets) and you can see if you've truly been missing a ton on those. If so, then sometimes there's just not much you can do because keep playing and letting the fun side of variance take hold.

I was thinking this but didn't know how to put it nicely. Montreal seems to be clinging to the minimum defense frequency when game theory has moved on to other stuff like range vs range advantages and disadvantages which influence profitability to the point that minimum defense has become highly exploitable.

The biggest thing I've told Montreal before on here is that while he has good fundamentals when the aggressor, he falls back to just his own range of hands too much. Against some people, it's near mandatory, but against others it's utterly pointless.

One huge one I'd encourage from Montreal is go to through hands where he called his opponent's turn check raise in a heads up pot, count the times it happened and count the times he was bluffing.

I had the opposite problem, I had to learn to grit my teeth and call down versus a number of opponents.

Well just for fun ( seem not much action are going on in the forums anyway) ...
It is just mind boggling how in such a short time (3-4 months) , poker results can change!
I do not know exactly what is my winning rate but it surely not sustainable.
I took it all back in a much shorter time frame than my lost and add it on top of it, some pretty good profit.

I just feel I just can't lose anymore lol...
Poker is fun again !
Even planning of definately moving up in stakes, tho usually when I do, I run Terribad.
I will need to rely on a very strict bankroll management for not giving me a chance to go on tilt .
Tho the only good benefit of experience such downswing is that now losing 50-100 BB is definitely not an issue anymore .
Just stop and fight another day .

Even I got the enjoyment of analyzing poker again ...



Well to answering this, it is just amazing how my good hands just don't get crack anymore on the river by 2-3 outs or a runner runner flush or straight.
That was like a 3BB swing in 1 hand that just kept repeating itself over and over...
I guess it show with my bankroll , that effectively I was runnning really bad .

I play online and contrary to you imo, the problem is not to fold strong hand but not folding too many medium hands.
So many crazy stuff happening sometimes that I witness ...

Anyway, time to stop the rant and gl at the tables ( except when I am on it ��)

If you can't be honest about your game during downswings, you shouldn't be playing poker.

I've played through some big downswings, and even posted about a couple of them, and the ability to dispassionately analyze my sessions was crucial for getting through them.

How do those super-intelligent poker bots handle downswings? What they do (dispassionately and robotically continue to learn more and add data while not worrying two turds about money lost) is what you should do.

Anyone here know what a reasonable range for a single live session downswing might be? Lost 30bb I'm my local game the other day. Some bad luck and definitely some bad play on my part. Trying to better understand swings in limit compared to NL. The mistakes I'll have to rectify in other ways 😝

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I mean 30BB is only a bit more than a buy-in for most people so it's definitely going to happen in a single session from time to time.

fwiw, the swing in limit is higher when you compare it with your total bankroll.
swing in NL is higher when you compare it with your buy ins at the table.

30bb down in one session is literally nothing. That is well within normal variance.

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I wish my live floor was 30bb down per session.....

I recently had a session playing 20/40 LHE where I lost $2000 in 5 hours. Bad times.

last 120 hours of 8/16 two 30BB downswings and a 45BB downswing didn't think it was that uncommon

I mean.....it's impossible to judge the meaning of a 1000 bet downswing without knowing the texture and handedness of the games you're playing, as well as your history in similar (ideally the same) game.

It could be anywhere from "pretty reasonable" to "evidence that you're 100% not a winning player" depending on those things.

That said....play smaller. Play simpler. Take time off. Etc.

Plenty of folks here have a much deeper understanding of the relevant math than I (and perhaps they will chime in), but.....

Generally, to really know how significant your 30bb loss is, you have to know what your variance and standard deviation are. You can then calculate what your expected win or loss should be over a given session and compare that to your standard deviation rates. Until you know those things, you are shooting in the dark while trying to understand how usual or unusual your loss was.

That said, I am pretty sure even most winning players here have routinely experienced 30bb losses. I have seen plenty of other posts around these threads where winning players have written that they had standard deviation rates in the neighborhood of 15 bb per hour. Standard deviation for multiple hours is not a linear calculation of your hourly standard deviant. In other words, a 4 hour session for a player with a standard deviation of 15bb per hour does not mean her 4 hour standard deviation will be 60bb. The number is considerably lower than 60. But still, the likelihood is that if you are generally a winning player or a break even player, your standard deviation is likely high enough that a negative 30 bb session is probably a tiny blip and well within your likely range of session results.

Here is a thread that might help you understand more about the math and applying it:

Simply put it, if you know a player ( that played more than like 10k hands in his life, you get the picture obv.) who never experience a downswing of around 40-50 BB, well you know his just cheating and, you or he, should leave the table !
It might not be a full mathematics proof but the drift of it sounds about right.

In my regular game I'd say I experience a "30 bet down swing" 3 or 4 times every 40 hours?

I have had a 30 bet loss in over 50% of my sessions this year. But I may not be very good at poker.

Seriously, other than recording your session results, and perhaps stop-lossing yourself (not something I am a fan of, but a lot of people here favor it), you really should not give two figs about the result of a session.

Review how you played each session, tough hands, how to get more value, whether you should have folded anything that you called or raise with, etc. But the result? Meaningless. Learn to completely ignore whether you are making or losing money at the game.

That is good to know I was unaware of this without having started at limit. Sorry for co-opting your post mate. I hope the downswing ends asap.

This was very helpful. It certainly will help putting future sessions into perspective moving forward.

Absolutely, that definitely has to be the approach and I'll work to move towards that mindset.