I've played 1/3 once for a total of maybe 20 minutes while I was waiting for a seat at another game... so I don't know. Everyone at the table seemed pretty bad tho. I grinded 1/2 over 10 years ago, I was in college and I didn't keep track. Id guess I was beating the game for over 20bb/hr. The games were a joke back then tho... you'd prob be in the top 5% of the 1/2 player pool back then if you knew when to fold overpairs.

Currently I'm playing 2/5, 5/10 and 10/10 and winning at 17.17bb/hr. 75% of that volume is at 2/5 (1 of the main casinos I play at has a $1k cap). Pretty sure playing in deeper games help with my overall winrate. Even though the higher capped games are usually more tough. 5/10 also plays 5/10/20 semi often, i guess I could try and account for that somehow to get little more accurate #'s.

People underestimate how much you should really have when its your life roll and you have no job. The stress of the downswing/going broke is much more real. If you have 15k to your name, do you really think you'll be able to play your A game after losing 8k, or even 5k? Hitting 0 becomes a reality at that point.

You ALWAYS want to play over-rolled, not at the bare minimum. ESPECIALLY if its your life roll too.

Imo stay at your current game until you hit 20k, for one you want the extra cushion on your roll, and for two you want a bigger sample/experience to know you're capable of beating the games. At that point play 2/5 maybe once a week for a couple months as you continue building and slowly transition into moving up fully.

1/3 was rough to me at the end of the month. Some coolers, some leakage. 2/5 saved my life as about 2200 of my ~2300 in profit came from 3 soft 2/5 sessions. I tried to upload pics but this website ****ing blows and I don't feel like investing more time in it. Have to read that Mayo post in ATF every damn time.

Use Tapatalk, makes it easy to post pics


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Thanks for taking the time to respond. 17bb/hr is considered god like according to everything I've read haha do you think being able to buy in deeper makes it significantly easier? I play $2/5 with a $500 cap and atrocious rake (10% capped at $15) and can only seem to manage 9bb/hr.


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My main Casino I play at 2/5 is $500 cap and $5 every half hour which is really sweet. The $1000 cap 2/5 game takes 10% max $5 +1 for bad beat. That $15 cap rake sounds horrific

Also you do know bb and BB mean different things right?

I have been playing 1/3 NL at my local venue for about 10 months now, usually about 2-3 sessions a week. I have been winning about 60-65% of my sessions and my hourly rate, over this period of time, has been about 6-7 BB. Over this time I have had coaching and believe that I have been making fewer mistakes.

In the last six sessions, I have lost 11 buyins. Yes ELEVEN. Nearly a third of my profit from last year has gone.
I have been repeatedly sucked out, outdrawn, and basically beaten, by players who are worse than me. Clueless players who I would usually thrash in the long-term (over months) in a routine way.
Today I flopped top set with 66 on a 632 board. Someone bet into me, and I thought I would double up. He was short stacked so I raised him. He had 54 offsuit. Of course I don't fill up.

Every session I went home and calculated my all-in equity on those big hands. Had they run to percentages my expected result is postitive. But I just run SO bad.

I had a "live one" berate me today for playing too few hands. She's loaded. She's probably lost six figures over her last few years playing poker. I just felt irritated.

I think that this has affected my play in the last couple of sessions. I am no longer getting full value for the few good hands that I get. I bet too much to protect my hand from being outdrawn and consequently am not winning as much money as I should from these loose-passive calling station ploppies.

It is not like I am losing money I cannot afford to lose, but losing like this is very, very demoralizing. You feel that you cannot win another session, no matter how well you play.

I have had some losing streaks in the past, but none as bad as this, and when I did have them much of my losses have been secondary to major errors. Not so this time after extensive discussion of hands with my friends/coach.

I am just appreciative of how anyone here with experience on this has dealt with such experiences. Obviously, I will not continue playing if I cannot make a long-term profit.

Not sure this post belongs here as it isn't strategy, however, I would suggest that you post some of the hands you were drawn out on. I suspect you're not sizing up your table very well and not reading other players properly.

I'm not on all that much these days, but there are many others that are, particularly Venice. He doesn't say much, but I've never seen him post anything that wasn't worth paying attention to.

