I'm brand new to poker, started in early May. Started by studying The Grinder's Manual thoroughly and hopped into $2 NL on ACR.



As you can see from the chart it started very well and has since been a downward spiral of unbelievable suckouts and bad beats. I have a Bachelor's in Math and play a very GTO style. I may be new, but I know the plays I'm making are mathematically sound, and yet I'm consistently losing to horribad plays.

I enjoy the theory of Poker very much, but do you really have to unironically grind out 500k hands per month on 20 tables to actually realize your EV even against the most degenerate mongoloids of players? Is playing for fun a complete waste of time?

-edit- Not pictured at the end is another suckout stack lost:
-Me: pocket AA
-Pot gets opened standard 3x, 1 caller
-Me: 3-bet 2.5-3x size
-Raiser(Aggro fish) shoves all-in with J8o, other folds, I call
-Flops a set of 8s
My shove range is very much on the tight side, all the large losses in the chart are plays similar to this one.

reasons why you could be losing--- not in any order

getting cheated
playing a losing game
not enough hands played to make an informed decision
rake too high for your stakes
crazy bad luck
combination of the above

most likely-- playing a losing game

Could you elaborate on your 'getting cheated' point? I'm just not entirely sure what you mean.

On the 'playing a losing game' point: Both my 'My C All-In Adj' and 'EV'(on drivehud before I switched to pokertracker) tell me that I'm a winning player by very large margins. I would absolutely not be making this post if my actual winnings were anywhere near those numbers. I'm new, so I'm not sure the significance of these stats and how applicable they are to my situation, but my impression is that they are a decent metric to judge how good/bad you are running luck-wise.

On the 'not enough hands': Do you just mean that I have not played enough hands to overcome general variance to determine if I am a winning player or not?(AKA my point about playing 500k hands a month to realize EV)

The rake is not crazy for my stakes. It's just standard ACR rake at $2nl. On that note, I started losing when I switched my account to flat-rate rakeback. I'm sure it's just coincidence but holy **** did the downward spiral start there.

My impression is that it is just 'crazy bad luck' but I'm wondering if these downswings are normal or if I'm erring on the side of anomaly and should just push through. The money is insignificant obviously but it is miserably boring to run bad this much when you know you are making the right plays against complete ******s that clearly got lost on their way to the slot machines.

That sample size is pretty much meaningless. Let me show you a little variance, mkay? This was JUST SUNDAY.

I played all day, 4 tabling 10NL 6 Max zoom on ACR. Even this is not a relevant sample size. See how above EV my green line is? It was DOUBLE that to the negative side the day before. So between the two days I am still ridiculously below EV.

The point I am making? The only antidote for variance is volume. You're in a rut? Put in more volume- provided of course that you are of sane mind. It's one thing to grind with your head screwed on tightly, it's quite another to mash with a couple screws loose.

Points heard. I appreciate you sharing your experience as well.

I was finally starting to increase my Play:Study ratio but I'm going to take a couple days reviewing and exploring some new resources and see where that takes me.

If you have a BS in math, you probably took a couple statistic / stochastic classes and are able to calculate that yourself?

Just assume a theoretical win rate and see how many hands you need for various levels of significance.

You should also be able to understand why it doesn't matter if you play a 'very GTO style' (whatever that means) or just click some buttons when it comes to run good / run bad.

FWIW, it's just a game. If losing a couple pennies bothers you so much that you feel the need to call other players "mongoloids", maybe you should switch to something without such a significant element of chance.

Try playing around with the poker variance calculator

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

According to the calculator, over 3250 hands with a solid 4bb/100 win rate with a typical level of variance in 6 max cash you'll lose over that sample over 40% of the time.

If you look at my graph (which is over 100 times larger than yours) you will see multiple 100k+ hand stretches of losing. 3.2k hands is really just a sliver of any part of this graph.

kvnd does your graph show your win rate at one bb per 100 hands?

and yes you can have giant swings in poker. but when you take your overall win rate and base that on your swings that doesnt tell the story. your win rate could easily be much higher those periods when your wins go way up from good playing, and such as being in good games. and when playing bad you can have a losing win rate. overall win rate is a great measure of your total success rate but not of your day to day playing abilities.

so in effect you can have a 3000 hand downswing and it can be entirely because you played badly during that period, or played in games where you were not the better player or other factors.
it is easy and makes it easy to justify a downswing as variance. but first consideration must be those other factors as they are more likely the result.

