Getting hit a bit hard on the variance side of the house. Cold cards, been that way for the last 2 weeks or so. Do you grind it out or just take a break for a bit tune up your game?

You should quit playing until you can play your A game. That may be a 15 minute walk or a 2 month break.

If you're playing your A game (and your A game is a winning game), you should grind it out.

I'm sure all of us know variance is part of the game. This is a simple fact, but when you have consecutive sessions of card dead/cooler hands/unkind riverssss, it is extra important that we keep reminding ourselves of this simple fact "variance is part of the game","variance is part of the game","variance is part of the game". If we don't do that, one can easily stop playing his A-game. That is when the deadly combination of run bad/play bad shows up.

I think it is very important to examine all "close hands" during this period. Did we make the right decisions? Was that a tilt call with 68s on the sb 3 handed? Is that a right time(and opponent) to make a semi-bluff raise on the turn with 9 high?

I find that during downswings is when I look at my game closer and discover leaks (often through help from fellow forum members here) that I may not be aware of.

Good luck!!

40k downer here. Put that in your power rankings and smoke it.

Tighten up everything. Play smaller or at least don't take shots. Game select more carefully. Play shorter sessions. Think about your image in a session. Quit faster. Be more diligent about seat selection

That really really sucks. I immediately feel better and just hit a str8 flush and got lots of lip from the Korean gal I 2 bet the river on. #winning.

Advice doesn't get any better than this.

One caveat: the latter point of advice, while important, may be difficult to accomplish. I make it a rule of "one seat change per session", unless I've a real good reason to move again (ex: 10 seat leaves and mega fish is getting called from the must move, I'll slide because I've the excuse of preferring the 10 seat. I honestly do prefer the 10 seat as I struggle to read the board from the end seats). Seat changing is the most blatantly obvious of predatory moves, so you have to be careful to not overdo it and create a toxic game environment. People don't like feeling like targets.

I don't play if I'm not having fun and that's about as far as I go with seat and game selection in live games.

Sure. But I'm saying make sure you make the one. Sometimes nowadays I don't even do that.

**** you Cali

Solid advice for a recreational player. MFCF never gonna grow tho.

**** you Cali

A while ago, I was sitting next to a guy at the table and we started chatting. He said his wife was getting upset because he was running bad. He blamed it on variance. He knew to just play good starting cards, and he figured that should enable him to win, but he just hadn't been hitting his hands lately. At the low limits that actually is a pretty good start.

Then I get in a hand with him. He raised and I'm in the BB with suited cards, and a few others are in the hand. He hits the flop and bets, but I have odds to call for my flush, so I do. I miss my flush on the turn, and if he bets, I have to fold. For some reason, he checked the turn. I hit my flush on the river and won the hand. He thought that was an example of his bad luck. Yes, I did get lucky to hit one of my outs on the river, but it was also his bad play of letting me see an extra card that gave me the chance to have that luck.

My point is that maybe you are running bad. Or maybe you are making some mistakes. Or maybe both. Take some time off and examine your game to make sure you are playing winning poker. Read through and comment on hands posted by other players here. Maybe reread your favorite poker strategy book. Find a poker friend and meet for dinner and talk poker strategy the entire time.

I cannot fathom what you say being true but your point is valid

take a break if you like. i would assume at 8/16 you're not playing for a living or for money that you are counting on (no one should be doing this anyway) so you can hopefully afford the break

improving your winrate will help, so make sure you keep working on your game and your skills

This may be an unpopular opinion but I recommend seat antioptimization at lower levels.

As you move up, you lose table changing ability and seat changes are frequently contested. You're going to play most hands from non-optimal positions.

So get used to it early on - seat change to the worst seats, or, at the very least, never seat change so you have a random distribution of good seats and bad seats.

When you're running bad, don't nerf the game for yourself by seat changing. You'll just get dependent on it and feel entitled to win because now you have "the good seat."

When you're a pro in a super combative game and you need the money or else you're dumpster diving behind the KFC for dinner, pull out the fangs and seat change.

Until then ... meh. As a recreational player you have the luxury of walking away whenever you want. Take full advantage of it.

Just IMO.

This simple but effective article might help you, OP.
http://www.thepokerbank.com/strategy/other/variance/

You're getting > 5:1 on the turn, so how can you fold a flush draw?

It was a NL game??

Variance is so great:

-It lets really bad players win sometimes so they keep playing

-It convinces bad players who are running good that they are actually good so they keep playing.

-It convinces bad players who think they are good that they are just running bad, and so they also keep playing.

Embrace it and be thankful it exists because without it, poker or other forms of gambling would not exist.

