Hello everyone,

I would like to get some recommendations about the topic. I have been playing poker for over a year and start to check my sessions and I notice that each month I do pretty well (high winrate) on 80%-85% of the sessions I play but there are always 3-5 sessions that are sooo bad ( -10 or even -18 buyin ) that kills my Winrate.

So I would like to know how do you deal with bad sessions in order to avoid this kind of situations. I started to do some meditations during the day and before each session. I added some breaks to see how Im feeling and how many buy ins Im down or up ( I put a stop loss of -4 buy in per session in order to avoid this big losses ) but Im not sure about this cauze some profitable sessions come from this bad starting where Im down some buy ins and end up with a big win ( or even bigger lost lol ).

If you guys have time I would like to know how do you prepare for a session and what do u do after your session , specially after a big lost.

I apologize for the mispellings, English is not my native language.

Have a good day !

The higher your ev bb/100 winrate the less frequent and brutal downswings will be. I guess working on your game away from the tables will better the situation you described.
For me i tend to tilt way less if work on my game outside of playing. Like my brain finds better composure.

You're going to have some big losing sessions. You can't be like "oh my winrate would be so high if only I didn't have these losing sessions" because that's part of the game.

We need more info on exactly how often your big losing sessions are, how many hands you play, etc. to determine if you even have an issue. Having multiple -10BI sessions per month is probably a problem if you're only playing 10 sessions of 300 hands each, but probably isn't a big deal if you're playing 25 sessions of 1.5k hands each.

I guess one other obvious question that bears asking: are you playing badly during these ultra-losing sessions? When you review the hands, are you like "wtf I would never make this play if I wasn't already down 9 buy-ins today."

Your stop loss shouldn't be based on if you're going to make it back or not, you don't know that. Your stop loss should be based on when you're annoyed and are going to play worse

Ya I usually do that when I am having a lot of lossing sessions in a row and it works pretty well to clear my mind but like my problem is to deal them on the table.

Its not like I dont want losing sessions I know its part of the game ( I dont mind when I just lost 5 buy in per session) but I think its not normal to have like a 3-4 losing sessions in a month of -10 or -15 buy in each one. I usually tend to play 1.5k-2.5k per session on Zoom and having like 20 sessions per month on average.

Just to be clear cauze it sounds that I am complaining about my bad sessions I take full responsability of them but Im seeking for advices or routines for pre session, on session and post session to avoid this kind of issues or at least to reduce the damage that this causes to my Winrate.

Thats fair, good point.

Do you think you're playing badly during these ultra-losing sessions? Are you doing something during them that you wouldn't normally do? It's impossible to give an answer more in-depth than "have a 5 BI stop loss" unless we know the cause

could try writing down a session review immediately afterwards and then another one at least a day later and see if ur opinions have changed

Get a tracker. Mark hands you're unsure of after or during. Replay tagged hands before a session as a warmup.

Divorce your expectations from reality. Your job is to execute the code you've written in your poker-bot brain and nothing more. One spot at a time. Execute, learn, repeat

Ya I play the worst poker I can for sure and thats the issue. So basically I am trying to fix my C-Game by making it appears less often and also by reducing the damage of it.

It sounds pretty good but idk how to write down a session review. Do u mean to write down just how I was feeling, or something else?

If you're playing really bad poker the immediate solution is probably just to have a stop-loss, maybe 4 buy-ins or so. From there, you can think about it as building up your mental muscles: if you're confident you're continuing to play well, up it to 5 buy-ins next time, then 6, etc.

Playing through a losing session is hard, there are plenty of very winning players that just stop playing for a bit if they're getting smacked around too much. There are also plenty of high-stakes winning players who don't play super long sessions in general, just play a bunch of 1 hour sessions

I will start adding the warm up It sounds pretty good, thanks.

I think high expectations was one of the problems for my big losses sessions cauze I was trying to chasing losses and just wanted to win rather than focus on my goals for the session and to execute the topic I learnt during that day.

sounds like u already know what's wrong, emotions clouding ur judgment

meant like analyzing ur decision making right after a session and then do the exact same thing again after some time has passed and compare notes with ur past self to see if there's a clear discrepancy, to see if u think differently when the emotions are gone

unless ur already aware of emotions taking over during play but still keep playing, then u prob need to focus on something else too

I hate losing and the problem in poker is you need to be critical off you're own game also in the begging i used to suffer brutal variance but as i got better i learned it was really bad play it ends you up in tricky spots.