It's cool.
Tbh man, always when somebody told me they lost like 6/7bi's a session I thought the same thing as you
a downswing of 30bis must be a horrible player, come on, I could always break even when I had a losing session

But now I realize the short run can be dramatic long and you can really run worse then you would ever expect to run

losing a couple of bi's for a week or 2, well, that's variance too, but that's really not a downswing..
20+ and you can start talking along

My comment was actually meant to help. First of all, it doesn't matter what anybody thinks. So you can look at it as a swing, or as tilt. If it's a swing, you just have to play through it. If it is tilt you have to take a step back and work on your game.

Now you decide what it is. But bear the following in mind. Imagine it is not what you think it is. What would be the more costly mistake? Experiencing a swing, and start working on your game? Or tilting and playing through it?

Just a thought.

well you are right about that part.
A swing is in your head, but it is also something you really expierence.
maybe we have to switch accounts to show you

Working on your game is something you always need to do imo, not only when you are having a downswing
It's very easy to stop working on your game because you are running good.. but when you start to lack on that stage then are the mistakes going to happen

So yeah, I always work on my game, on a daily basis. If I am not playing I am reading about poker, reviewing my hands or other related stuf that helps my game growing

And it sure doesn't matter what anybody thinks, you are right in that part

I actually didn't lose 7, it are 4, and spread over 3 sessions I played today but it sure did felt like 7!

And to answer your question: tilt is pretty costly. Either way, or you lose BIs on the table, or you smack your keyboard

Ship it to Booger instead. Not only is he guaranteeing a turnaround , he will berate a reg of your choosing.

LOL, there are alot of players that would disagree with you.

TDK, watched Team America: World Police again the other day. Maybe a good choice given your downswong???

I can live with that

nah, it's just highly unlikely for a winning player with a WR of say 2-3PTbb/100

A coin CAN land on heads 100 times in a row.

speaking of which, did anyone watch Daren Brown episode where he does something similar?

That's what I mean by "implausible" btw...

TDK: 20 to 30 BI downswings are possible. I know what you're going through. But if we are similar in any way, I suspect that massively running bad has affected your game in ways you don't see. When I read CMAR's "Drift" thread, I thought he wrote it specifically for me, because as I've realized in the past few days that I've gradually developed a serious flaw in my thinking, and basically was burning money in a very common spot. True, most of the money I've lost was due to coolers/running bad, but it could have been a lot better if I wasn't letting my game drift over time. Think about spots where you have an automatic "standard" line, or spots where you're automatically stacking off (for me, I was automatically giving up OOP if they called my flop bet and had a double barrel frequency of basically nothing, and was auto stacking off with any two pair in a limped pot...instead of thinking about ranges and player types, I was going "they obviously hit the flop, I c/f" and "I has two pare, all in!").

Also possibly look at spots where your downswing has caused you to assume people always have the nuts. For example, a recent hand I played....I knew the fish had Qx on a QQT8K board and I had J9, but I was too afraid that he had KQ or QT, I didn't get 125 BBs in the middle when he raised the turn. In fact, I called his turn raise, then froze up when he bet the pot on the river, timed out, and was folded. The reality is, if he is limping with any suited queen, he's going broke 100% there, and I shouldn't even be thinking twice about auto-shipping in that spot, but running bad caused me to make a horrible play.

Good luck to you, tighten way way up if you need to, play more straightforward, and get stacks in vs fish.

Come on, give me a milestone hand! ONE TIME, ONE TIME!

Ditto. If a few hundred was shipped to my BR I'd be ecstatic.

I like this season too, I still don't think it tops 1-3 probably since the novelty of the show has worn off. The past seasons have been pretty meh I've thought.

im following 24 too, i like the thrill and such, but seriously it's kind of pro military propaganda

WTF is wrong with people... milestone hand at 50NL 6 max just now....

Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 39548
The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked.com

UTG: $56.15
MP: $10.75
CO: $39.15
BTN: $25.10
SB: $49.50
BB: $50.75

Pre Flop: ($0.75)
UTG raises to $56.15 all in, 3 folds, SB calls $49.25 all in, 1 fold

One of the folds the guy actually got up and left....

do you win the money when everyone else folds pf?

i guess so, but its stupid, cause the winning hand wins more.