Why is the first 1500 hand sample in your graph indicative of skill and the second 1500 hand sample purely bad variance? You have to be concerned about results bias in poker. Most people attribute winning to pure skill and losing to luck. If you told me you were new to poker, had read and studied a bunch, and managed to break even your first 3000 hands, I would have said "Nice job! Looks like you hit the ground running."
I think someone else questioned your claims of GTO play earlier. Have you spend months running sims of common situations in a good solver? Have you reviewed your game speed hands to see if you're correctly implementing your simulation informed style? I know some GTO wizards, they claim it takes 1000's of hours of study to come close. You also have to have the experience to understand how the situations you've simmed apply to the current hand. If you're saying that the books you read attribute some of their plays to game theory, that's cool. It is way short of "I'm a 2NL player who plays a GTO style."
This is a mathematical impossibility. Bad plays are the source of your profit. The only way you make money is if they make enough mistakes that you can overcome them enough to beat the rake and make profit. In the short run, they can do the wrong thing and it works out. However, someone playing terrible poker should bring joy.
I'm going to start here. If you got a trainer and started playing tennis the same time you started poker, and then went to your local club tournament, would you expect to dominate? You're new. It is supposed to take time to learn stuff. In 2004-2006, you could beat many poker games with a starting hand chart. Beat them enough to make a living. 2020? Not as much. If you're losing in soft games I'd start with
and downgrade the middle one, for now. Knowing only that you don't have a lot of experience, I'd guess you have big holes in your game and you're playing games with huge effective rake.

Good news, big holes are easier to find. You're making some fairly expensive error relatively often. Find that error. Maybe it is some GTO inspired bluff that is actually hopeless? You decide "I should bluff some % here", do it fairly often (humans suck at random), and your bet makes no sense, so it gets called all the time? Most beginning players are terrible at telling a reasonable story with their bluffs. We all did, when we started. This is my main point, we all start bad. We fix the worst bits. We get better. Thus, the first upswing in your sample is as or more likely to be variance.


This was a huge gift that doesn't work out. I'm guessing everyone has this some % of the time. If you're losing in the long run, it will be somewhere else.


BTW, if the "Aggro fish" were actually terrible, he'd call off his money. He got unlucky that his over-aggro play ran into your AA. If your tight/careful style (good style for newer players) has you overfold in this spot, he ran bad that you had it. If you want to look at the spot as a poker player, you don't say "I have AA, so he's terrible." You'd look at your range, your call off frequency, and how his bluffing range is in this spot. It is possible that he should recklessly shove AI because you under-defend your 3 bets. For example.

Nearly everyone in every decent sized sample has a few hands that they were a big favorite to win, that they didn't win. That isn't evidence that you're running bad. It is evidence that once you stopped your early win streak, you went and looked for bad luck of any kind. You don't need 500K samples, but you need some long term evidence you're a winning player. Now if someone good looked at your hands and said that it seems you played them well, that would be a start of knowing that.

And even then it's extremely hard to implement it properly in a real game setting.

The whole "Linus is a bot" debate revolved around the fact that the number of hands deviating from solver output was lower for him than other players. And those "other players" are all GTO wizards themselves.

Yeah, let's say you gave me the entire solved game of HU to 6m NLHE. How long would it take me to come close to being able to do that in a game? Let's add the variations where I see that seat 3 brutally under-bluffs, and I have to decide some good minimally exploitative strategy. Can I do that well, at game speed? That's given for free the entire solved game. I'd guess you'd spend years, all the while looking at the hands I played vs the source material.

Thank you all for the replies and putting up with my boisterous OP. They are very helpful and put things in perspective very quickly.

