We've all had those sessions where the table has a bunch of maniacs and a bunch of calling stations, but 96% of our hands we're dealt are J6o ... or worse. Then, during the 4% of playable hands, we ship TPTK vs maniacal villain's TP2K on the flop to make a 297BB pot, only for the maniac to hit their 2 on the river.

When the entire session is like this, I feel like it's virtually impossible to win.

What % of sessions are like this in NLH?

8%

0%

Are you serious?

I feel like if you get coolered twice then are card dead for hours against calling stations, you end the session a loser. Has this never happened to you?

That doesn't even take into account "write off" boards, e.g. raising to 30% of your stack pre-flop against maniacs and stations with Q Q then the flop comes A K 9 and people ship and call before it's your turn.

Yeah, I'm serious. The concept of something being impossible is quite easy to disprove. Just don't quit the session, and if you're a winning player it will eventually return to a winning session. It might be a longer session than you wanted, but it'll happen. Of course, thinking of anything other than it all being one big session is counter productive

Since your question isn't very useful to answer, I'll just give you some numbers I know that are actually helpful.

It's normal to be card dead for hours and hours in live play.
The more you get frustrated by this, the more confirmation bias will tell you that this is happening constantly and the more it will seem to happen.
So don't worry about it. Instead focus on the playable hands you get.

You sound like you go on tilt when you get a stretch of bad cards or a beat or two.
This is probably making you miss a lot of playable spots, making it seem like you're card dead, but probably just not seeing the spots because you're on tilt.

Most cash game players stats I've seen, seem to win around 50% of their sessions.
Live that number is probably a bit higher, maybe between 50-80%, depending on how soft the games are.

That's still 1 out of 5 days even in the softest games for the best players that they're losing.
If you focus on it it'll feel like you're losing 3/5 days instead.
If you focus on the 4 winning days instead, you will barely notice the losing days.

For tournaments this is different, both live and online, you're going to lose about 80% of the time.

That is assuming you're a winning player.
But judging by your post, you're probably not a winning player.
So start working on that game and become one!

no disrespect but do you also think you should play super tight when up in a session and gambooool when your down. Honestly im not sure your question is even answerable .

It's all one long session buddy

Of course, you could just play continuously for 86 hours until you break even or profit, but that's quite obviously not what I meant.

Perhaps I should have specified further so there wouldn't be this kind of misinterpretation.

Pretty sure I answered that.
Assume at least 50% for solid winning players in cash games.
If they're soft or you're really good, it might be less.
If they're hard or you're not actually winning, it's going to be more.

"Hours and hours" doesn't seem like that much to me any more. I'm thinking more of the recent online session I played where, for maybe 500 hands, I lose 2 big coolers, 2 big flips, fold 83o pre-flop, lose KK vs AK pre-flop all in, and I fold JcJd on a 3-way flop of AsKs8s after 4-betting pre-flop. The coolers and flips cost me 400BBs, the write off boards cost me maybe 100BB more and I just can't see how anybody could possibly win in that scenario. It just felt like one long and unwinnable nightmare. I'm wondering how often I should expect this to happen. If it's really often, perhaps poker is not the game for me!


See, now this is why I don't play tournaments! lol

I am not sure about the focus part of what you're saying. I don't have a large sample, but my bankroll is about 1000BBs up from where it was a month ago, so I am definitely winning over a small sample. But... man... these massive loss sessions are just so demoralizing, so I want to know now how often I should expect to deal with them.

Even your reformulated question isn't really answerable. To me "impossible to win" means that there is no possible sequence of actions you could have taken in your hands throughout the session to win overall, which is unknowable and would require ridiculous play, so I don't think that's what you meant. It's dependent on too many variables that aren't well defined.

If you asked "what is the probability of being down after 'n' hands given win-rate and standard deviation," you could get an answer with statistics.

some days are hopeless and you win by making great folds.

another way to look at it is there are times when the outcomes continuously favor your opponents. a beginner might wonder if it's normal to feel like superman one day and on kryptonite the next. it's a real feature of the game. it feels like trying to salvage a blowout in a sporting event.

this. always this.

https://www.primedope.com/poker-variance-calculator/

This may help, it's very interesting at least, play around with it a bit.

You have a tilt issue, work on that.