I have lost 12 buyins in my latest downswing playing 1/3.

I was doing very well until COVID started, and then all poker in my local area was suspended for over a year. I was a few thousand dollars from finally moving up to 2/5.
When I got back, I had what I thought was a very bad run, with lots of bad luck and coolers, in a breakeven stretch of say 30x 6-hour sessions.

In the last 2 months thing have changed dramatically for the worse. I am simply losing just about every session since I came back from an overseas trip in April.
The player pool seems to have changed, apparently more favourably - with more loose and spazzy donkeys. Even a 10x raise typically goes multiway.

I simply cannot hit flops, I have gone 8 sessions without flopping (or turning, rivering) a set from any pair, and I am not hitting draws despite getting the odds (and on the couple that I did, I lost to a bigger flush). The few hands I am winning are through hero calls and multi-street bluffs. I went four sessions (16 hours of play) in a row without making a single successful value bet.

I'm still spending lots of time away from the table studying the game. I don't feel that I'm playing particularly poorly. I'm just not enjoying consistently losing.

Today, a total maniac raised me all-in pre with 2-2 and I called with Q-Q. He flops a set. I don't think I've won even a $100 pot in the last seven or eight sessions.

In the past, I have never not played out of a downswing. But I have not had a downswing this bad for 6 years, and even then I won some sessions in between.

Does anyone here have any similar experience?

Downswings can and do happen in this game. Sometimes in small chunks , other times it feels like the poker gods want to make an example of you for MONTHS. We’ve all been there.

Outside of the obvious coolers like the one against the maniac, get back to posting hands and talking through your thought process. That alone can help refine your game and get you to the other side. Good luck.

So 180 hours of play at like 30 hands an hour? Not that many hands - either way keep working on improving your game and making the best decisions. Upswings/downswings who cares - it all comes back to correct decisions will win in the long run.

this is exactly y a perfessional has a bankroll and y people tell a pro u need x buy ins, and y months of expenses. Its not to sound cool. Its cuz u can lose in more ways possible than u ever imagined. When you are in the midst of getting your head kicked in repeatedly its pretty much the loneliest, most frustrating isolating thing there is.

I no longer play full time but every year when I did I would average 1-2 months where there seemed to be nothing I could do right and it would feel like winning was not possible. You have to accept it and do your best to b a robot. In these instances i have found having a network of people u can bounce hands off of for a sanity check is critical. It is very easy to tilt when everything feels like its going south. This is how a 12 bi swong becomes a 20 bi. Dont do that

There's a significant mental game aspect to poker when you inevitably have bad runs ... and one of the things I've found that helps is realizing just how normal it is, and how there are so many different kinds of luck. Just folding for 2 or 3 hours straight is so often better than trying to force something to happen with a bad hand in a worse position.
Not hitting sets happens, a lot. But sometimes that's luckier than hitting them on wet boards and not having the winner on the river.
Maybe you fold for 3 hours and then see AK, get one caller and the flop is 8 high ... is that bad luck, or great luck because villain hit a set.

And although I open between 3x-5x depending on how stationy people are, I would caution against going up to having 10x raise sizes (without a bunch of limper dead money) because it does a lot of bad things ... 1) There's too much money in the pot when you get callers, so your results will depend so much on if you win _that_ pot. 2) You range will almost certainly be too wide for the size, and yet still more obvious to villains than with a smaller size. 3) In general low SPR spots on the flop are the easiest to play for bad/loose players.

Keep posting your hands and keep plugging up your leaks. It seems to me (by your post above and recent HH's you posted) that you're playing too passive, like trying to hit flops, and flatting AK otb instead of squeezing, etc. The passive lines don't win in the long run, we should be the one forcing our opponents hit flops, not the other way around.

You're on the right track though, so keep posting hands and studying other hands posted. I'll never forget the day I lost $900 in 3 buy in's at 1/2 at the Trop in AC when I was a beginning player. I was devastated. I wanted to learn how to be a winning player more than anything after that day so hopefully this will be the same for you.

Do you have a decent sample size / decent winrate prior to this downswing that solidly suggests that you are indeed a solid winner in this game?

If so, probably nothing to worry about and just one of those downswings that everyone will go thru eventually as they get in the hours. Trust your method and maybe err on the side of avoiding close spots for now (as your head might not quite be right enough to handle them correctly).

If not, then better chance the method you're using overall isn't a winning one to begin with.

Also doesn't hurt to perhaps re-evaluate your method if you think your game conditions have changed drastically. Should you be considering doing something else to your "normal"?

GgoodluckG

Have you read "The Mental Game of Poker" by Jared Tendler?

I was in the abyss from Dec. 2017 to Feb 2020 and then was unable to play for two years (covid). Loosing in games like the ones you describe here and in your recent AA thread is really hard to handle, but you should feel good about the edge you know you have and the fact that you are getting it in good vs these fools.

There is absolutely no guarantee that it will get better any time soon. If you choose to play, you accept this reality.

Keep posting HHs

Happens to every poker player from time to time.

No, it does not.