People use both for big blind, these days. Big bet (limit term) is really not in use anymore.

11 BI is a shocker the first time it happens. As long as you're getting the money in good, or just getting coolered in spots that, if the hands were reversed, would have played out in exactly the same way, try to just buckle down and grind through the variance.

And don't get caught in the trap of my WR is X and my yearly profit is Y and this swong is driving them down...It's entirely possible that you are not a 6-7bb WR player, and this swong is regression to the mean.

Edit assuming 30hrs/week that's 1200hrs=approx 36k hands, which is a decent enough live sample size, so I can understand.the frustration. Online wizards assume you need more like 100k at the min to estimate your wr, so just don't worry about that metric.

I dunno if this will be locked or moved or whatever, since it isn't really a strategy thread, but here goes.

I assume from the comment made by the "live one" (and your winrate) that you VPIP fairly small, 10-15% or less? This can actually be a fairly high variance style over the short term, and by variance I mean everything, getting big hands when no one else does, getting outdrawn, or constantly running into the top of ranges. You simply must get full value for the hands that you do play, or your winrate can take quite a beating in the short term, whereas for someone who is VPIPing 30%, eh, a set is just a set, if I'm beat, let's move on. While the 30% percenter can have evn more wild swings in the course of a night, the sheer number of extra hands he plays can have an overall smoothing effect on his winrate.

While I would NOT suggest opening up your game in the middle of a downswing. it sounds like you have done a lot of work on your game, and while your winrate may be a function of the games you pay in (high rake, lower max buyins, etc.), it seems a bit small for that amount of work to me. After your game gets back on track, you might consider opening up your ranges and see how that goes.

I would also suggest trying to change your mindset a bit, you refer to players as "clueless", "worse than me", "ploppies"(?). Remember that if they weren't these things, the game would be unbeatable.

Also, remember, that longer you play, the more likely you will run into downswings, and some of them will be worse and longer than you can imagine, especially playing part time live. They can feel like they last forever (and they do). If it helps, an 11 buyin downswing doesn't even crack my top ten, and 6 sessions? Minuscule.

Good Luck!

Well I've gone through my big hands and how much equity I had in them; if they had run according to theoretical expectations, my hourly EV wouldn't have changed much.

I am actually moving to another city in a couple of weeks, and their player pool at the same stakes is significantly weaker.

Well, then you just wanted to whine. Which means that this belongs in BBV.

I don't think my VPIP is THAT low but I think 17/13 would be about where I am on a full table (10-handed). We have a few European nits (10/7), a few decent white players and a lot of Asian tourist calling stations / fish (50/10).

The particular player, who is a regular, who made that comment about my play is clearly a losing player who I cannot see profiting in the long run any time soon.

So you re really winning 8.5 BB per hour?

OP, remember this. One day, maybe next month, maybe 2 years from now, you will run even worse.

I was talking to a friend during my worst downswing and someone nearby said something almost exactly like this. I wanted to throat punch him. That is all.

Warning, controversial statements ahead.

Not sure how many total hours you have put in but if your true avg winrate (winrate changes table per table) is around 6-7bb/hr (which is definitely achievable) you are absolutely ****ing destroying the game.

If you're getting 33 hands/hr (above avg I would say, so true BB/100 is probably higher), then you're beating the game for 18-21bb/100 hands. If you're getting 25 hands/hr you are beating the game for 24-28bb/100 hands. Also, this winrate is after rake, which is HUGE in live poker.

So if you're making $21/h at 1/3 your win rate and therefore your edge is huge (like, insanely huge). As your avg winrate increases, your avg variance (or your experience of what we call variance) decreases. Obviously it depends on the table, but overall this holds true.

To my controversial point, I doubt your true win rate is 6-7bb per hour. You probably have considerable leaks and have just been experiencing the good side of variance before you hit this downswing. An 11bb downswing is of course possible if you're playing 6-7bb/hr winner (or even perfect), just very unlikely.

Every time I have had a downswing, looking back, I made a lot of mistakes. A lot of spots where I got unlucky were spots I should have just folded preflop, or something similar.

TL;DR focus on improving your play and table selecting well.

