Assuming I don't have any horrible leaks, is this to be expected?



tl;dr

Looking at my losses, a lot of it has come from coolers. Or what I think are coolers anyway. Tonnes of KK vs AA. I haven't gotten AA allin preflop in the entire 40k hands. If I even manage to get postflop with AA they're often beat. Looking now, except for two occasions, any pot I've played with AA that's bigger than 40BB I've lost.

I've tightened up with calling small pairs and I'm a small winner with them, but I've still been oversetted a lot. TT vs QQ, 88 vs AA, 99 vs JJ etc. Twice I've gotten it in with a higher set and had them hit quads on the turn.

Then there's the weird way that fish play. Often times I'll have an overpair on a dry board and get x/minraised by AA and KK. They take lines that make such little sense that it's hard to find folds. Of course it's only after I call them down that I realise they are a fish as there's little to no reads at zoom. The thing is I can't adjust to how they play, because then I'm exploitable by better players. Not only this, but I assumed the majority of the player pool were okay-decent players, so I play against unknowns assuming they have standard ranges. More often than not they're fish. I can't even resteal from the SB without having the BB cc me.

There's so many of them that every hand turns into a spew fest and I'm having to make bigger decisions than I should have to. Even some of the regs do things like call a 3b and then x/jam a set. Too many times have I folded against a fish, only to watch the rest of the hand play to see that I was ahead. So I take a note. Then the next hand I play with them I get it in slightly looser and they have the nuts. I find it much easier to profit when the player pool is smaller and there's more regs playing. That's not right is it?

What gets to me the most is that it's exactly the same thing that happened at NL10. At both stakes I have about 300k hands and these problems are never ending, but they're also impossible to adjust to. When you have AA on a paired board, what are you supposed to do if you face a shove everytime? Can you fold a pair everytime you're minraised?

I could waffle on forever. I know it's asking a lot, but if anyone had some helpful advice I'd appreciate it a lot

it could also just be a 24 BI upswing :P

I saw that one coming x]

Over how many sessions have these 24BI been lost over? Are you still playing after getting coolerd 5 times in 45 mins or are you managing tilt properly and always playing your A game? Be honest.

Well you can see in the graph three sharp declines, each of those happened in one session. The first one was mainly getting KK vs AA 4 times. The other two were coolers for the most part.

I used to have to quit after taking beats like that, but I've worked a lot on my mindset lately and don't find it affects me as much as it used to. I mean this has all happened over the course of a few weeks and I'm a bit soul crushed but not angry like I used to be. I often laugh at how bad I'm running, helps me remember it's no big deal.

So yeah, I'm still playing but it hasn't contributed to my swing. Of course I've made mistakes, but not many big ones. I mark any glaring mistakes and they add up to about 3 stacks.

Just pancake on it a little, then move on.

assuming you don't have any leaks

bruh just quit

plug some numbers into this variance calculator. it will give you a good idea of what size downswings you will experience and how often

i feel ur pain i hav dropped 27 bi 25zone in last 3 months i build it up on 10zone move upb get popped every whick way even as bad as calling 250 w 78 me aa flop 388 hate it it almost makes me think its rigged but i play loser at 10zone and pop over pairs alot with rags

horrible leaks*
Why even spend the time posting?

Yeah I've used that, it gets more reassuring the bigger the sample you use Was watching one of xflixx's videos today and he was breakeven at 25 zoom for about 100k hands which made me feel a lot better. He was even complaining about the players making weird, creative plays that were hard to get behind and adjust to, which confirmed my thoughts about my swing. Thanks for posting something helpful

That sucks man, that's poker though I guess. Still waiting on my $600 EV rebate

I had a similar downswing recently (24BI). It is still very hard for me to understand why my winrate was so bad and constant at the time... I reviewed those sessions multiple times since, and didn't find many mistakes in my game. (Horrible spots mostly)



I was playing vs a bit more agressive opponents, but don't think I was playing bad/ getting outplayed...

Anyways, that was one of the worst downswings I ever had, but I think swings like this should be expected in poker.
Maybe I was running very good for the first 34k hands and didn't even notice, then horrible for the next 10k hands. So it kinda evens out to where I should be...


That's how I imagine it.

Downswing like that doesn't necessarily mean that you played bad (or different), but it could mean that opponents played strategies (made mistakes) that happen to be good vs your tendencies.
You should review those sessions (not only big pots) and try to find out why your opponents were winning.

You have leaks. $25NL Zone is not a game you should be taking 24 BI downswings in if you're a skilled player. Of course you're not seeing where they are in your game right now. What you need to do is take some time away from analyzing hand histories and analyze strategy and learn new concepts that might help you better understand how you've made mistakes on the past.

You say "I have to make bigger decisions than I should have to". If you're uncomfortable making big decisions in poker then you should put some more time into working on your game outside of the actual game because making correct big decisions is where a majority of your profit is going to come from.

Actually at zoom poker huge swings can happen quite often. Expecially if you are new to zoom and have very limited amount of stats on opponents.
But yes, if 25NL are the highest stakes he plays, he probably isn't the most "skilled player" and likely has some leaks.

That's a great post, nice one. Yeah, I think it's appears more devastating than it is because you've just come off of a nice run and then instantly start getting destroyed. Must've been painful at hand 48,000! Spent all of last night and this morning reviewing with filters and there's definitely some stuff I want to change.

Well I've seen several people that are very good at the game go through worse at stakes way lower than their own, so I think it's safe to say it's not (entirely) down to bad play. Everyone's so quick to assert their dominance here.

I think it's safe to say you can have big downswings at pretty much all stakes. Just used that variance calculator and even with a winrate of 20BB you can have BE stretches of 40k hands.

I never said I was uncomfortable with them, they're just high variance spots. Big decisions are often close decisions with barely any EV. But yeah, I will be continuing to work on my game, just like I was prior to your post.

Cheers everyone

If you're new to a game and wondering if you have leaks the answer is pretty obvious.