We don’t know how many hands hero played to lose 12BI since April, how many BB a buy-in is and what variance that game has. That said I’m pretty sure in a 100BB buy-in game with “normal” variance the probability of a 12BI downswing for a proven winner (>5BB/100 expected winrate) is under 1% if we’re talking about 100 hours or less at 30 hands per hour.

Running similarly bad the last 3 weeks or so, have had some winning sessions sprinkled in. For context: last 20 times I had AA/KK only won 2 ,where pots were like 50 bucks.

Trying to remain as objective as possible analyzing spots and interacting in here

I feel your pain. Just keep studying and paying attention, because there is only so much math, odds, etc., against a bunch of donkeys. Seriously. You can play almost perfectly mathwise, but when they are just going nuts, you have to hang on.

I have started paying very close attention to my player pool, and it is paying off. Nothing you can do about 22 vs. QQ, but I have learned when to value bet, bluff, and fold just based on the players w/o taking math, odds, etc., into too much account. I'm sure I'll get flamed, but sometimes knowing your opponent is the best strategy.

If your pool changes constantly, keep studying and, most important, keep your head -- no tilting!!! Easier said than done, I know!

Good luck. Don't give up -- it will swing back around.

No flaming here. Essentially what you are talking about is accurate ranging via history and some bad ass hand reading. This is where it's at imo.

I've skimmed over your threads for the last 6 months or so. Obviously they are not a representative sample of how you play a full range of hands but I do see some trends that are a concern. So while you've had some run bad, you can't do a thing about it. It happens. However, you can improve your game. If you haven't read "The Course" by Ed Miller, get a copy and read it. Multiple times. Pay attention the starting hand guides. The A8 and 97 hands are folds pf and shouldn't have even been a 1/2 second thought about how to play them. When you play weak hands, you're going to lose more often than not.

Another thing I saw is many of the HHs involve over pairs. Don't get me wrong, over pairs are great hands. But if you're getting to the turn with them and the pot is getting big, they are mostly in trouble. Unless you have a read that the villain thinks TPGK is the nuts, you want to slow down with them.

Now others have mentioned that you are playing passively. If you are, you want to stop that. This is pure Ed Miller. If there is no raise in front of you and you want to play pf, then raise. In most 1/3 games, the majority of hands don't go to showdown. The pot goes to the person who bet last. Be that person. If you think you're behind, then get out of the hand. Don't call things down hoping you might have a winner. Hope is not a strategy.

You're a good poster in this forum and I'm confident that you can be a long term winner. Just keep working on your game.

Thank you so much for your kind words and sagely advice everyone.

I WAS a long-term winner until April, at least in the seven years that I've been playing this game.

I have read Ed Miller's the Course - multiple times.

And yes - the vast majority of the money I have lost in the last two months have been off overpairs and, to a smaller extent, AK.

On every table I played - except maybe one - each other player didn't have any idea of the fundamentals of the game. I probably didn't even meet more than two people I had any history with.

Since reopening my casino has removed the bottom 1/2 game and so everyone is now forced to play at least 1/3 - and the 1/3 game's skill level has decreased accordingly. However, this is not being translated into higher win rates, much less my win rate has ben -$100/hr of late.

There is much to be happy about in my life outside poker - I had my first $200k year in my day job, I bought a new house and car, and for the first time in my life, I can run 4 miles.

I enjoy my off-the-table non-clinical time. I enjoy studying the game and I don't find it a chore. I get entertainment and stimulation out of it.

But I am so sick of losing. In late March, I had a great session with a $1K+ win. Since then, I lost six sessions (admittedly losses were small) in a row, then had two moderate wins, followed by four big losses, two tiny wins ($17 each) and now my latest disastrous session. As I said, I have whiffed just about every flop.

It would be a shame for me to permanently quit the game that I love for its mathematical beauty and all its permutations and combinations. Doomsday is a long way away yet and for the time being I'll continue paying the rake. I'm not in any danger of blowing my entire roll for the foreseeable future, and my net worth is much higher than when I started playing poker, admittedly mostly due to my day job and investments. But if I lose my entire career profits (a few tens of thousands of dollars - and note that I did have a bankroll to begin with and never dipped into it for indulgences), I am probably not going to play any longer. And certainly not at negative $100 an hour.

Our dealers are pretty fast, we get through about 35 hands an hour pre-COVID.

I think the number might be slightly less now because the skill level has deteriorated and almost every hand now goes to a flop, the majority of them multiway.

In 2019-early 2020 my win rate was around $15 an hour (about $45 per 100BBs or 15bbs), fyi. My biggest losing streak during that time was 5 sessions and I did not have a downswing exceeding six buyins. I did have a 20BI downswing way back in 2017 that took nearly a year to play out of but I was a MUCH poorer player then.

Random poker variance calc. with 5.5bb/100 win rate and 100bb/100 std. deviation and 3000 hands is _way_ more than that.

It's more than 1% if your winrate is 10bb/100.

If we then change the question to something more like "given a sample of 30,000 hands what is the percentage someone has a run of 3,000 hands that are 1,200bb down" ... that's going to happen more often.


