Amateur Poker Association & Tour
Poker Forum => General Discussion => Topic started by: MJS on July 16, 2007, 20:57:39 PM
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I"ve been playing poker for many years now but only really started to take it seriously in the last 18 months or so. I"ve read many books, as we all have, but the one"s that helped me the most are without doubt the "Harrington on holdem" volumes 1 - 3 series.
Since reading these my performances in both online and live poker seemed to be going from strength to strength, culminating in my 13th place in the Dublin APAT event (my first one). Whilst I was disappointed to not make the final table, I was really chuffed that my game seemed to be on a new level and confidence was high.
However, in the last 2 months or so things have taken a turn for the worse. I can"t seem to do a single thing right. All the marginal decisions that I was getting right before are now costing me big time. I couldn"t hit a cow"s posterior with a bango!
My question; Can success/confidence be detrimental to your game? Is a good run a precursor to a bad one by changing the way you play? Or is this just a case of fine tuning your game as you learn more?
Advice is much appreciated :-\
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I don"t think I am qualified to give advice, but there are always swings in poker, and sometimes they are huge... You will go through patches of winning and patches of losing. When you are losing you need to lose as little as possible. Sounds straight forward I know, but its something that you need to take account of.
Also, when winning we do change our game very slightly. This may be due to confidence. You should go over your HH"s and have a look at what you were doing and what you ae now doing differently.
Have you moved up a level or two too quickly or still playing at the same tables and on the same sites....
Try to get back to basics, and that winning streak will come hurtling back....
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omg
I could have written that post. (except I didn"t come 13th in Dublin - wd btw)
I, like others, have been on winning streaks and long losing streaks. My classic mistake was believing wins only come from good play and losses only come from bad luck.
I can only agree with the next post that suggests looking at HHs and level changes. By continually evaluating your play and making correct decisions you learn to enjoy the successes and ride the losses.
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You"ll be glad to know that i am aptly gifted in the art of advice giving........Mart....give it up!!!! ;D
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I sense the fear in you Mr Donnelly. You"re not still dwelling on all those chips you dumped off to me and my poket Kings are you???
I do analyse evey game I play, especially the hands I get knocked out on! If anything I think I probably overdo it. I"m glad I"m not the only one having this problem. I"ve also noticed a bit of reverse logic in this situation. We tend to play less when we are winning and more when losing to try and break the bad run. Why do we do this??
Cheers
M
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We all know that variance is part of poker life. I"m sure we have all been there. One month you hit every flop and manage to lay down strong hands at the right time. You cash in SNG"s one after another and Poker seems so easy. Then it comes back and bites you. You start missing every flop, eveyone outdraws you and you cant win a cent.
But I also think the standard online is getting better and better. As you have said most of us have read at least a couple of books, we buy the magazines and plough through the forums for advice and tips. Yes there are still fish swimming about but I believe they are getting harder to find.
I mainly play SNG & MTT at the $10 to $20 level and was wondering is there much of a difference in the standard of play between these stakes and say $50 to $100.
Anyone get much experience at these levels.
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One thing to remember when moving up the levels is that the players there are not always better players, sometimes just richer players who find it too boring playing lower levels. Obviously you are going to get better players aswelll though
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My question; Can success/confidence be detrimental to your game?
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it certainly was for me.i qualified for the ept season 2 on pokerstars for 30fpps.
www.pokerstarsblog.com/2006/02/getting-real-in-deauville.html
anyway i went on to finish in 15th place in the main event,my confidece went through the roof as u could imagine.but with my newfound wealth/confidence i then went onto record my worst 5 months results id ever had.
but i realised what was happening took a step back(almost like looking over my own shoulder)and basically forced myself to play abc poker until i was sure id got the monkey off my back.anyway it worked and i was soon back to winning ways.
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I find the best way of retaining confidence is to use a number of different sites. If you"re doing badly on one, give up and try a different one. I"ve got 12 differents sites downloaded on my computer and although I tend to rotate around a handful of favourites (Betfair,Pokerstars,Partypoker/Empire) if none of these are producing the goods, I"ll play somewhere else for a while.
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Depends what you play in all honesty.
If its cash then if your on a losing session for more than a coupe of days then some would say its variance but more than likely its your game thats at fault.
If your losing repeatedly analyse your game, yes you may have lost with ur race with JJ against AK but was there a need for it to go to a showdown could you have limped in/flat called the raise to get away from a flop containing an A or K?
You cant simply put a bad run down to bad luck, your game is never going to improve otherwise if you simply say oh well i played as best i could and just got unlucky, did you though?
