When I looked back through my records I was surprised to see I've actually only played about 500 hours TOTAL of live LHE since 2012. I thought, "that can't POSSIBLY be right", but without boring everyone with the details, I do believe it's pretty close to correct.

When I first started learning to play LHE I had people warning me that the downswings can be pretty brutal. I had one guy tell me he's gone on downswings of over $1000 at $4/$8 LHE. In my admittedly LOL sample size I'm pretty sure the worst downswing I've ever suffered was $400. I set a daily stoploss at $300 and I've only EVER lost the entire $300 in one LHE session TWICE. EVER. And in those 2 sessions it took 9 and 6 hours respectively to lose it all.

This year I had an UPSWING of about $1100 over about 55 hours. That at least doubled if not tripled any other upswing I ever had at LHE since 2012.

I think it matters that at LEAST 400 of those 500 hours were spent at utopian, 5+-people-seeing-every-flop-and-playing-exactly-how-SSHE-says-they'll-play tables.

What's the point of this post you may ask? Good question.

Just conversation. We all know none of us have any control over swings. We can all win or lose any given hand. We can all end up or down any given session. We are not "due" to go on a downswing when we've been on an upswing. We are not "due" to go on an upswing when we've been on a downswing. I'm just curious as to what kinds of swings other people have experienced and at what stakes and game conditions.

Hope this leads to fun discussion.

Last year I had a -$2.4 K run over 100 hours. Part bad play, mostly variance. 6 sets of Kings, lost 5 of them, that sort of thing. Still fighting back from that.

My casino is not like this regularly, unfortunately. I am finding 3-4 to a flop more. It was better when the went 9 handed for a few months, but back to 8 handed after the regs complained about the crowded tables.

You really only play less one hour per week? If so, you will never get to the point where your total results aren't just due to variance - basically you can't even know if you are a winning player or not. Really I can't even imagine why someone playing that little would even bother learning to play better. Who wants to spend more time discussing a game than actually playing it?

Anyway though, my worst downswing ever was about $6000, while I was playing mostly 10/20 LHE. After 5 months I was finally back up to even, so it was probably roughly 2.5 months of losing almost every week and then the same amount of time mostly winning. At that time I was probably playing a bit over 30 hours per week on average, so roughly 700 hours total. Soon after that I had several months of far above expectation which was nice. I've never really taken note of my upswings except that when I started playing again after Covid, I won my first 12 sessions in a row of mostly 20/40 LHE for a total of about $8000.

chillrob my apologies I meant to respond to this sooner.

I'm surprised by your comment about spending a lot of time discussing the game. Reading books, running simulations, playing video-game poker, posting and discussing hands/spots - I think all of that is FUN. We could nitpick the ratio of discussing to playing, but I really enjoying coming in here to hobnob with other LHE enthusiasts.

With regard to the less-than-an-hour-a-week average, that's only for live LHE. I played tons of live NL early on, played tons online, dabbled in PLO and FLO8 both online and live etc. I even dabbled in tournaments for awhile (good lord do I HATE tournaments. I do NOT understand their appeal to the masses.) LHE is clearly my game. There's a glimmer of hope that someday I might get back into shortstacking NL but that's a low probability at best. When I go to a casino, it's to play LHE, basically full stop from there.

There were also several years where I barely went to the casino at all. From summer 2019 to spring 2023 I pretty much took a 100% break from poker. There were 2 or 3 other years where I only went 2 or 3 times because my family was having financial difficulties.

This year I've been to the casino 15 times playing sessions that average about 7 hours each. I'm taking a short break now (long story) but I'll be surprised if I don't get there at least 8 more times between now and the end of the year.

Hope that clarifies things a bit.

I probably play 500-600 hours/year. Historically, my bread-and-butter games have been $6/$12 Limit HE and $6/$12 Limit Omaha/8 with a half kill. Depending on which room I play in, I sometimes play at slightly lower or higher stakes ($4/$8 or $8/$16) and sometimes play Limit Big O.