Not sure if anyone has interest in this but figured I'd see. I created a short R script that calculates and plots some stats. Will maybe develop it further. But this should be easy to replicate yourself if desired using R. I recommend using the RStudio IDE with it because it just makes everything so much cleaner and easier.

I exported a csv from my Poker Income app. This includes some non-session data like player notes and whatnot, so I isolate the sessions at the beginning of the script. Everything else should be self-explanatory.

We as humans like to explain things and put a reason behind them, but randomness has no rhyme and reason and it's just is. Coming to terms with it is a challenge, but this is one of the important lessons poker teaches.

Being on a downswing is frustrating and demoralizing, but all you can do is play one hand at a time to the best of your ability. That's why it's important win or lose (but especially when you win) to judge yourself by how well you played a hand. If you do that, you become results oriented in a good way.

When I first started playing poker online and in financial circumstances far worse than yours, I used to snap at people sometimes, mostly out of frustration.

But later I realized that when you lose a hand and you start berating a player for the way they played theirs, you re losing twice over. One, the actual hand and second the fact that you re giving your opponent the chance to improve. Not to mention that it's not the right thing to do.

That's not to say that downswings don't affect me. Sometimes, I feel and look like a boxer who has been punched around for 12 rounds straight. It is what it is.

+1

OP should consider this very, very carefully. It goes to the heart of what I suspected when I read the post initially and why I asked for hands to be posted, with reads.

Yeah that's what I use. But it seemed like they were using bb.

7.58 bb/hr over ~3200 hours.

But that overall rate really means nothing as it simply doesn't take into account the drastic difference in quality of the game (i.e. I was beating the game for 9.44 bb/hr at the 2000 hour mark), nor the increase in rake, etc. Heck, the rake has increased $2 in the last year alone, which I've guesstimated will easily cost me upwards of 2 bb/hr.

GthingschangeG

I did something last session I can't recall doing in quite some time: I played (in my humble opinion) a mistake free session. Course, I didn't have many real decision points and everything was mostly pretty ABC standard (imo), the most difficult one (I guess?) being mucking QQ after I 3bet a LP opener and an old guy limp/shoved 66bbs preflop (he showed me the AA), although I did question overshoving my stack the very first hand in a fullhouse-over-fullhouse situation (which I've convinced myself was fine). Anyhoo, I lost 171 bbs in just 6 hours. That's poker.

It took me ~1800 hours to finally go on a 5 BI downswing, which I then turned into a 9.5 BI downswing in a very short time (where I was cruising along at > 9 bb/hr beforehand). That's poker.

Downswings are part of poker. It doesn't even matter if you are playing the perfect version of your strategy, they will happen regardless. You just have to accept this. The key is to stick to your guns, and play your game, the one you know will win long term. And you really have to do your best to leave entitlement at the door. Play each hand and each situation as best you can, and if you do that better than your opponents over the long term, you'll do better than them. But don't expect a nice easy peasy 45 degree angle straight line on your poker graph.

Gacceptthatyouwilllose,andnowdothebestyoucanG

You have to believe that you can win and run good to run good. It's a decent advantage over players who seem to always complain and expect certain "bad beats" to always come up, and seemingly, they extract this much more than others.

Have confidence and belief in your game. Know that sometimes things don't go well but still "hope" that your cards come and that your opponents range is more average. If you're always worried your opponent has the nuts, they might more than average. Confidence your hand is best when betting for value. If you're coolered, reset back to this mindset. Cannot recall a time personally, that I'm betting and don't think I have the best hand or don't think my opponent will call when bluffing.

You can try to practice visualization techniques, it's what many pro athletes do. Imagine the you with the end result that you want.. maybe imagine what it's like to play the course of the year confidently and end up with a mound of chips in your box. Michael Phelps said in an interview something like he doesn't really feel too surprised when he wins, because he's seen himself touch the wall first thousands of times in his head.

Take some deep breaths, go for a walk, and reset if it's clogging and taking over your mind at the table. If you play very regularly, it may be an idea to try taking a week or two off (if you can) to rework the way you think about poker... or don't think about poker and come back new and fresh.

These are some powerful techniques, enjoy.