I was excited yesterday when my downswing started because I saw it as an opportunity. I'd spent time thinking about how I would handle a downswing and here was my chance to apply it. Considering that I want to be a NL200 reg, dealing with NL200 downswings and the new level of money being lost was a big mental hump that I knew I'd have to get over, and here was my chance to do it.
My plan was to stick to my 3 buyin stop loss, and once I felt I was running like total shit I'd move down to NL100 6max and NL50 HU. I also planned to take breaks where I'd do walks, exercise, and just mental examination to get back into a good mindframe.
I stuck to my plan very well. First session I dropped nearly 3 buyins, then recovered to a 1.5 buyin loss. Thought it might just be a small dip and not the real downswing. Took a break and when I was feeling good and confident I did another session. This one just kicked my ass. Floated around 2 buyins lost and then had a rush of big hands where I got coolered / sucked out on and suddenly I was down 4.5 buyins, so I quit.
This is where I made my mistake. I took a break and told myself I would do 1 more 3 buyin stop loss session of NL200 and if it went bad I'd move down. I wasn't convinced that I was running bad or that I'd keep running bad. At that point I should have moved down to NL100 or quit for the day. So I've adjusted my plan to be more specific for dealing with downswings - from now on if I have 2 sessions in a row where I run like total shit then I will conclude I am starting a downswing and will either A) quit for the day or B) Move down at least 1 limit. And by definition a session always has a 3buyin stop loss.
I went back and did the third session and got rapeddddd. Same type of thing. Was down by 2 buyins really quick, floated there for a while, then hit some big hands that I thought would bring me into the green but lost in setups/beats and suddenly I was down a little more than 4 buyins on the session, so I quit. And I felt like shit, because it was suddenly very obvious to me that a 3rd NL200 session was idiotic. You can't beat variance when it decides to shit on you. I've learned this lesson before. I've moved down limits really fast before. But I didn't do it this time. It was stupid.
So the first lesson learned is that I need a better "dealing with a downswing" plan. Here it is for future reference.
1) Always follow a 3 buyin stop loss - don't feel like you need to hit 3 to quit though, it's fine to quit at 2.
2) After quitting a bad session don't check your BR or to see how much you lost. Just review hands and then take a break. Use the break time to take a walk, exercise, watch poker videos, play video games, go out with the GF, and overall get into a good mindframe. It's ok to take the rest of the day off if you can't get mentally solid again.
3) If you have 2 sessions in a row where you run like total dog shit, accept the fact that you're downswinging. Move down immediately. There's nothing wrong with playing a few thousand hands at a lower limit till things are going well again. Don't feel like you need to keep playing - quitting for the day is a great option. But if you do play more you need to move down. And when you come back for your next session, whether it's the same day or 3 days later, play it at a lower limit.
That's the first lesson. The second is much trickier and has been identified for a while now, but I still don't fully understand the root of the problem and I have very few ideas on how to fix it.
What I've realized is that I'm doing the exact opposite of what I should. I play too much when losing and too little while winning. I don't know why this happens. I do know that when I am having winning session after winning session they keep getting shorter. As soon as I win 2-3 buyins I stop. The reason I stop is because suddenly I get distracted, sometimes I get nerves in my gut, or I get apathetic, but overall my mental state wanes. I don't feel 100% in the game, I don't feel like I'm on my A game, so I quit.
On the other side, when I start a session and lose a buyin or break even for 500 hands, if I'm playing well then I am eager to keep playing for at least another 500 hands. I want to grind. I don't get any feelings other than a desire to be more aware and play even better. Eventually if I lose too much or take too many beats, I start to tilt, but my first reaction to a losing session is a passion to play more and better.
I need to switch those things around. I need my body and mind to get that drive to play more and better when I win 2-3 buyins so that I keep grinding. I need my body and mind to get those butterflies, nerves and apathy when I lose 1-3 buyins so that I stop. I've created these mental associations that are deep and ingrained in my body and they are triggered by circumstances at the poker table, and when they are triggered they affect my play and my stamina. I need to figure out why they were created in the first place and then I need to switch them, because playing too much while losing and too little while winning is my biggest leak right now.
I think that a big part of why I stop playing after winning a few buyins is that I am scared to lose it. I look at the profit and think "oh that's a nice winning session, might as well stop now cause I'll feel like shit if I lose it all in the next 100 hands and then quit at break even". I'm too worried about variance and not thinking at all about the long term. I'm far too focused on short term results. And I'm far too scared to lose money. I shouldn't even be thinking about how much I win or lose in any given session. It's not important.
