Hello everyone, I just have a general question about running bad. Do you change your playing style when running bad or do you stick to your current play style? Thanks for the input.

I change.

If your normal playing style is a winning one then you shouldn't change it.

If you play differently when you're losing than winning, that's called tilt.

Are you still getting it in with the best hand? Is this tourney or cash? Are you card dead?

As long as you are making the correct play, that's all you can control.

If you constantly see yourself getting out kicked, calling down with top pair, bluff shoving and getting called, ect; you might want to change it up.

I try not to change my play just because I'm running bad ... but that's a lot easier said than done.

If you're getting the money in ahead, you're not doing too bad (although there still might be better lines instead). But if you're getting it in badly, "against the top of his range", consistently ... that's when you really need to re-evaluate your game. You're making mistakes somewhere.

More pragmatically though, you *should* change your game if the table has changed to react to your run-bad. Some villains will be MUCH more likely to call you down when it looks like you're getting sucked out on left and right. So your ability to bluff them off hands is going to go down while the value you should be able to extract from made hands goes up. To exploit this you have to bluff them less.


If getting your ass kicked messes with your head and throws you off your game, there is some value in passing up slightly +EV high variance spots (55/45 flips) to maintain your mental focus. Don't rely on this though, it's a short term solution until you can fix the underlying tilt problem.

Thanks for the reply guys, much appreciated. I've went over most of the hands that I got it in with and they have been good. Way ahead when I get it in, just not holding up. I guess I was really asking if I should tighten up more, and open less hands from late position?

If you're getting it in good and just getting unlucky, then why would you want to alter anything?

That said, any time that I went on anything longer than a week long string of big losses...if I was to be honest with myself(and thank God that's a strength of mine) the losses were really due to poor play. Sure, you take some really tough beats along the way during that bad streak, with hands where you had much the best of it, but I'm talking about all the other hands that you played where you were way behind(the hands that we seemingly lose memory of) which, is a common occurrence that happens after we lose some really key hands. It's called tilt. It can snowball into a weeks long, a months long event and before you know it, you're "running bad". Or so it seems. But I don't know anything about your game.

So, when I see myself stretching hands and opening up too light or too often, I can usually spot it fairly quickly and I just go back to my normal game(ie) wait for good spots...if you know that you have the second best hand and your odds for continuing are bad, then you don't "hope" to get lucky, you fold. You're not missing bets, even the thin ones...you're able to pick off bluffs etc. all that is playing well. But when we run bad, we tend to tighten up so much, that we miss bets and good opportunities, which lead to losing more money.

Don't be afraid or too stubborn to leave a game and just go home. Takes lots of discipline but if you can do it just once in the midst of a bad day, you're on your way to better days to come.

If the money went in good I wouldn't change what I did to get it there.

It's pretty much impossible to say if you should tighten up or change your range composition without knowing an awful lot more about your game.

This is gold.
Whenever you "run bad", you can always point to a number of big losing pots where you were coolered or drawn out on. Maybe you played them perfectly. But almost always, when I have been running badly for a while, if I really think about all the other hands, I will realize or discover that I was deviating somewhat from my best game. It's not only the biggest pots which matter.
Tilt can take many different forms.....

If you lose some coolers or get sucked out on and then, in response, you start pissing away smaller amounts on very marginal hands and playing OOP too much it all adds up. It is a very insidious form of tilt that even good players can fall in to for a while. Try to concentrate on your best game thru the variance pitfalls. Don't vary too much trying to catch up, that's where most of the trouble occurs.

Yeah, like the marginal hands in stud8 like split 9's and then justifying to yourself the call, or the raise. "What, I had great position, are you kidding me? I LOVE this hand in this spot. Pffft. Please."


Or going to 4th street in stud with jacks when you know the guy has kings.

Limping with A5xx in LO8.

These are the spots indeed that slip from memory yet there the ones that are most attributed to our "bad runs."