That was an EPIC Friday night session--it went >12 hours, ~12k hands. Unfortunately, I ended it stuck 6 buy ins, which is the hole I dug myself in the first 2 or 3 hours, climbed out of twice, and wound up back in for when I had to quit.

The BBQ chicken turned out to be the highlight of my Friday night.

Well, you and I seem to be diasagreeing quite a lot recently (and unfortunately).

I spent October and November in a 40k hand, 42 buy in downswing. During that downswing, I was more than 42 buy ins below all in expectation--I think it was 43 or 44, but I broke my computer in the middle of it and because of it, so I am not absolutely certain.

I felt pretty good about my game during the entire downswing. I am reasonably certain that I tilted off about 4 buy ins--maybe as many as 6--in tilt moves.

I had a stretch of several days in which I got all in with a set against an overpair on the flop or the turn 15 times and got two outered 13 of the 15 times. I was running bad in other ways, too; During the same week, I had a day on which I was set over setted 3 times in <200 hands on the same 200bb table (by the same player, too). I was set over setted at least 15 times in the 40k hands, which is a pretty ridiculous frequency, I think.

My point in the horror story is not to whine, but to point out that "statistically unlikely" really means, "guaranteed to happen to some poor s.o.b. in a large enough sample."

**** just happens in weird ways--I had that stretch of 15 sets where 13 of them were cracked by two outers, but it hasn't happened even once since the first of December.

During my bad Friday night session I ran KK into AA 5 times, and the only time I had AA v. KK he flopped a set on me. But I hadn't run KK into AA in like 200 hands with KK before that.

I dunno; I think I read somewhere that you have way more math background than I have. I don't think I ought to need to tell you this stuff.

I guess you should just be grateful that nothing like this has happened to you yet, but I assure you, a 30 buy in downswing resulting almost exclusively from variance is not only possible, but that it just happened to me.

Somebody recently said here: "I never learned more than by posting in strat threads and being corrected." So with this in mind I do not regret what I said above since we are getting a nice discussion started.

To clarify a few things: I do have a Maths background, but Statistics is not my specialty. When I said that something is "statistically implausible" I was not implying that it couldn't happen. I meant that the probability of it happening is so small that it is more likely that something else influenced the result. If I had seen somebody flipping tails 100 times in a row I would be quite certain that the coin was fake.

I have not yet run the numbers on the probability of somebody with a solid style, beating the game for, say 3BB/100, going on a 30BI downswing. I will try to do that as soon as possible, and maybe the result will surprise me (or others). It was just my gut feeling that it is more likely that somebody is not really beating the game, or is off his game such that his winrate isn't where it should be. Also it would take Digger's Zen attitude not to steam after being down 20BI imo.

I have heard before that mpethy is the unluckiest player around here. However I want to mention that our memory is quite selective.

I agree that we disagree a lot recently. However I do not see why this is unfortunate. It would be most boring if everybody agreed. The way it is we both have the chance to learn something, and in the worst case we may agree to disagree and still respect each other.

Peace,
C.

f downswings, f luck, ain't no 2p2 who aint learning everyday something about poker, this is the micros for christ sake, ive been thru downswings, i want more, let them come, all of them, one after another, i kill them all, ill trade them for break even girls and ill make hundreds of childs in a heater.

Cherish the day, boys and girls, live is good.

(thx digger

even on my best game I don't think I beat $100 for 3ptbb/100, which is where most of my swing happened (30-32 buy ins, iirc).

My results at $100 are pretty bad in a big sample. I have always run bad at $100, but not so bad that a good player couldn't have been beating the game at a decent clip (maybe 1.5 to 2.5ptbb/100). But during my bad run at $100 this past fall, I was definitely playing well enough to have beaten the game or a solid 2.0 to 2.5 ptbb/100 win rate.

(Also, I don't think I'm the unluckiest player around here; I'm pretty sure that KurtSF and *Split* run worse than I do.)