There is normally something you could have done to avoid a certain outcome in poker and my suggestion would be if you look back over your Hand History for key turning points in an MTT and post them on the Blonde Hand Analysis board and see how some of the big MTT winners on there would have played it.
As you said though its only only in the last 2/3 months that your poker has taking a turn for the worse so im sure it wont be long before your game gets back on track but just never forget to analyse your plays and exits/wins in tourneys, what did you do that made you win/lose/make money.
Do your homework is my advice, and as you have gone through the process of reading a lot of the literature to improve your game previously i can see you being willing to put the time in for anlaysis (havent proof read this and have a feeling i have used the word analysis a lot).
Good Luck and WD in ireland.
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Depends what you play in all honesty.
If its cash then if your on a losing session for more than a coupe of days then some would say its variance but more than likely its your game thats at fault.
I"ve been on a losing streak far longer than a few days on a few occasions in cash games. I was getting my money in with the best hands and then getting shafted by variance. AA v KK busted three times in one session - losing four times my initial stack on the last occasion (and therefore negating 6 hours of relatively good and productive play).
Of course, I made mistakes and my play wasn"t perfect, but variance can certainly affect your cash game for more than a couple of days.
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Of course, I made mistakes and my play wasn"t perfect, but variance can certainly affect your cash game for more than a couple of days.
Agree completely, variance can cause downswings to last for way longer than a couple of days!
I like the recommendation to post hand histories online, I"d recommend the 2+2 forums for that.
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Depends what you play in all honesty.
If its cash then if your on a losing session for more than a coupe of days then some would say its variance but more than likely its your game thats at fault.
I"ve been on a losing streak far longer than a few days on a few occasions in cash games. I was getting my money in with the best hands and then getting shafted by variance. AA v KK busted three times in one session - losing four times my initial stack on the last occasion (and therefore negating 6 hours of relatively good and productive play).
Of course, I made mistakes and my play wasn"t perfect, but variance can certainly affect your cash game for more than a couple of days.
Ok if i change my argument to MTT"s then it rings true. 90% of the time you either could have accumulated chips in an earlier hand to prevent a situation like an outdraw not meaning exiting the tourney, or played a flop with the AA and possibly got away from it.
There is always a different way a MTT hand or previous hand could/should have been played which could affect the final outcome.
Variance may last longer than a couple of days, maybe a week/month whatever but there is always a method of playing a hand which can minimise its affect!
I just think its all to easy to blame "luck".
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Depends what you play in all honesty.
If its cash then if your on a losing session for more than a coupe of days then some would say its variance but more than likely its your game thats at fault.
I"ve been on a losing streak far longer than a few days on a few occasions in cash games. I was getting my money in with the best hands and then getting shafted by variance. AA v KK busted three times in one session - losing four times my initial stack on the last occasion (and therefore negating 6 hours of relatively good and productive play).
Of course, I made mistakes and my play wasn"t perfect, but variance can certainly affect your cash game for more than a couple of days.
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there is always a method of playing a hand which can minimise its affect!
I just think its all to easy to blame "luck".
You can keep the pot size small to minimise the effect of bad luck because it means that you lose less if you"re outdrawn - but that"s not necessarily good poker.
For example if after the flop you have bottom pair and your short stacked opponent goes all in - but - you put him on 2 overcards to the (non flushing, non straightening) board (eg AK or AQ), wouldn"t you call?
You"re about 75% favourite to win the pot, you have to call if you trust your judgement - but if he pairs one of his overcards that"s just bad luck, and the only way you would have been able to play it to avoid the damage would have been to fold when you were a massive favourite to win the pot.
Is this what you would advocate?
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Depends what you play in all honesty.
If its cash then if your on a losing session for more than a coupe of days then some would say its variance but more than likely its your game thats at fault.
I"ve been on a losing streak far longer than a few days on a few occasions in cash games. I was getting my money in with the best hands and then getting shafted by variance. AA v KK busted three times in one session - losing four times my initial stack on the last occasion (and therefore negating 6 hours of relatively good and productive play).
Of course, I made mistakes and my play wasn"t perfect, but variance can certainly affect your cash game for more than a couple of days.
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there is always a method of playing a hand which can minimise its affect!
I just think its all to easy to blame "luck".
You can keep the pot size small to minimise the effect of bad luck because it means that you lose less if you"re outdrawn - but that"s not necessarily good poker.