To combat that I have a few ideas and am open to any suggestions you guys may have.
1) Don't check my BR or HEM results after a winning session. Right now I won't check that stuff after a losing session, but if I think I won money I am eager to close down the tables and see how the session went. Then I stare at it for a while and get a big boner. Then I look at my month long graph to see how the line is going and start to cum. lol. Seriously though, it's bad. From now on I'm going to check results at most 1 time a day, which will be in the morning. I will go to bed without looking at my results and when I wake up in the morning I'll check to see how I did the previous day. And that's at MOST - I am going to try going several days without checking results.
2) Refocus on the long term. At the end of the day the BR will go up and down and up and down, but if you play well it will go up more often than down and the end result is a bigger BR. I know this. I've seen this. And I've played with a long term mentality for most of my poker career. I lost that the last 10 days or so. I need to focus on one hand at a time and making sure that I play every single one perfectly. I need to focus on putting in the hours. It doesn't matter if I have 5 winning sessions in a row or 5 losing sessions in a row, because the only way I'm really going to make money is by playing LOTS of sessions. A heater is just the same as a downswing, I'm making the same amount of money even if my BR is going up fast or slow. A downswing is just variance taking back what I earned when I didn't deserve it, and a heater is variance giving back what I lost when I shoulda won it. They balance each other out in the end. It reminds me of a poem I used to recite to myself a lot because it was a list of life lessons. It's called "If" by Rudyard Kipling and the part I'm thinking of is:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
Those two impostors. We always focus on learning how to deal with horrible times, painful downswings, and how to not let that type of thing affect us. But we don't ever focus on dealing with the good times, the heaters. The ability to treat a heater and a downswing exactly the same is what I want. Don't get all giddy about all the money won on a heater just like I shouldn't get all depressed by money lost in a downswing. Treat them the same.
Alright, that's all I can think of for now. Comments would be greatly appreciated, and definitely want to hear any suggestions that come to mind!
For now I'm going to do NL100 for a bit. I think I'll aim to win 10 buyins before moving back up but I'm not going to be too solid on that. Basically I'll wait till I feel confident and am playing well and am not running like shit. I'm still well rolled for NL200 so it's all good.
Thanks for reading ^^
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failsafe United States. Mar 15 2009 16:21. Posts 1041
brett, just do this after every session. all your introspection is probably character-building, thought-provoking, victory-inducing
good sound rules. I agree that your BR shouldnt decide when you should quit. But I wouldnt be able to not look at my results when I am playing good. When I have a great session it is a boost to play even more when I see how many $$ I actually made. But ofc you have to do what works for you! GL at rebuilding!
looked up the rest of that poem. very nice. thanks, dude.
something that might be of interest to you: don't have a name for it.
I realized my mental state while playing husngs swung so much that I needed a way to keep track of it outside of looking at my graph, so I made a google docs spreadsheet with like 6 headers. Date/Stakes/Player/Crucial/State/Play/Read/Luck/Notes
so after every game or set of games I'd note the stakes, player profile (LAG/TAG, his leaks, stuff to exploit).
under the state/play/read I'd have numbers from 1-5 asking myself how I thought I felt. I average around a 4 for each game when I'm playing my A game and if I picked up something or made a sick play I'd give myself a 5 somewhere.
Luck would be a -1, 0, or +1, asking me if I thought I ran good or bad that game.
Crucial would be part of that, just the biggest hand I thought was a pivotal point in the match. Coolers included. I'd note the board, action, etc. Or just the word "pfai cooler".
Notes would be anything else, gameflow, if I decided to quit, etc.
My stoploss is 5bi but I frequently catch myself quitting before that because I just feel crappy or continuing to play because I'm noticing exactly how well I'm playing. Really depends on how much time/energy you'd be willing to put into a "session monitor" like this. It's like 30 seconds after each game for me.
Playing 200nl FR you could just set up a timer or commit to evaluating your entire mental state every 1k hands. Sit out, give rate stuff like your energy/concentration, emotional state, overall play, toughness of game (find a new game!), percieved luck, etc etc.
I know the feeling of getting scared to lose your won money when ur winning in a session, had i too.
