While I'm not disagreeing with you Bodybuilder that a massive downswing such as that likely was self-sustained from mental leaks ontop of the runbad...

However, I'd also like to point out that being a crusher at another game does not directly correlate to downswings at 1/2, because the competition is so bad at the lowest stake offered that you should be able to print variance free money almost always. At higher stakes there will always be more variance, even if you're a crusher, as the skill gap is not as extreme

[QUOTE=bodybuilder32;50062718] It is not as if once you lose 10bi you start winning or something

This thread has been mostly **** for the past 5 years and then Duke arrives and starts laying out the truth to the masses. Nice post and great work!

This +1,000,000

But I promise you if you go to the beginners forum they will be all about it and if you disagree with them they'll write a 5 paragraph essay with companion graphs showing why they are right and why you are wrong.

(then you search their posts and discover they've been playing .05/.10 for the past 5 years because poker isn't beatable).

Are you in the black in tournaments yet because I might need a lil staking into that Vegas 1/1 game.

You sick sadistic son of a bitch!

I'm allergic to both jobs and poker.

Wow, that sucks. 19 of 20 sessions is crazy. Obviously some run bad, probably some mental issues due to the run bad, and probably some adjustments that will need to be made. Just keep plugging away and keep improving and you will get to where you want to be in time.

Enough with the CRUSHER talk. He's a crusher, you're a crusher, I'm a crusher, EVERYBODY IS A CRUSHER on an internet forum. Too bad it doesn't work like that in real life. Becoming a crusher takes experience and experience takes time.

Does a $68/hr winrate at 2/5 over 400 hrs make Johnny a 2/5 crusher? No, it means he was a new 2/5 player running above expectations. That's no indictment of Johnny. That is to be expected. When you play a new level you are learning a new game. You don't know all the ins and outs of it right off the bat. As you gain experience you will be able to range players better and learn to better exploit them. This isn't something you are just born with. Look at Duke. A few years ago he didn't know his ******* from a hole in the ground but now he's obliterating his competition. Duke wasn't just annointed CRUSHER because he's a smart guy. It took a lot of hard work and studying and he had to make adjustments along the way to continually improve.

It's Psycho.

Duke's deep 2/5 graph is an excellent example of this, where it looks like he made almost ~half his overall profit in his first 300 of 1700 hours.

GcluelessNLnoobG

+1

Being down 10 BI doesn't mean immunity to coolers. The difference between being down 10 BI and 15 BI can be literally one pot in deep games. To say that a hand like that won't happen because of how much you've already lost is absurd.

Sadly, it's how most people in the world think to be true.

By sadly you mean fortunately.

It's almost as if the crushers are the guys who run really hot over medium and large samples.

+ new dog

Wp sir

Welcome back welcome back welcommmmeee back

Or small samples

If you really are a 2/5 crusher you don't care about your win rate or care about your current winning or losing streak. You play as well as you can every hand and believe in what you are doing not matter the results.

Yeah I agree. The reason I am even focused on it is because I plan to play exclusively 2-5. I wouldn't make the jump if I thought a $16,000 downswing was possible or "standard" for someone who is beating the game. Hence, why I ask other posters if they have experienced such a downswing. Nobody has come on here yet and said "yep, that happened to me."

Considering this is the "win rates" thread, I don't feel it's unreasonable to discuss what you're biggest downswing is at a given stake.

I've experienced a $30k downswing at mainly 5/5 and some 5/10 over about a 4 month stretch. The games i played in at that time were uncapped and pretty deep with tons of variance. 1000bbs is nothing. Clearly you don't understand as I said before. The cards don't give AF how much you're down in the last month or 6 months. Sure at 1/2 NL where everybody might as well just turn their cards face up I can believe you've never been on a 1500bb+ downswing. Not to mention the deepest you've probably played with more than 4 players at a table is 250bbs deep. The answer is that the variance in poker is unpredictable by nature. And just cuz you've never experienced something doesn't mean it doesn't happen to others all the time.

Possible, yes. You can probably learn more about the possible just playing around with a variance calculator or some do it yourself statistics than you can polling in the winrates thread.

The guy you're asking the question based on basically said he lost 24 out of 25 as a 2-1 to 4-1 favorite or something along those lines iirc. Four hour dice rolls happen, etc.

Yeah, i mean- for sure huge swings are possible even for the best players out there. The big question though, and what i would think many people is asking themself is how good of a player you really are if you go through like a 30K$ swing at 5/5 over 4 months time: deep stacked games or not, that is such a massive swing and i would for sure start to ask myself some serious questions about my actual skillevel if a similar thing happend to me.


I think Johnnys downswing of like losing 19 out of 20 sessions is also so huge that this kind of swings doesent come from pure variance alone. For sure its some big leaks or spewing mixed in also- and also maybe som false sense of how big your edge really is in the games you sit in.