I cooled off and spent the day reviewing and exploring resources outside of the 2-3 books and channels I've had my nose in. Alongside finding a bunch of holes in my play already, I was also reminded of the vast amount of learning ahead and areas I haven't even dipped my toes into(this is a good thing).

I'll keep working at it. Thanks again for the direct feedback.

come back and post and be part of the forums.

Planning on it!

Do not play a GTO style at this level, exploit the "horribad plays" your opponents are making

All these long and elaborated answers, while the only reasonable thing to say was "lolsample".

I'd counter by saying that if I sit down at your table, you can know I'm likely not a very good player in 4 hands. The answer to all questions in poker isn't "play 50K hands, and then you'll know".

Not sure why you did post that hand, it will not impress anyone, not even me (i am playing poker 3+ months).

It seems to me you have a tilt problem that is absolutely normal for a beginner.
I think you have to study this part of the game more for the moment and dont overlook it like most players do. The biggest mistakes are made from tilt.

The fish did a mistake (-EV play) and it doesnt matter if he wins this time.
In the long term he will lose and you who did +EV play will win. If everyone is playing GTO versus you how do you expect to win money?

Study on tilt more.

So if you just started poker, you should be pretty happy with this. I lost 1k my first year and its the most valuable 1k I have ever lost as I learned so much. If I could give any advice to someone new it would be to not focus on the money but focus on how you play. Study as much as you play, if not more. Take baby steps when learning new things. From there you should be able to develop a great foundation. It is worth mentioning your sample size is like a severely lazy day for reg which tells us nothing. I get where your coming from though.

Yeah, I picked up Elements of Poker and just finished it last night, and I have The Mental Game of Poker on my list to read soon as well.

I'm not totally unfamiliar with tilt, I've been a high to top rated player in a handful of competitive video games, but the sources of tilt in those are generally more concrete or straight-forward than they are in poker.

Thanks for the feedback and advice. I decided to dedicate Mon-Fri this week entirely to study and review. I want to isolate myself from the game for a short period to make sure I'm not continually reinforcing bad habits or preconceptions.

Come the weekend I plan to resume playing in the frequency of 25:75 to 50:50 Play:Study.

I think the one thing that you need to be aware of is not to try to implement too many things you've studied in one go, as this may easily overwhelm you and either confuse you, or give you too many conflicting signals when trying to evaluate future play. Look at one or two things, think about how you can adapt your game, play some hands, evaluate, see if you've got the concepts, then probably play some more hands regardless to be sure, and then add more things in - don't devour a whole book or study course and try to do everything it says at once

I definitely hear what you're saying.

I'm certainly focusing on the foundational(basic) concepts, but I think exposure to the intermediate and advanced concepts concurrently is invaluable, even if I may not fully understand or be able to implement them yet. I certainly don't one-and-done a whole book and consider it finished. I've had my nose in TGM and my notes on it since I finished it, and I'm actually revisiting earlier chapters of it as I write this and reviewing it as I go through his course on Runitonce. As for Elements of Poker, I found that to be a pretty soft read so I kind of buzzed through it, but John Little actually did an hour long interview with the author that I'll be listening to this evening, so I'll consider that my review on that for now.

It's a self-study technique that has worked for me through other endeavors, so I'm comfortable with the fact that some more advanced things will go 90% over my head the first time through, and even a lot of the basic things won't be fully absorbed. As an example, the concepts in Chapter 12 of TGM I am particularly uncomfortable with, especially in implementation, but at least I have the exposure and when I start recognizing these situations better in-game and want to know more, I'll know exactly where to look.

Even though I don't want to, I'm going to stick-by my decision to not play till the weekend. In some of my review I found a lot of bad habits where I sort of filled in gaps of knowledge with my own reasoning of what the 'optimal' play should be and deemed it as righteously correct in my head. Low and behold they were anything but, and I want to give myself a few hard days of study and review to not only reduce these basic gaps, but to make sure I don't further cement those kinds of habits into my play, if I can instead weed some of them out in the next few days.

Another, more casual reason, is that I've just really been enjoying reading about and studying the game, so I'd say that's a reason in itself.