Yet, it should make u more confortable to play longer sessions, since u need to run really bad to lose ur profit or to go negative for the session, so yea try to get some more hands in when ur winning
On March 15 2009 17:48 PanoRaMa wrote:
lolol this is just like me
but the "dont look at your results" thing which i was trying to do at one point clearly conflicts with the stop loss rule :[
yeah but I can usually sense if I've lost 2-3 buyins =)
But I would LOVE a program that would give me a popup when I lost 3 buyins. The best I found was some old AHK script but I couldn't get it to work with HEM. I wish HEM or tableninja or some program came out with a way to give you a popup when you hit your stop loss #. That way you could just play play play and not think about it and then the pop up comes and you can sit out and close PS down.
fwiw, I think the "focus on the long term" philosophy a lot of people adhere to is unrealistic. The long term is so goddamn far away. It's hard, and that's natural (the frustration). It's also counter-productive.
You think about the contrast with tilt, and essentially, tilt is "focusing on the past". You remember prior results and they have an effect on your performance. Focusing on the long term makes you imagine the future and expect certain results. But poker isn't like that. I have very little actual experience with this (just being a low/midstakes grinder) but just learning from other, better players, has taught me that the "long term" is much longer than a lot of people understand. It's just an idea, right? As time progresses the probability of your results deviating from your EV gets steadily lower. That's all you can be certain of.
There's probably a point where you can say you are officially "unlucky" or it's "unfair", but what good does it do you.
So I'm thinking, what about the present? Why not focus purely on the here and now and nothing else. Should I bet/fold/call/raise, and why? If I don't know why or I'm making shit up, quit.
Iuno, this is just me rambling. I'm just trying to stop thinking even in terms of "I'm making money even if I'm not making money". I just want to play well (which is why getting it in bad, whether or not I suck out, tilts me like crazy). Reminds me if learning Starcraft. =p
On March 15 2009 16:19 remember87 wrote:
good sound rules. I agree that your BR shouldnt decide when you should quit. But I wouldnt be able to not look at my results when I am playing good. When I have a great session it is a boost to play even more when I see how many $$ I actually made. But ofc you have to do what works for you! GL at rebuilding!
If seeing the money won makes you want to play more then definitely do it. I have a weird backwards effect where I see money won and I want to take a break, so I have to do this new system =)
On March 15 2009 17:56 SemPeR wrote:
fwiw, I think the "focus on the long term" philosophy a lot of people adhere to is unrealistic. The long term is so goddamn far away. It's hard, and that's natural (the frustration). It's also counter-productive.
You think about the contrast with tilt, and essentially, tilt is "focusing on the past". You remember prior results and they have an effect on your performance. Focusing on the long term makes you imagine the future and expect certain results. But poker isn't like that. I have very little actual experience with this (just being a low/midstakes grinder) but just learning from other, better players, has taught me that the "long term" is much longer than a lot of people understand. It's just an idea, right? As time progresses the probability of your results deviating from your EV gets steadily lower. That's all you can be certain of.
There's probably a point where you can say you are officially "unlucky" or it's "unfair", but what good does it do you.
So I'm thinking, what about the present? Why not focus purely on the here and now and nothing else. Should I bet/fold/call/raise, and why? If I don't know why or I'm making shit up, quit.
Iuno, this is just me rambling. I'm just trying to stop thinking even in terms of "I'm making money even if I'm not making money". I just want to play well (which is why getting it in bad, whether or not I suck out, tilts me like crazy). Reminds me if learning Starcraft. =p
The long term is what allows you to make the right decision. EV doesn't always come up right away. You can do 10 +EV moves in a row and lose a shitload of money. So yes, you're focusing on the moment and making sure to do the best decision, but the best decision is the one which is +EV in the long term.
Session by session you will win or lose and it doesn't really matter. It's such a small sample in relation to the long term that it's kind of just static noise. But if you focus on the moment and +EV decisions, and then look at whether you're playing hands well in +EV ways, then you're focusing on something useful.
Also thanks for the suggestion on the mind state check list. I don't think I'll do that exactly, but I do think I'm going to get a timer to use to get myself to stop sessions at certain points to do a mental status check and so on.
yeah, I totally agree with that. different phrasing I guess.
I just think of that time when I used to have like, monetary goals and they really distracted me from what I really needed to do. Improving my game, etc.
anyway gl.
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CrownRoyal United States. Mar 15 2009 20:30. Posts 11386
your rules seem too strict
move down with it feels right, move up when it feels right.
there's no reason for you to be playing nl100 with a 7k roll or something
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Brasil. Mar 15 2009 16:29. Posts 5230
