Bouncing back from a downswing

Everyone’s definition of a downswing is different. I’m sure there are some pros, or at least players two take playing poker more serious than I do, who are both prepared and used to dropping several buy-ins and remaining confident in their play. For them, dropping a few big pots in a row is just a bad day.

But for the casual player, running bad for a sample as small as a few hundred or a thousand hands can be devastating. I’m personally operating with a 20 buy-in bankroll, which to my knowledge is deep enough to withstand the variance for the small stakes games that I play and the win rate that I’ve experienced since I started actually trying to play well and became somewhat of a student of the game.

I dropped about 4.5 buy-ins in the span of about 500 hands earlier this week. It should have been worse, as I won a 200BB pot when all the money went in on the flop when I had a low pocket pair vs. top set but hit a runner-runner flush. But I’m still here. I have to admit that all those terrible things were going through my mind when I finally decided to put a halt to the bleeding. “Good players like leatherass have 80k hand sideswings, and he’s a prolific winner. I’m not even sure I’ve played 80k hands in my life. What if this is the start of a massive downswing? What if my win rate was only the result of running hot for 20k hands? Is it worth it to continue with poker at all? All this work and thought I’ve put into the game and I still suck.”

But what can you do? Head back to work, and figure out why things went wrong. Figure out what situations you make good decisions in, and which situations you’re just completely lost and need to think about more away from the tables.

Ultimately I’ve realized that I was playing on auto-pilot. I wasn’t thinking about my opponents’ ranges. I was playing my own cards and somewhat randomly picking lines that I thought made sense. I wasn’t paying attention for their tendencies or really reacting to the clues about their play that their statistics suggested. I was closing my eyes and shoving with junk without thinking.

After the the introspection, soul searching, and guitar hero playing instead of hold em, I’m realizing more and more that this is a thinking man’s game. It’s about brains, not balls or “heart” as Doyle Brunson puts it in Super System. Maybe you do need “heart,” in that you can’t be afraid of getting your whole stack in, or you’ll be easily exploited by endless bluffs. But the image of the wild Texas gambler is a mirage. You must continually analyze changing situations and dynamics to figure out where the money is going.

So now I’ve learned my lesson.

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