I play in a pretty wild 1/3 plo game which plays significantly bigger. Max buy in is 700. On an average night I'd say there's 12k on a 9 handed table. I'm currently experiencing a big downswing. Fortunately this coming off a big upswing. Currently I'm down around 15k over about 10 sessions. I haven't strung two wins together this whole run. I win one session then lose twice that the next. Yes of course like any downswing I could have been down less if I hadn't played bad or tilted in any spots. I've spoken with other good players which have said to me that it's not as bad as it seems in this game. Does this downswing seem far outside normal variance?

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it's barely 20 buyins, I'm sure you can play better but on a scale of downswings seems pretty mild

thats standard. well within the parameters of normal variance. doesnt make it less painful tho

like anyone with a pulse im sure your play has suffered from losses

just keep trying to make the perfect micro decisions and the macro will take care of itself

A ton of PLO pots are coin flips and if you watch the variance of a coin flip chart you’ll see “mind-boggling” streaks of 11/13 tails etc. When some of these flips are 4 buy-in to even 10 buy-in pots downswings and upswings get huge. You need a bankroll of 70 buy-ins to comfortably play PLO in my opinion. If you are stubborn you can adjust your strategy to smaller bluffs against passive opponents IP and cash-out/table change when you have 3 buy-ins + in front of you.

I watched the recent Chicago Joey podcast with Johnny Vibes and he stated that in live games, this is not the case. Of course, the variance is higher in PLO as opposed to NL but we don't have enough info to determine if this is in fact variance. Yes, a coin can land on tails 50 straight times. Because it is possible, does that mean that you are playing correctly each and every time? No. Post some hand histories and we help you determine if it is "just variance."

dropping 5000 big blinds is probably not just bad luck, most likely your game needs to be seriously retooled. and you shouldn't tilt.

Do you do session reviews when you lose?

It could be a downswing, but in a wild game like this, you may also have overestimated your true win rate and are not making the proper adjustments.

The average skill level in lower and even mid stakes live plo is pretty low, so i would be pretty concerned of you are not beating it for a consistent clip, especially because this game will also be very beatable by buying shorter to avoid larger bankroll swings.

you're right in that we don't have enough info to know if this is poor play or run bad (probably both.)
But whatever johnny vibes said means nothing. he doesn't play plo.

i've played in plo games that were so crazy swings like this over ten sessions wouldn't mean anything. but other plo games that play pretty passively where i'd say it's almost certainly terrible play.

you should be reviewing hands no matter what.especially in plo people tend to overestimate run bad and underestimate run good.
for example when all in, or a lot of money goes in before the river we often don't see out opponents hand when we win. we tend to forget those hands even though or opponent had a ton of equity. when someone calls calls river bricks they fold when they had 20 outs on the turn we basically forget about the hand and just think we played like wizards. you hit the draw get paid and again we think we're wizards.you get all in with top set, runout is all bricks you say top set show and win. maybe they had 1 out with a lower set, maybe they had 20 outs with a monster draw but you don't know.

because we don't see the opponents hands it's easy to just think these hands are normal and standard to win. when it goes the other way- all in and their draw hits/your draw misses you see their cards and it's "omg i run so ****ing bad"

you can only control how you play, not how you run. if you feel tilted don't play. but be objective. even when you win a ton in a short time realize while you may have played great, your ev wasn't nearly as good as you actual results in that time period.

blinds in live games often don't tell the story. online games in 2019 basically play the same or at least similar, but it's not the case live.

if this is some nitty game then yes losing 15k this past shows a serious problem.
but if this is some game that is often straddle, blind reraised etc it's really not 5,000 bc. it might not even really be 1500 bb.

Downswings are much lower in terms of buyins in live games versus online because the games are passive and deeper. Your win rate actually has a bigger effect on Risk of ruin calculations which determine your max downswings then variance does. I have 25buyin downswings like once every 2ish years for last 10 years. So probably happens for me every 2000ish hours. Even a small adjustment to win rate would have a huge impact on its likelihood though so really it is personal to figure out what you should expect.

I would just try to focus on playing well which is actually the hardest thing to do and the thing people focus on the least when going on a big downswing.

You will at one point run worse than you ever thought possible. A strong mental game and healthy bankroll will prevent you from going busto.

Did some quick sims in Excel:
Here are some sample win results if you are a 60% favourite over 100 times. 60% is pretty common in PLO. What this shows is that two blokes can be playing exactly the same, yet have a 40 buy-in swing over 100 all-ins due to chance. Now, over 1000 samples the results almost all are pretty favorable in the black, but it will take a long time to get to 1000 flips in live PLO.

Thanks for all your input. Been making some adjustments to my play. For sure I lost a good deal of money from tilt and bad play. The game plays huge. Its 1/3 but it's completely normal to win 4k+ my I've had 3 sessions over 7k+. I've seen many of the best players get buried in the game for 5k or more last night one was in 6500. When you like 6 ways to flop for 75 it's not hard to get a 700 stack in a bunch of times in one session. I love plo don't think I can ever play NL again.

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Dare I ask where this PLO game is in Vegas?

I do not know of any 1/3 PLO games running in Vegas at the moment...

This is so true guy.