For example if after the flop you have bottom pair and your short stacked opponent goes all in - but - you put him on 2 overcards to the (non flushing, non straightening) board (eg AK or AQ), wouldn"t you call?
You"re about 75% favourite to win the pot, you have to call if you trust your judgement - but if he pairs one of his overcards that"s just bad luck, and the only way you would have been able to play it to avoid the damage would have been to fold when you were a massive favourite to win the pot.
Is this what you would advocate?
Im not advocating laying down the best hand at all here, yes he has a 25% chance of hitting but its not bad luck its simply a 1 in 4 statistical possibility.
And thats what ppl sometimes forget, its not "bad luck"! Its people who believe in luck that are usually the ones red in the face suffering from tilt!
My counter argument to yours jon would be that unless this was very early on in the tournament you should be looking to be agressive and be stealing blinds/antes so when a shortstack does do something like this, you should be freerolling with your call anyway.
If you win great, more chips- if you lose, back to where you were maybe 20 minutes ago.
Like i said your mistake doesnt have to be made on the hand you currently playing, it could have been two/three rounds ago when you had the chance to steal chips to freeroll against a shortstack, am i making sense?
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It was a crapshoot - everybody was shortstacked.
But that aside, if you have a lot of chips and your opponent has a lot of chips and you"re a massive favourite for the pot there should be nothing to stop you trying to get all their chips. If they played badly enough to put all their chips in when behind - you should try and nab them.
I"ve stated elsewhere that I think luck and probability are just different ways of describing a similar concept so it"s neither here nor there what description you use.
But you seem to suggest that if you get damaged by losing a hand like this you have made the mistake earlier by not getting more chips - my suggestion is that not only should the relative chip sizes be irrelevant but that you aren"t losing out because of a mistake you"ve made - you"re losing out because of a mistake your opponent has made.
There isn"t anything you can do stop them making mistakes and getting lucky however well you play (and vice versa - but obviously we don"t make mistakes like that ;) )
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There are occasions when you can just be unlucky (or lucky). You have QQ, flop comes Qxx, you stick a decent bet in and get called. The K on the turn is a great card if your opponent has AK, but once the chips go in and they turn over KK...
Not much you can do about that one. If you"re the one with the kings - you"re laughing. If you"re the one with the queens, you have to tap the table, smile and say "NH" (probably through gritted teeth).
I get what KP is saying though. You can "choose" when to go to war, to make sure you"re in the best shape for when the "luck" isn"t on your side, or to make the most when it is.
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I agree that you should pick your spots very carefully but sometimes the choice you have is a no-brainer and you have to stick your chips in. I had a situation a couple of weeks ago in a live home game (7 players). I was second to act and picked up pocket Kings. The player to my left made a verbal declaration to the player UTG saying "if you go all in then I will call". The player UTG thought about it for a while and proceeds to move all in.
I don"t see how I can fold, he has me covered so I call. The player to my left also calls, everybody else folds. The UTG player turns over AK o/s and the player to my left had a junk hand and just wanted to gamble during a re-buy period. As you can guess the Ace came on the flop.
Now, although this was during a re-buy period (so of course you call with Kings), I don"t see how this makes any difference. I would do the same in an APAT or any other event. If the other guy has Aces then good luck to him. My point is that sometimes your "choices" are far from that. You can"t go deep in a tournament without sticking your neck on the line in an unfavourable situation at least once, unless the deck is constantly hitting you in the face.
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This thread is turning into a bad beat post
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Getting back (vaguely at least) to the original post - do people get the impression that they get more bad luck after a big result?
Or is any slump after a big cash or win just down to the other reasons already mentioned - over confidence, for example.
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Getting back (vaguely at least) to the original post - do people get the impression that they get more bad luck after a big result?
Or is any slump after a big cash or win just down to the other reasons already mentioned - over confidence, for example.
You"ll have to help me here. Whats a big result? ;D
I"ll let you know after the weekend (lol)
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Apologies for the bad beat story, I was just trying to make a point.
Since my original post, and much analysis I think I"ve found something else which is having an effect. I think that as you find your skills, and results, improving you tend to open up your range of starting hands to try and make the most of your new skills. I guess there may be a certain amount of arrogance in the thinking you can outplay people after the flop more often. This leads inevitably to getting yourself into more trouble and cashing less.
Back to basics I think.
Thanks for people"s help on this. See you all in Luton.
