Hey guys, so I believe I have a leak...and it's my biggest leak: going on semi-tilt due to being card dead.

Most people describe tilt as losing a big hand and getting frustrated. This basically NEVER happens to me. I've overcome this. If I lose a big pot but I see I didn't make a mistake, or I run into the top of someone's range, it doesn't affect me at all. If I lose a big pot but am unsure if I made the right decision, if affects me but I wouldn't call it tilt. I just keep thinking about the hand during the next few orbits, questioning myself.

But if I go for like 3 hours+ without getting dealt anything, I get frustrated. I'd call it tilt but I don't "blow-up" or start playing trash (I loosen up a bit slightly pre flop though). I just get frustrated and can't focus on the other players or developing reads as well as I should.

And this card dead thing, it's real and the frequency that it happens is almost becoming a near statistical impossibility. When I get carddead, I like to play an unproductive game...I count the number of times I'm dealt 72 and compare it to the number of times I'm dealt AK.

Last Sunday I had my best ratio ever: I was dealt each hand twice. Over the past 1000 hours of play, whenever I play this game, the ratio is something like 5-1...it's insane. And I don't have selective memory. I remember basically every live hand I've ever played, minus some of the details like the exact bet amounts or suits on board. I have NEVER played a session where I was dealt AK more often than 72.

The chance of being dealt either is equal, and the ratio should converge pretty quickly to 1:1. Except it doesn't for me...

Anyway, anyone have this problem? Any suggestions for fixing this leak?

it just takes practice being patient. every time you play try to improve your patience. learn to not be results oriented either. at this point in time its best to leave early when you start feeling tilted though.

realize that this leak is very very common among pretty much everyone who plays live low stakes. realize that if you fix it, you will be that much better than them.

If it's any comfort, rec players, especially half-way OK rec players, have this lament worse than you.

So I get a sitter for the dog, take honey to the UFC fights at the MGM in Las Vegas, pay the airfare, rent the car, concierge gets me the show tickets, make reservations for the fine dining, finally I sit my nitty old man's butt in a chair, a blue chip for Gary and he smiles at me, Terry sells me some chips, I am finally PLAYING.

How many hours do I really have available to play on this trip? All day at the fights, all night at some show, I play every hour I possibly can on every trip, some days it is only a few hours, fight night it is only noon to three pm if I am lucky.

All the way from fing California, I am finally playing live no limit in Vegas with mostly rec fight fans, and wtf do I look down at hand after hand? 72o, 84o, on and on and on, finally TT looks like rockets if and when it finally comes.

Last week they were giving our drawing tickets for any hand, winning or losing, flush or better. Hundreds of tickets over four days. But not to me.

Yes, it is just one long session, and no, don't feel sorry for me, I play for ego, trying to beat the regs and the recs at their own game, I will never win enough to pay for the trip and the fight tickets, I know that.

But really long card-dead periods are a part of the one really long session we are all playing. Get over it <smile>

You're supposed to get a top 11% hand once per orbit at a 9 handed table...A top 11% hand is playable. That's the statistical average. You're supposed to get a pair once per 16 hands...that's the statistical average. Anything much further than that is an anomaly. I'm talking about going 3 hours + without getting dealt a pair pre flop or a top 11% hand...session after session.

Going card dead often doesn't "happen to everyone".

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

How often is a pair a top 11% hand? Being able to answer this question correctly seems paramount to blaming being a sub par player on getting bad cards.
No competent player would ever suggest their biggest leak is being card dead.

Harsh but true.

F.w.I.w: 3 hrs is like 75 hands live. Being card dead for 75 hands is hardly a statical anomaly

Well, try to think less about being card dead and more about being situation live/dead. Sometimes you don't need cards to make a play at a pot, but at other tables you 100% need to have the good because everyone is calling nearly all bets and fold equity is non-existant.

A lot of authors would describe *any* non-optimal mental state as tilt, including hunger or general tiredness. What you're describing is a little bit like entitlement tilt. You feel like you *should* be winning, but you're not. Or boredom tilt. I'd recommend reading some mental game related books. The Mental Game of Poker is good, Tommy Angelo's stuff is good, I'm sure there are others.