LOL this was an exaggeration but yeah, I thought you ment that this is impossible.

Poker is definitely a game where the law of large numbers applies in force.

We are used to talking about sample sizes and regard a sample of 25k as far too small to draw any conclusions, mostly we justify it for educated guesses. When I held lectures for information security 101, I used an example drawn from real life and the idiocy of security theater.

Consider facial recognition software. In laboratory conditions, with perfect lighting, hand-picked training material, exaggerated contrast values and so forth, an exceptionally good software can achieve 98.5% success rate. So on average, it either misses a face or falsely identifies a wrong face 15 times out of 1000.

Assume that the software works equally well in field (never going to happen, but this is supposed to be a best-case scenario). Put the software to monitor Chicago airport, where 250k people go through every day. Because terrorism is actually an incredibly rare event, we can assume that over a course of a year, all the misses (1.5%) are false positives. For every one of these, the security has to be dispatched.

That's 3750 false positives and thus false alarms per day. There are 24*3600=86400 seconds in a day. That means that on average security is running after a false positive once every 23 seconds.

And that's supposedly the best-case scenario. I used this example to get through the idea that people who make any decisions involving money should actually understand what the numbers mean. I can only hope it worked. Most of those people are probably climbing the corporate ladders and drown in slideware or advertisements with ostentious/over-optimistic numbers the advertising departments cooked up.

But my point is, in any population large enough an event, no matter how statistically improbable it may be ... it will happen, sooner or later.

wtf at payouts for the 200k lottofest.

4270th place - $30
271st place - $30

uhhh... flat much?

pahud tilts the **** out of me right now, gonna buy hem tomorrow

So I'm sitting at a table, right to the left of this fish. His name is dscplinter. He is running 48/0 over 50. I've been ISOing him a lot and I feel like he's starting to get annoyed. It's sort of at the point where neither believes the other has anything. Then this hand comes up...

Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is BTN with A 8
4 folds, CO calls $0.25, Hero raises to $1.25, 2 folds, CO calls $1

Flop: ($2.85) 2 6 K (2 players)
CO bets $1, Hero raises to $3.50, CO raises to $9.75, Hero raises to $26.40 all in, CO calls $12.95 all in

Turn: ($48.25) 5 (2 players - 2 are all in)

River: ($48.25) 4 (2 players - 2 are all in)

Final Pot: $48.25
CO shows J K (a pair of Kings)
Hero shows A 8 (a flush, Ace high)
Hero wins $45.85


Now he says something in chat about me being a donk or something similar. He's sort of right, but I was more or less a coinflip and the whole point of ISO'ing with that hand is to get the spades. He could easily have a middle pair or 6's because he's such a huge donk and we don't believe each other. Anyways I say something like 'Well, you limp/called with KJo so you kind of deserve it'. He again calls me a donk (like I said, he's half right and calling KJo in that situation isn't too horrible. I don't stack off there, but that's me) and we keep chatting it up.

So anyways I keep punishing this guy, talking trash in chat and ISO'ing him constantly. He is very clearly foaming at the mouth by this point, and this hand comes up:

Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is MP2 with 9 9
3 folds, MP1 calls $0.25, Hero raises to $1.25, 3 folds, BB calls $1, MP1 calls $1

Flop: ($3.85) 7 2 4 (3 players)
BB checks, MP1 bets $1.25, Hero calls $1.25, BB calls $1.25

Turn: ($7.60) 7 (3 players)
BB checks, MP1 bets $4.00, Hero calls $4, BB folds

River: ($15.60) 6 (2 players)
MP1 bets $10.00, Hero calls $10

Final Pot: $35.60
MP1 shows T J
Hero shows 9 9
Hero wins $33.90

I didn't shove the river because I was pretty scared even with my super hero calls and it's actually a little funnier to leave him with $6 or something behind. Anyways this hand came up and when he flipped over his cards I was laughing in real life pretty hard. I pissed him off so much he bet like 3/4 pot on all 3 streets and I called him down with my lil' overpair.

I don't think there's anything more satisfying than the above. I love tilting people and making them play so bad. it.