Quote:
Originally Posted by darkhorse966
Hey guys
been playing poker for around a year and half and have had my share of up swings and down swings as we all do
but the past 2 months i just cant seem to win. am losing flips constantly
keep getting knocked out by 2 outers and running cards when i have like 80% equity
i know every poker player goes through downswings and that what i keep telling myself but its literally been going on for months now
anyone else ever been on a swing for a few month or do they generally last a few days at the most?
In some ways each downswing is unique although perhaps we could say some things above the average ones.
The size and duration (in number of games) of swings is governed by the payout distribution, ie, typical size of tournaments and your roi at them.
It is very difficult to get an estimation of roi for big sized fields 180's or above. If a player had a known roi of 10% (impossible to get this roi figure really), and played 10k games of 180's we would get a spread or confidence range of 2.5% to 17.5% and this is just a 70% confidence, 30% of the time the player's results are outside this range. So it's difficult to know from playing 180's how good you are.
On average during a 10k batch of games a 10% roi player would see a downswing of 300BI's or worse (this is about a 50% probability to happen somewhere in 10k).
Lets say this player has a 'short' spell where lots of stuff goes wrong and he drops into the downswing because bad luck grants him a -10% roi, ie 20% below expectation for some period.
This bad period in this case would be 300/0.10 = 3000 games.
If the player expected to play 10k games a year this is a period of about 3 to 4 months.
The above sad story is just an example of what may happen, downswings can hit depths quite suddenly with a severe spell or reduced roi or they can be due to a longer spell of less severe bad luck. Both types are difficult to accept and yet MTT players have to - it's mentally a very hard game.