Pre-COVID, my regular room was the Oaks, which is noteworthy for two reasons: they sat 10 players to a table, and the blind structure was 2 chips + 3 chips, which encouraged the small blind to complete with just about anything and to call a single raise with a very wide range. These two features made for multiway hands and large pots, often $150 to $200. Big pots make for big swings, both up and down.

I typically bring $600 with me in addition to whatever's in my wallet that day, and I'm mentally prepared to put that much in play and lose it in a single session. I remember one night when I lost $600 at the Oaks, went outside for a walk, decided that I was feeling fresh and calm, and it was still relatively early, so I bought in for another $300 and won back everything I'd lost.

My long-term win rate is about $10/hour, so just under one BB/hour. In one of my winningest years, I won nearly $10K but also had two or three downswings of roughly $2K over the course of multiple sessions. In a game where I commonly win or lose as much as $600 in a single session, a $2K swing is just three or four big wins or losses in a row.

I think we often pay too much attention to the results of a single session (I know I do). At some point I decided that if my session result was anywhere between –$60 and +$60, I was going to call that breakeven. Thus if I was stuck $540 and got back to being stuck only $36, I could feel good about racking up and leaving, especially if it was very late and I'd already been playing for 10 hours or more.

The year I won nearly $10K, my session breakdown was something like 65% wins, 25% losses, and 10% breakeven.

People sometimes brag about their streaks—I won this many sessions in a row or whatever—but I don't think it's helpful to focus on that either. I try to focus on making good decisions on every street and on remaining calm in the face of whatever challenges or frustrations I might face. For a time, as I entered the Oaks, I would tell myself, "I'm walking in a winner, and I'm going to walk out a winner too"—meaning, it didn't matter if I lost this one session; I was still a winner on the year and consistently over the past 25+ years.

I actually think Limit Omaha/8 can be way more frustrating than Limit HE. You flop the nut flush and lose to a boat on the river. Or your nut low gets counterfeited. Or you have to split the low with two other players, so you only win a sixth of the pot. Or you flop a monster draw—nut low draw + nut flush draw + a gutshot straight draw—and miss everything. The game is also very slow—and some dealers have trouble reading hands and splitting pots correctly, which adds to the slowness and furstration—so if you're slightly tilted, it can be harder to resist playing marginal and bad hands.

I think it was Tommy Angelo in Elements of Poker who said that nobody goes to a casino to sit down at a poker table and fold all night. But we need to fold a lot to win. I can fold a lot in Limit HE and still enjoy myself. Whereas in LO8, it gets boring folding a lot because every hand takes 3 minutes.

This may be slightly off topic but there’s a player I know who will quit two minutes after sitting down if they win a hand to break a losing streak. Go figure. lol.

I swear to you, I've sat down and been up $100 within the first 30 minutes at the table, then gradually over the course of the next 5 hours I lose it all and end down $200 or $300 (whatever my stoploss is that day) more times than I care to count! It's an 80-minute drive to the casino for me so I just can't make myself get up and leave after 30 minutes!!!!!

I got hooked on FLO8 for a short time and ended up hating it for most of the same reasons you stated. The FLO8 game at my casino pretty much has the same 9 to 18 people at it week after week after week. It usually starts right before noon on Saturday and most of the same people are still there when I leave my LHE game at around 11:30pm. One of the players at my table was joking that they all know each other, know the names of each others' kids etc.

You mentioned folding a lot in LHE. If I had a nickel for every time me folding prevented a family pot I'd be rich. And to be honest, I'm not sure anybody has noticed or even cares.

Years ago a player needled me that I was the tightest player in our Omaha game. I realized that he was the tightest player and was trying to distract everyone from that. He was also trying to make me play looser, I'm sure. Or make me so uncomfortable that I'd leave and be replaced by a worse player. His needle was actually a compliment; we later became friends.

I think you can play super tight in low-stakes games without others noticing if you're friendly, make jokes, and sometimes play aggressively. Other players will notice you raising preflop or check-raising the turn more than they'll notice you folding a lot pre. You can give the impression that you're the one throwing the party even though you're not. Sometimes my opponents comment when I don't defend my big blind to a single raise. I just laugh it off by saying I can't play 72-off or 83-off.