How many buy ins do you bring with you? And do you top up your stack ever or do you only rebuy when busted? My 1/3 game, the max buy is $500, and right now I've just been bringing 1 bullet until I feel comfortable enough in potentially losing 2 full-buy in bullets in 1 session.

^^^^

My 1/3 NL game has a max BI of $300 (100bbs). I constantly top off after every hand (I never start a hand < $296). I bring $2K (not that I would ever need it) cuz I'm typically just there to a set time (i.e. 9:30pm) and I don't want to run out of bullets. I've only left early twice (once where I tilted off my final 2 BIs and blew my whole $1.2K, to date still my biggest loss, and once where I wasn't feeling it mentally after being felted multiple times by a maniac having gotten it in preflop for big $$$ each time).

GcluelessBInoobG

My biggest downswing for 2/5 is $6K... $2K was from a $1k max buyin game though fwiw.

I think Mike tries to play a very exploitable style. (a style that 95% or more of the player pool won't know how to exploit) That's also probably the only way to get a 70%+ cash rate over a decent sample.

Has to be a nice combination of big folds, funky value, and checking.

My assumption has been, for a long time, that once you get past a certain winrate at a certain game, any increase in winrate will come with an increase in variance (taking thinner calling/betting/raising lines). And therefore, the players with the highest winrates are likely to have some of the biggest downswings. Maybe I'm wrong about this though.

Back when I played full-time, I had a couple of ~10-12k downswings playing mostly 2/5 200BB BI games (occasionally 5/10 if it ran). I played like a complete nut though; I bluffed off my stack many a time, and likewise got paid off huge in spots where nobody else got paid (i.e., by the regs, even nittish regs - not only by the whales). And despite some ugly downswings, I completely crushed the games I played... However it's not always clear when you cross the line from being a good aggro player to being a spewtard. Some of my sessions were probably very much -EV spewtard sessions.

Yes, that's what I'm saying.

I've been losing 1-2 all in pots a day with 70%+ equity for about a month. Anything is a possible. That's only a slight exaggeration, usually one day a week I get to hold with the best hand a few times.

Im not sure exactly what that means. IMO, everyone plays an exploitable style. Anyone can be exploited if someone studies them enough. Like you said though, 95% of people dont pay enough attention or have the balls to deviate from their own personal strategy to exploit anyone.

I would say your last sentence is somewhat accurate.

Shrug. We must play in very different games. I lost 700bb in 4 hands yesterday in under 45 minutes. Obv lol variance, I got it in >70% to win all 4, but people must just stack off lighter here.

Meaning you are consciously deviating far away from general GTO strat to attack or defend against the overall opponents you play against.

For example I play an overall overfold and overbluff strategy for 2/5. A very good player that's good at hand reading and pattern recognition would tear that strat apart... but I wouldn't play like that vs those who I think are good.

That's crazy. At Borgata with 100bb cap?

Nah.

You really can run way below (or way above) EV for a long time in live poker. Especially when people are getting it in a lot and getting to see all 5 cards.

The game was probably crazy but running below EV in 4 pots isn't crazy at all.

Your last sentence is very true but this type of game is definitely not the norm in live low stakes. Perhaps in certain games/markets but not in general.

You're right. I've recently relocated and thought it was awesome how light people were getting it in compared to my old city. After being here for 9 months and going through the most ridiculous and brutal swings, I kinda miss my old game that played deeper and allowed me to scoop a ton of pots without having to turn over the best hand.

Most of the things Mike posts seem that way to me, based on my experience. Especially related to sample size.

This is my assessment as well. The lines that Mike takes in his strat threads would not or do not work in the games I play in. They are lighting money on fire against my V's.

Yeah but in 45 min it's pretty crazy imo. That's like 20 hands

I can assure you that Im not coming here over and over for 18 months just to post controversial **** and troll everyone. Everything I post is true.

Honestly, I log on here most days and shake my head at the stuff I read. Kinda like you guys do when you read my posts I guess.

I watch decent players go thru 3-4 buy ins in 2 hrs on multiple days in a row and I think "why are you doing that? Its not necessary to crush this game"

I see certain people post things in strat forums that seems terrible to me that they act like is standard and then they post in this win rate thread about bad downswings and I think to myself "what do you expect?"

It really boggles my mind that people here mock the lines I take and then are shocked at my results...and they see no correlation between my success that surprises them and the lines I take that they dont agree with.

Huge +1 Mike, i feel alot of the same way. Ive been crushing both 1-3 and 2-5 over the last 1000 hours harder than ever, for like 12 BB hour. That is literally destroying the games by 2017 standards, and i know you have similar winrates for decent samplesizes.

Even thoug i have been disagreeing with you in some threads, and calling you out for pushing your winrates in front of every thread discussion you get yourself into- we are totally on the same page here, youre hitting the homerun in this post.

Its not rare for me either to ask myself when i see posters report of downswings for x amount of buyins in short period of time, and "breakeven" stretches on several hundred hours- like you no **** Sherlock when i see what hands people stackoff with, what lines they take and generally the lack of profiling on their opponents+ the lack of handle on the player pool population main tendencies at different stakes.

My biggest downswing ever is like 8 buyins aka 100 BB each, and i cant even remember last time i hit my personal stoploss limit for one session wich is 4 buyins.

wish i could poast and hit the homerun

I guess the answer and reality is that lots of posters on this forum wich likes to come off as big long time winners in the games, in reality is marginal winners or even breakeven/small losers long term with huge leaks in their game.

Since we're talking downswings, my biggest at 2/5 I'm hopefully just pulling out of, down 4300. Also had one night back in like 2009 where I lost 3400 playing 2/4 online with a maniac while stoned, still don't know whether I was +ev in that game haha. People with higher winrates have lower chance of going on a downswing, even with a higher variance style - which mine definitely is, giving how many 1k+ stacks I've punted off with air.

If you almost routinely punts off 1K stacks with air (out of curiosity why is that happenning?), i would say you have huge potenial to raise your winrate if you can just manage to plug that leak.

Those kind of things have an insane impact on your longterm winrate, its alot more serious than many players may believe.

Same goes for losing lots of BB or even your whole stack in hands you shouldnt have entered in the first place. Or follow up mistakes in other words.

The domino effect on these things makes the impact so big over time.

It's not so much an issue of "oh those lines look funny and make no sense" it's that "I've seen and or tried those lines, and they don't work that way." So either it's still that live sample sizes are LOL small even if we don't want to admit it, or that different player pools can be *vastly* different in behavior and results.

I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. Everyone that posts they have never had these bad downswings are the sunrunners who are the lucky ones running well over expectation. I imagine there are a lot of them on a forum like this, as they have self selected themselves as "great" players.

Like I've posted before, I've lost more buyins as an 80/20 favorite in one down than a lot of these luckboxes have lost in their biggest "downswing".