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My win rate would disagree.
I just means you're probably playing better than other people who play worse than you. It doesn't mean you're necessarily achieving your full potential. No real point arguing beyond this hypothesis, but the majority of players who are thinking deeper than you probably aren't staying at those stakes or posting their thoughts on a public forum, so there's a lot of confirmation biases here (and it works out both ways of course; I'm aware losing players are less likely to post up results also, so you're left with the middle bunch).
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I consider 10 live and 20 online to be pretty normal, but if it contiues its dipping into tilt/leak territory.
10-20 being the average big downswing (with some rare bigger ones) sounds reasonable. It depends on a LOT of factors, like how big the game plays, how big you or other players buyin.
Like, back to the point of a 5-10 buyin ds being huge: if you haven't played in a game where you're 500-1000bbs deep, then you're probably not maximizing (and this include games with 150bb max buyins; if you haven't tripled or quadrupled up in a session and kept playing because it's good, you've either not played enough to find a crazy table, or you haven't taken advantage of those spots, or you quit games too soon). And if you have 500-1000bbs on the table, all of those chips better in play, or you're, again, not playing optimally. If you're telling me you're like all the vegas nits who sit ridiculously deep, but only put the money in when you have the nuts, then you're CLEARLY not playing optimal, so what are you saying?
And therefore: if you a) play in games where you eventually get deep, and b) try to actually play correct deep stack poker that puts your money at risk in a +EV way, then we can deduce that a 5+ buying downswing can happen... in ONE HAND, much less over a few sessions.
To think that, if you're not tilting, you're unlikely to have a few big losing sessions strung together, is absolutely gamblers fallacy. If your chance of having a bad session of 3-5 buyins is 20%, then the chance of having that again next session, assuming same mental state and game conditions, will be another 20%, and I think we all know it's possible to lose 2 flips in a row, believe it or not. To think otherwise is gambler's fallacy.
Of course our mental game fluctuates, and for most people, to be sure your mental game not being impacted or having an impact on your downswing is delusional, but the role it plays can be relatively minimal. I've been in big downswings, I think we all have, where I was not playing well, and I knew it, but the biggest pots I've lost were all completely standard hands, and the hands I misplayed were the small to medium ones, and only made up as maybe 10-30% of my losses or winnings I missed out on.
My personal biggest downswing is hard to say since the game gets straddled a lot usually in these big downswings. I had a 60k GBP downswing last year November (after a 90k upswing) where I was playing some 10/25, but a lot of it was 5/5/10. Even if we say average blind was 20, that's a 3000bb downswing.
That said this is PLO, it's a lot easier to play NLHE without your stack at risk. I've had -3000bb downswings in NLHE a couple of times in the past also (probably happened in every stake I'd played large volume in, 1/2, 2/5 and 5/10), maybe twice a year or so, but I haven't played NLHE recently. I would guess nowadays NLHE is played more passively and that will be a lot rarer than 3 years ago, but a 10 buyin downswing would probably occur once every 200-400 hours if I had to guess.
I'm not going to pretend that during my big downswings I was not on tilt. I'm pretty much always on tilt to some degree, like, tilt isn't a binary, everyone is suboptimal, so obviously I'm not ever going to be perfectly zen, but of the times I was on a downswing, the chances that I was -EV in the game due to tilt has got to be below 10%.
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I have experienced this as well. In 1/2, my hourly is around $30 and my 2/5 is around $45. The biggest difference is the swings are much larger in 2/5. At, 1/2 I won over 80% of my sessions where in 2/5 it is only 65%.
Since 2017, I have 2 hour 45 minutes average sessions (due to jumping tables and stakes a lot) but on my tracker I only win 63% of my sessions (if you group the sessions together then the winrate would be higher since chopping up sessions on the same day increases frequency of losing sessions). Over entire sample, I average 5.6bb/hour winrate. Life time: I have 22.5bb/hour winrate at 1/2 and at 2/5 and 5/10, I average 14.6bb/hour.
I would hypothesise if you plot all breakeven or winning players' winning session % as y-axis, and winrate as x-axis, it's going to be some kind of lopsided upside down bellcurve.
THAT SAID, some games are just so soft that it's very tough to lose, and I certainly agree that I'm much more likely to have a losing session at a higher stakes game than a lower stakes game, but if you're moving up, and you're infatuated with not losing, you're seriously hampering your potential for growth.
I've played in 5 US cities, and around 20 poker rooms, and the 1/2, 2/5, and 5/10 is pretty much all fairly similar with few exceptions. I would say that for the most part, if you are averaging more than 70-80% winrate over 5 hour sessions, there's no way you're playing anywhere close to optimally. If you're playing optimally and still losing so infrequently, the game must be amazing, there's no way your winrate isn't some ridiculously huge number. The other alternative is if they literally just fold every hand very very slowly so you basically pick up the blinds 3 times an orbit and you play 2 orbits an hour or something.
Focus on what makes you the most money. Reducing downswings help you tilt less and IS a factor, but the majority of your work should be playing the highest EV poker you can.
Last edited by Sol Reader; 02-22-2018 at 11:30 AM.