Think about how many hands you actually see in those three hours ... 150? 200 at an extremely fast table? Online that wouldn't even register as a blip in variance. It's very easy to go 2, 3, 6 hours and just get **** for hands. Or have the few "good" hands you pick up run into bad spots.

Having a 1000 hour stretch of bad variance sprinkled with a bit of tilt is totally possible live. My last two years have been like that. It's starting to become a statistically interesting sample of 30k hands, but I'm sure you could find online grinders reporting run-bad over those kinds of spans. I was looking over my records for the past year, and a couple of big hands going the other way would have changed my results pretty noticeably.

I really doubt that you can remember every hand you've ever played live. There's going to be some bias in there unless you're actually recording statistics. Look for instance at your statement about never being dealt AK more than 72. You say that you only play this 'game' when you're card dead. If you were being dealt a lot of AK type hands and hitting them you wouldn't even be tracking AK vs 72, so *of course* you don't remember any sessions where that was the case.


If you're so situation dead that you're having a hard time focusing on the other players at the table ... get up and take a walk. Stroll around for 10-15 minutes and clear your head. Grab a snack. Zone out and watch TV a little bit. If you still can't focus on the game just go home.

Entitlement tilt, IMO. The only thing to do is to recognize that you are only entitled to two randomly selected cards from the deck.

You have no idea what you're talking about. You do not understand probability.

Over a large number of samples, you will get a top 11% hand once every 9 hands. This most certainly does not mean you will get a top 11% hand every 9 hands.

Over 100s of hours of poker, you will eventually see that a top 11% hand is likely every 9 hands. But there is no memory in the deck between hands (assuming the deck is properly shuffled). So on a deal to deal basis, there is no way to predict what the next two cards will be dealt based on the two cards you had in the last hand.

If you don't completely believe this, flip a coin 100 (1000) times and see what the longest streak of consecutive heads results is. Then realize that this is for a system with probability of 50%. Then consider when the probability you are talking about is only 11%.

The point is, it is completely reasonable for you to fail to see a top 11% hand in an entire 8 hour session playing at a single live poker table at 30 hands per hour. At 30 hands per hour, you're seeing only 3 orbits per hour. It would only be a streak of 24 for an extremely unlikely event in the first place.

Loosen up and widen your PF raising range IP.

As a lag, I have gone hours without even laggable hands. Buy a beer, table change and get a fresh image.

It helps if you stop looking for opportunities to "win", and instead think of poker as a series of decisions that you have to make optimally. Give yourself a mental pat on the back when you fold hands that other people would play, like a suited ace from UTG or folding KJo to a raise from someone you deem to be a rock.

Keep making good decisions, the winning will come.

The voices of experience - the other posters here - have it right.

Back when Paradise Poker was indeed "paradise" I played PLO8 every night for years. I had retired and Honey hadn't yet retired.

More than once I went five hundred hands without winning even half a pot. Almost total card deadness, several times.

Once it was 800 hands.

(Paradise kept stats, I am not guessing at these numbers.)

At 20 hands an hour at a live PLO8 table 800 hands are 40 hours of live play.

Even if you had 25 hands an hour that's 32 hours of live play.

Weird stuff happens, get over it, I still say.

In live 10/20 limit holdem, had AA back to back to back at the Mirage once session 25 years ago.

(Lost, Lost, and split with a broadway on the board, big pots, in that order.)

Next time you go on an extended five-session heater consider how rare THAT is.

Just realize it happens.

Perfect solution for me is if I go like 3 or 4 orbits with trash, or I just feel "card dead" or had some juicy hands I had to ditch because of action in front of me, I just get up and go for a walk. Watch a few other tables play, see how the action is there. Go grab a drink, just walk it off.

Then I come back refreshed and more importantly refocused.