For sure?

The chasm between possible and likely lies in a normal distribution curve. Given my history at 1/2, 2/5 and 10/10 I would have thought this impossible, but at the end of the day the long run of being a 2:1 - 4:1 favorite means nothing when you are talking about one off encounters.

Without knowing you in person, thats my prediction yes. Its not even sure you notice it yourself (with all kind of respect), because when you run so bad your decisionmaking often get clouded without you even noticing it. Ive experienced that myself during my biggest downswing, wich was like 5 losing sessions in a row losing 300-500 BB each session. That even made me question myself, i can tell you. 19 losing sessions out of 20 is alot, and i cant imagine thats a normal swing for a steadily winning player at 2/5.

Regardless i hope you manage to work your way out of it Johnny, cause i think you bring alot good to the forum and i enjoy reading lot of your posts.

If it's as he said there's nothing to notice (well, there's always something to notice but within reason here). It's like if somebody gives you even money to lay the hard ten and has a run in there where he hits the 10 two dozen times in a row. Unless you're getting cheated (something to consider...) it's just math there's nothing to notice.

Put another way do you think a dice game should reconsider their play when a once a decade shooter hits them up for a big score (other than making sure they weren't cheated)? If he lost 24 out of 25 as 2-1 or better favorite somebody hit the Power Ball on him/it is what it is same as a sick dice roll where the house had the best of it for the whole four hours and still took a big hit.

It sure would be nice to know how much equity he had in those 24/25 all ins to compare that to his overall results during that time frame. If he lost $4000 in equity on those hands and is only down $3000 during that time frame then he is probably playing OK. If he lost $4000 in equity in those hands and is down $10000 during that time, he has other leaks that he needs to examine. But since you guys think doing Allin EV calcs is stupid, he / we will never know.

I had a stretch where I had 16 all ins during a 2 week period with 70-90% equity. I lost 14 of them. I also had 2 large coin flips and lost both of them during that same stretch. I wanted to pull my hair out but I had the data readily available to me. I lost $2885 in all in equity that month. That knowledge and the fact that I was still in the black during that time period told me that I was playing well. Did I leave money on the table in some hands during that time? Im sure I did and I did the best I could to limit mistakes and still reviewed hands in my mind afterwards, but overall it was obvious to me that I was still playing well which gave me confidence to just keep grinding thru it and not make adjustments. I suspect that Johnny has no idea if he needs to make adjustments or not.

Gilmour - I'm not sitting here making hero calls for stacks, forgetting to bet/fold TPTK, paying bad prices to draw etc. The worst decision I made during the streak was probably the AKs vs. AA hand for $1000 and at the end of the day who knows where that falls on the variance/spew timeline.

I find poker to be easy. The formula is extremely simple: make good decisions + run good. You can't control what you can't control. I got to where I am by playing disciplined and knowing when to walk away if I'm not playing my A game. I think I have the wherewithal and emotional stability to look at this objectively and realize it's a small blip on the life graph.

I have a friend that just went through a bad run and he is repulsed by poker at the moment. It makes him sick to think about it. I wake up every day with a clean slate, a short term memory of recent events and I'm excited to play. I know my edge in the game and I go in there and try to realize it. But I also accept and embrace the luck/variance factor.

Will I run good? I hope so, but I cannot control it so no sense wasting energy contemplating it.

You mad, bruh?

Most of us know how to calculate equity, and I don't think any of us really need calculator to figure out what 75-90% equity hands look like.

It should be pretty obvious that if we lose bunch of big 75-90% pots, we are losing a lot of $$$. Does it help to know precisely how much EV we lost, so that we can lament why we only have $1000 left in BR? Probably not.

Most people that cashed out a winner in a session will probably think they played well.

Does it matter they lost bunch of AI pots as big favorite, but won bunch of non-AI pots by sucking out gutters and 2 pair as huge dogs?

Nope, they played well, if anything, they probably thought they played extremely well because they did lose bunch of AI pots.

You know that because you can calculate AIEV and you won in the session?

We all have different and varying degrees of lies to tell ourselves.

Obviously you start questioning how well you're playing ect when on a downswing of that magnitude. It'll make you question everything. And there's likely no one that can play perfectly when running like this. Did I question my game? Yes. Did I wonder if I still had an edge? Yes. Did I review my play with others and honestly search for mental game leaks? Of course. Did that change anything? Not really. Other than knowing I played ok even when stuck up to my eyeballs. The variance in this game is unpredictable and the long term in live poker especially is a really really long time. I just played thru it and finally came out the other side. I still remember the session when things turned around for me. It was pretty eye opening.

And fwiw these games I'm talking about everybody was mostly $3-$5k deep. Like all 9-10 players at the table. And a few were literally maniacs. So super high variance with pretty deep stacks. Pretty easy to go on a downer there that can be brutal.