Over the weekend, I got to play one guy who was a total "tale of two sessions". First 40 table session, he got crushed by the deck. Every draw came in, every broadway combo made TPGK and held up, etc. He did things like cold call my UTG raise (after I hadn't played a hand in 3 orbits) w/ A4s, call the cap, and make an expert slowplay after flopping the wheel to get that sweet, sweet turn raise in against my Kings. When he left the table, he had 8+ racks in front of him.

Next early morning, he came back to the table, and was back at it. Except this time, things went poorly. His draws were missing (with him playing top dollar to hit them), his bluffs weren't working (I had called down a two barrel on AJ5-7-A with K9, which frustrated him, though I think the cd was standard given the situation). By the time my friend had arrived to the table, he had already lost a 4 rack buy in and was down to the last few chips of his second, three rack buy in. And his descent continued from there. Before we knew it, he had lost what we speculated to be $12k and quit.

So what happened here? Because of some run good at the expense of stronger players, a poor player decided that the game was fun and he could potentially make a lot of money, not grasping that his play style made him a significant underdog. While his loss in terms of big bets is probably too much (both in that I empathize with the crappiness of a 150 bet downer in a big game, and that it's highly likely that he may not be back for a long time), it does highlight how variance keeps people in the game.


Also remember that people have different motivations for playing poker. For some fish, it's almost the thrill of playing "good" players; what other activity can you play someone that you've seen prominently in the activity's most famous events? Would you get to play Rory McIlroy or Jordan Spieth in golf? Would you get to play Novak Djokovic or Roger Federer in tennis? No, but all you need is the cash to get in a 100/200 Mix game with some of the best. The analogy I told my friend was to imagine being a weekend warrior, racing small time events, and you get invited to race in a charity event w/ an entry fee; maybe 95% of the fee stays in the pool for prize $. Your opponents consist mainly of guys fresh off the 2015 24 Hours of Le Mans, with your occasional F1 and NASCAR driver mixed in because they feel like slumming a small event for fun and practice. You know at the end of the day, that you'll be losing $ and likely putting in a ton of effort for a net negative. But maybe you do it anyway, because of the chance to compete against great competitors. And of course, maybe somedays you race well, have a few lucky breaks and make the $.

Obviously there's other motivations to playing as well. Maybe you like the gamble, but don't like the solitary nature of table games. Poker offers you a chance to play and interact with real people. But one thing people don't like is just being soul crushed every day. You'd never play the world chess champion for cash; he would destroy you. Poker is a fun activity, but being killed for huge sums of money constantly makes it stop being fun.

I just wanted to throw a word of caution, because I think a lot of people (myself included) talk a lot about bad players and how they get fooled by variance without taking an uncomfortably long look at their own play.

3-betting light OTB? Waiting for the turn? Free carding? These are all things which happen frequently enough to matter, but not so frequently that you can use results to guide you to the correct answer.

For example, 3-betting your button too light is a mistake that may work out for you very well over 1,000 hours of play; waiting for the turn too often is a mistake that can be hidden because you're an overall winner.

A +0.5 BB/hr winner with three 0.1 BB/hr leaks may be running +1 BB/hr over 1,000 hours and not even realize that he has leaks amounting to 40% of his win rate!

This is why it's particularly important to analyze things quantitatively, rather than rely on, "it's worked well for me so far."

Plus in live settings, you're dealing with tons of confirmation bias.

this post deserves an award

I agree. Great post!

I think a silent killer in many players game is that they are unconsciously unconscious about certain aspects of their game. In other words, they have no idea that they are making a mistake. Obviously they are unable to fix a leak they don't know about. I would highly recommend having somebody sweat you, or getting a coach, or posting hands in the forum. Do routine session reviews, making sure to go over hands you think you played poorly as well as hands you think you played well.

I would also notice when you are playing on auto pilot. If you have played for a long time it's easy to get into the habit of always doing certain things in certain situations. Try to get more into the moment. Make your decisions with more awareness. You have gained knowledge along the way that you may not have integrated and certainly not habituated into your game.

If one were to play solely live, how does he do the above? Without help from PT/HUD/hand histories???

It is hard. Do the best players you know ever make a given play? Do they do it regularly? Can you defend your play with hot/cold equity? Jon_locke made a point about people running hot doing stuff like limping PP hands in EP and then deciding that it is a good play. If you're doing stuff that good/great players on the forum say is terrible, either ask them or at least get involved in threads discussing the same. Don't be afraid to be wrong.

Honestly, the best feedback is to go play 100K hands online and look at your PT or HEM numbers along the way. There you can't ignore the fact that you get bored and play Q8o in the BTN+4.