Acting like you are the only one that has gone 3+ hrs without any good hands is LOL. It happens to everyone. You can learn to be patient or just don't play live. Go multi table online and you will see the same thing eventually. 75 hands is nothing in the big scheme of things. As far as advice goes you got plenty of good stuff above.

Think back to your running hot sessions to motivate yourself. Your card dead sessions are building up to your running hot ones.

Listen to music while you grind and look at hookers on erslist while you're card dead. Leak fixed.

Sounds like you're replacing one leak with another.

If you genuinely believe that the universe is conspiring against YOU personally during your poker games you should find another hobby.

When sample sizes get large enough nobody is "lucky" and nobody is "unlucky".

Do you disagree with this?

No one reaches that sample size in live poker, though.

Leave the table go for a walk. Table hits bad beat. No one likes you. No one pays you. quit the pokerz.

JP.

Take a table break. throw a penny in a fountain. Find a sad degen and give him 10 dollars 50/50 stake at roulette. Tip the drink bitch 5 bucks. Tip the dealer before you get cards. Go get chinese food. eat ice cream. Do a good deed. Maybe your karma is ****ed because you dont do anything good for society and feel ****ty and in turn all your cards look...****ty.

I won a 200$ pot w 24 today and a 150$ one w 74 Top pair on flop turned into a flush bluff. I profited an extra 60$ w a 100$ bluff w 9 hi against nit donks who I KNEW would fold. Stop looking at your cards look at the other players tendencies actions and showdown history.



***Wipe the sorry bitch look off your face so you can steal some pots you cant just wait for the nuts in this game baby. If you look like a sad little bitch you get no credit and people call you and you will get sucked out on. Put a smile on. Think positive. Play the other players cards. Play your position. Your cards are 1 piece of the equation. usually when Im folding so tight so often I can use my image to pull a bluff to win a little bit of $. Then I eat chinese food. Bam.


Miserable and losing anyway? Go home come back not crying. its bad for your image.

I applaud the honesty of this OP. Many might be too ashamed to admit they're card dead: this is how "fish" think after all. But, the reality is that you're likely to be experiencing a bad run of cards, or what is technically a form of variance. Some of the advice offered so far is helpful on a theoretical level, because it sounds like you don't fully understand the precise nature of this variance. The more you read about variance, the more objective you'll become and therefore less likely to become frustrated.

Other practical ways you can deal with this "frustration" tilt would be:

• Change the object of the game (focus on position, player profiling, stack-sizes etc., rather than your cards)
• Monitor how long you actually spend looking at your cards (If you are spending more than 1/2 a second, this is literally wasted time)
• Rather than spend time looking at your cards, watch other players look at theirs and collect and correlate tells.
• Play imaginary hands with cards other than those you folded (so fold that 75o from EP and instead imagine you had raised with AK, c-bet whatever flop comes, received two calls and so on)
• Constructively consider how you might widen your preflop range in certain positions under certain table conditions (test this wider range by playing imagined hands like the above example)

It's great that you've identified this leak. We're all vulnerable to irrational thinking at times. While monitoring a leak such as this seems obvious, there's no doubt it's sapping your cognitive energy and general awareness at the table. Imagine a future when the term "card dead" is no longer part of your lexicon

Watching the table and "guessing" players' hands is generally what I do when I'm in a long period of bad cards at a table where I need good ones to play profitability. At these types of tables there are generally a lot of showdowns, so I'm not just spinning my wheels.

Look on the bright side. Being card dead is much better than getting coolers. I was card dead for about 2 1/2 hours two days ago. Then I picked up QQ and ran it into a underset to a player who had just sat down. I missed being card dead after that hand.

Seriously though, playing 10 minutes of video poker is great card dead release - both mentally and emotionally. You see a hand every few seconds. So, you will get some hands. If the jackpot is over $1,200 and you're playing 25cent max bets, it's very slight +EV too.

Sorry buddy, but it does. The laws of probability apply to everyone. I have run bad for months before. It sucks. As long as I continue to play, It will happen again. But that's a choice I made when I decided to play a "game of chance" for a living. You simply have to stay focused and weather the storm with patience and good BR management.