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Totally agree with the last post, success breeds confidence but maybe too much success too soon breeds over confidence and arrogance. I think as your learning the game its a phase you need to go through as it will help you look at your game and analyse it and see that your now starting to play too loose and tone your game down a bit. The flip side of the coin is that when you start to go through a losing streak you maybe starting calling when before you would have raised with bigger hands and folding when you could be calling (possibly with a small pair pre flop) which leads you to play too tight and then obviously you dont pick up chips easy enough at the start of tournaments, get bullied off pots and leave tournaments without really ever doing anything
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Apologies for the bad beat story, I was just trying to make a point.
Since my original post, and much analysis I think I"ve found something else which is having an effect. I think that as you find your skills, and results, improving you tend to open up your range of starting hands to try and make the most of your new skills. I guess there may be a certain amount of arrogance in the thinking you can outplay people after the flop more often. This leads inevitably to getting yourself into more trouble and cashing less.
Back to basics I think.
Thanks for people"s help on this. See you all in Luton.
mate, i certainly didnt think of this as a bad beat thread at all.
And yes i certainly come to the problem of opening up range of hands after winning a big pot, i didnt truly realise this til my mate was railing me on a final table while speaking to me on msn and obviously playing the game but telling him my hole cards pre flop and it wasnt until he literally said look at the hand your playing now thati realised id loosened up so much after winning a nice sized pot i was paying a lot of hands like 5 7 and 6 8 soooooted.
Now when im in a tourney and i win a decent pot my mind always goes back to that thought of realising i was playing junk and that keeps me tighter (ish).
GL in Luton and see you there
KP
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Getting back (vaguely at least) to the original post - do people get the impression that they get more bad luck after a big result?
Or is any slump after a big cash or win just down to the other reasons already mentioned - over confidence, for example.
You"ll have to help me here. Whats a big result? ;D
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Funnily enough I was thinking about what a "big" result meant for me and it is more to do with its significance then it"s size or prestige. So significant result would probably be a clearer way of describing it.
Not only will what different people find significant be different, but what you find significant yourself will change over time. For example, the first significant result I had was my first online MTT win (a $3 rebuy) - but I wouldn"t find that significant now. Whereas because I"ve only played about 10 live MTTs and I haven"t won one yet - any final table in one would still be significant to me.
And it is those big (for you) results that can shake up your game a bit, but I also think that luck is out to get me after each of them as well :)
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In regards to have good streaks and suddenly not being able to do a thing right I know about that. I"ve just gotten over a 2 month losing streak where seemingly everything I did was destined to be beat. I even wrote to pokerplayer magazine at the start of this unlucky streak as I was consistantly bubbling in tournaments. Thankfully the cards seem to make sense again and My pocket kings are no longer losing to 92 suited on a regular basis. WAHEY
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Standard.
Ive seen people win upto 800k in one year, only to lose it all to huge streaks by not exersizing proper bankroll managment (KEY!). The chance of you going broke if you exersize proper bankroll managment is next to zero (obviously there arent infinately small stakes but you get the idea).
Theres also the idea of GOOD TILT, we all get bad tilt, but good tilt is calling with bad odds when your running hot which obviously means you wont profit in the long run.
I have suffered huge swings, followed by tilt and destroyed my whole roll. I have let stuff goto my head I was +5k the start of this year (considering im a student thats a hella lot of money) then i spent it all, didnt use any of it towards my roll now im building back up, cudda been playing much higher stakes right now.
But seriously, if you can say that your up overall, over a long period of time. You can analyse your game, tell yourself why you played bad and stop blaming the fish, then you are a winning player in the longrun, its not what you can achieve over the short run that counts.
Ash.
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I think most people have been through a similar situation where things go well for a while, it seems like you make the money all the time etc... What happens then as other people have alluded to is that you loosen your starting requirements, play a lot more hands in bad spots and expect to hit them or be able to outplay your opponent after the flop. When it doesn"t happen it"s called "bad luck" instead of what it is which is bad play.
Having been through this myself I found that taking time off from playing all together (maybe a month or so) allowed me to "forget" my winning streak and get back to what I was doing in the good times and quickly I started to be successful again.
One other thing I do is look back at the end of each tournament and try to pick a few key hands to review (in detail!). In particular I look at how I played them, how the other person, people played them and try to come up with an alternative scenario that would have improved the outcome from my point of view. Sometimes this may be that I think I could have won a hand I actually lost, other times it might be that I should win more or lose less. By doing this regularly I find that the same kinds of situations come up over and over again and that while there aren"t necessarily right and wrong ways to play them there are certainly better and worse. This has been invaluable to me and I find myself having better results in those situations.
Oh, and by the way, make lots of notes when doing this so you can refer to them later!
Good luck
Jon