I understand the desire to not just tell people they are unlucky when they are playing bad, and in my experience almost everyone at 1-2/1-3/2-5 could improve significantly, but the other side of that math is that it's almost as bad to say "if down 12bi, obv. fish".

Or to put it in a slightly more positive way, yes you want to work on getting your "A game" better but esp. at -12bi you probably want to look at mental game things to make sure you are playing your A game.

Can you tell on what pages Ed said to call a UTG raise with A8s and 3bet 97s? I must of missed them.

For 5.5bb and observed win rate -40bb/100 over 3000 hands, I get 99.3%?

Besides that, would it really matter if it’s 1% or even 5%? I was responding to somebody saying that happens to everyone and it certainly doesn’t. It does happen to some winning players though including very good ones. I can say with 100% confidence it doesn’t happen to everyone because it never happened to me in a 100BB game. Deep stacks is a totally different issue.

I didn’t call anyone a fish or suggested he was a bad player. Frankly, the old “don’t worry happens to all of us” is something you tell bad players at the table to keep them in the game.

Downswings are a great time to go back to basics, brush up on fundamentals and try to figure out what went wrong other than just running bad. That’s something we don’t do often enough when we run good even though it would be equally important. If we lose 5 BI we’re much more willing to analyze our potential mistakes than when we won 5 BI in spots where we should have won 10 BI instead.

I can only attempt to extrapolate your previous winrate / hours thru the statement regarding how you've won a "few tens of thousands of dollars" over 7 years.

It's a double edged sword depending on which way you guesstimate things.

If you played 500 hours per year over 7 years to win $30K, that means your winrate would be $8.57/hr over 3500 hours. So a decent sample size although one that shows you're only winning in the 3 bb/hr range. I mean, better than most in your pool, but you're not exactly killing it either, so you could easily have big breakeven stretches / downswings.

If you played 200 hours per year over 7 years to win $30K, that means your winrate would be $21.42/hr over 1400. So a much more solid winrate of 7 bb/hr suggesting that you are indeed a decent winner... although at a much smaller sample size, where it is possible you were just sunrunning for a period and stats are inflated.

Another thing to factor in is that conditions change over time. 7 years ago the maximum rake in my game was $5. Today it's $8. I would guesstimate that at worst that could possibly take upwards of 3 bb/hr off results. So if your conditions changed similarly you have to factor this into expectations.

But only you know what the numbers are and how much confidence you can have in them with regards to your expectation in the current climate.

GgoodluckG

OK, well for the best part of 2 years I wasn't able to play due to COVID, so I've been playing less than that.

My win rate at 1/3 was about $14-15 an hour over the long term. My average session was about 4 hours, so that's about $60 a session.

In my last 8 sessions, I have lost four successive sessions (pretty big), followed by two tiny wins ($17 each), then lost 2 more sessions, so 8 consecutive sessions running below my historical EV.

The chances of that happening are 1 in 2^8 or 1 in 512, if I play 3 sessions a week it would happen about once every two years.

Unfortunately, this also comes from the back of losing six sessions in a row earlier in the year, an experience I have experienced only one time earlier in my entire career, such that I have won only four out of my last 16 sessions, only two of which were of a nontrivial amount.

Perhaps it is God teaching me a lesson to quit gambling.

Losing?! If you are making 200k and have good health, you are winning big-time in real life! You also got supportive feedback from Venice and other posters worth way more than a few buy ins or whatever ridiculous amounts coaches charge. How much would it cost to ski or play golf hourly instead of poker? For the amount you play, probably more than twelve buy-ins. Look at it this way: if you are down 3,500 in poker while earning 200,000, you are doing much better than the vast majority of professional poker players.

I suggest that you go play 10,000 hands online on Ignition NL10 and download them to a HUD. Go through every one you lost and identify where you made errors (you can see your opponents hole cards 24 hours later). Competition on NL10 is way tougher than live. If you are winning player at Ignition NL10 after 10,000 hands, you can be confident your downturn is bad luck, not poor skill. (Of course, without the loose-passives, calling stations, and multiway pots, the online game dynamics are different than live, so you'll have to adjust.)

Whether I win or lose in poker doesn't matter at all to me. It's out of my control. I do care that I play well enough that I don't hemorrhage money.

Solomon - It looks like you got life dicked my man. Most people would be better off if they never dicsovered gambling. You included. You dont need 15$/ hr. fcuk it. You have proven to yourself you can beat the game. That is an accomplishment. Move on to something else that you can share with others. Take up an instrument, learn a new language, take up a new sport, recommit to an old one, etc. The older I get the more I understand exaclty how short and finite life is and wasting it in a casino with a bunch of bozos is EXACTLY that - a waste.

best wishes

Depends what a buyin is. 1200 bbs is rough but def normal even for crushers, 2400 bbs is pretty sketch and I'd def start reevaluating my game at that point, 3600 bbs and I'd prob just quit lol.

But tbh if your enjoyment of this game just comes from winning and you're earning 200k/yr at your day job I'd prob just find another hobby.

Yes - I didn't win for 6 months once and i'm a 10BB per hour winner long term.

It was followed by a massive upswing of about 30-40k so it goes in cycles.