Happiness By The Kilowatt

Today I have a couple thoughts I want to try and flesh out on downswings and the tilt that can become involved with them.

First, downswings are something that occur only in the past tense. I'm not the first one to say that, David Sklansky mentions it for sure, as to others. The basic idea here is that since the element of luck doesn't carry over in poker (just because you got AA last hand doesn't mean you won't get it next hand... or just because your aces got cracked last time, doesn't mean they won't get cracked this time, etc) It always resets with every situation. Therefore, the idea of 'running' bad or good is non-existent. You can have run bad or well in the past, since we can look at results and show conclusively that over this 5000 hand stretch or that 2 day period we won 500 more dollars or 100bets less than our cards or EV would have indicated we should have.

So that's all fine and dandy. Every hand is fresh, you're never 'running' bad. But, for me, and I'm sure for a lot of people, when we start losing or have suffered a few large losses in a short period of time, which is somewhat common with HULHE, it can change the way we play the game or just change the way we are thinking about the cards that come up.

I had a run a few days ago where I lost 100 bets in 50 hands. I feel like I have an expected earn of 4-5 bets/100 hands, so i was, in this case 195bets/100 hands below my expected earn. This drastically changes the way that I play hands from here on out. I can't think the same way about the hands that I play in the future because of how stuck i recently became. It has nothing to do with how much i win or lose in the next 200 hands, I lost that much and I feel slighted that it happened to me and that because i lost it so quickly that I should win it back just as quickly.

That's simply not the case. I likely stopped playing my best game, and in retrospect I could see a bunch of leaks in my play that were hurting my results against a player that I certainly had an edge against in normal circumstances. I kept making mistakes and this cost me even more money.

This brings me to an 'ah ha' moment. Well, not so much a brand new moment, I think I've had it before, but something that came very clear to me and something that I'm going to actively pursue: I need to quit if i get stuck more than about 35-40 bets in a short amount of time almost irregardless of who I am playing against. If I lose 40 bets it is going to take me 800 hands to win it back according to my expected earn. It takes longer than I am going to play against someone to do this, and it probably makes more sense to quit, take a break and then get back on tables against someone who isn't confident, like my winning villain is, and when I am in a better mindset to win.

I think that makes sense. I haven't read it over and I'm just going to post it like that.

Basically the cliff notes are: when i lose a bunch to someone, i need to quit because i play worse.

LQ

Currently Listening: Alexisonfire - Watch Out!
Currently Reading: Tommy Angelo - Elements of Poker