Whats the longest you have run bad and what did you do while it was happening?


Mine was a month
I reloaded a few times and read poker books and watched poker on tv.

Watching poker on TV to get better is -EV imo.

You probably wouldn't have had to reload if you practiced proper BR management. LOL JK

I lost a ton of SNGs (like 16/20 or something) one time, broke a $50 mouse and quit playing for like 2 weeks before starting to play cash games.

I lost $3,500 on sports betting this past foot/basket/baseball season so I'm on tilt control by playing freeroll's. I'm also new to poker so risking money at this point is idiotic.

No bad card run but lost my sports betting roll. Off subject sorry.

Uh, today kind of ****in' sucks. =)

Ouch u still running bad?

Run bad get a hand, get bluffed/coolered, etc. etc.

every play and every hand is a new one independent of the past. so the longer you run bad(lose), the more likely it is because of the way you are playing and not luck.

21+ Years and counting.

LOL@21 years and counting

My graph for today looks like a Richter scale. (Thanks Gina)

a time frame like 1 month doesnt real mean much because for some a month means 1,500 hands and for others its 45,000. i think most extended bad runs almost assure a mixture of relatively subpar play. if you follow proper BR management a bad run will never wipe you out. dropping down limits makes it easier to get back on the winning track which can help a lot with prolonged tilt, which is often one of the major factors behind a bad run in the first place.

+1

You can't ever say that "I'm running bad," or "I'm in the middle of a downswing," or anything similar. You aren't in the middle of anything. The next hand knows nothing about the hands that came before it or the ones that will come after it. It's just another hand.

That said, there are obviously "trends" in your results. Play long enough, and you really will run your KK into AA four times in a row. But that's just the laws of probability allowing horrible streaks of luck now and then. You can only identify them after the fact, never during.

In the fullness of time, you will have an equal number of lucky streaks where your AA catches a KK four times in a row. Unfortunately for our nerves, most of us tend not to notice those as much.

My worst run 8% ITM over 200 SnG comming off of a 55% run over the same samlpe size. Nice variance. Yea, I quit for about 6 months.

This.

I just had a weeklong downswing, and in the moment felt like I was playing well and getting bad beats. I took a deep breath, reviewed the sessions and saw *LOTS* of tilty play that contributed heavily to losing. I'm working to fix those leaks and control tilt alot better.

I lost more than half my $100 roll, but have built it back to ~$60 again.

roadkill, you will be around and make money in poker. just by what you said you do is enough to convince me. good luck

LOL Will I??

Yes, but then the guy with KK catches a set. :P

In all seriousness, this is true in theory but the problem is that it can take forever for your luck to even out. So far after 19k hands at 50nl I've lost 5 times allin preflop kings vs aces, once aces vs kings, and never won that exchange so im 0-6 on AA vs KK.

I believe that a run of bad cards can last very long, but it's also a fact that mistakes cost everybody a lot of $, so you always need to work on your game despite whatever excuses you may have for having lost $.

My point is that you should always analyze your game and try to correct flaws, but not take a downswing too seriously. You can be playing way better than average and have a pretty long losing stretch, especially considering that the rake is brutal at uNL. I know I've paid more rake than I've made profits in the 2-3 months I've been playing, or about as much.

edit : lol, ive paid 540$ in rake over 19k hands of 50nl, and im down 150$ over the same period. so without rake id be up 390 instead. well at least we get fpps.

Another losing day of 50nl. Back down to 25nl for me

Damn getting hit out on or just running bad?

lol I should record my sessions. you wouldnt believe how i run at 50nl. clowns keep going all in on a gutshot straight draw and hitting the river. it just keeps happening over and over again. they call a 14$ bet on the turn when only one card can possibly give them a hand. this is a good thing but damn, can't seem to have one winning session right now.

LOL, just flopped fullhouse in a 7 player pot and got counterfeitted on the turn

me : 3, 3

board : 3, 5, 5, 5

guy went all in........

thats the same thing isn't it?

Uh, little of both back to 25nl

Edit: Know how you feel unlucky.

Flopped a set on two different tables, then PS crashed on me. Both against calling stations, goodie.

OUCH need a Voodoo Dr. I can get one for you.

Yes.

That's good enough for thousandth post.

When you pick up KK, there is a 4.39% chance that someone else at your table will have AA. (This is for a 10-handed game. Odds change slightly for 9-handed and quite a bit for 6-max.) You'll average KK one in every 220 hands, so for 19k hands you probably picked up KK somewhere between 80 and 90 times, right? If it was 90 times, you were expected to run into AA 4 times. It actually happened 5 times. A bit unlucky for you, but not really a horrible streak. Not nearly as bad as it felt.

You had AA roughly an equal number of times. You only faced KK once (instead of the expected 4 times) and unfortunately lost that matchup. This is worse than your KK v AA sample, but it's still nothing to be surprised about with this sample size. By the way, your sample size is 90 (or however many times you had KK), not 19,000. Since you only get KK once every 220 hands, it takes a HUGE number of hands to build a significant sample size of KK hands. The same goes for AA (or 33 or any other pair).

This particular example (of KK vs AA hands) takes an extremely long time to converge. Other examples -- like how often you flop a set when you get a pair, or how often you pick up a flush draw with suited cards, or even how often you pick up any pocket pair -- converge much more quickly. I'll bet if you look in your database, you'll be within 2 or 3 percent of the expected value on pocket pairs or suited connectors.

Bottom line: you ran into AA with KK about the number of times you should have, even though it feels like a lot more. You've been unlucky with AA, only facing KK once and losing that time, but that's only 3 less than expected. You could get AA vs KK three times in one day and be caught up to expectation just like that. I picked up bullets twice in a row in one of the few live tournaments I've played (no one had KK, though ). Weird statistical anomalies like that happen every day. Yours really isn't that weird, yet.

Mistakes cost way, way, way more $ than bad cards. Orders of magnitude more. In fact, in the long run, the number of pots you lost from bad beats and coolers will equal the number of pots you won from coolering or sucking out on someone else. If you could look back at the end of eternity, after an eternity of playing cards, you would recognize that there were never really any bad beats or coolers after all. There was never any such thing. There were only random cards fulfilling and proving the laws of probability. The so-called bad beats and coolers were perfectly and uniformly distributed among all the immortals so that they all canceled out, and in the end the only thing that mattered, the only thing that ever mattered, was how each player played the game.

Cliff notes:
Exactly right. Just make sure you don't fall into the trap of using bad beats to excuse downswings. There's usually something else lurking in there along with the bad beats and coolers.