|
So I've been playing poker "part time" for the last 5 years or so. I never was really that into poker during the "glory days," but I do remember UIGEA passing and the way people talked about win rates before PTR came out. Long story short, people used to brag about 5ptbb+ winrates over what I can only assume was a very small sample, and they probably did a lot of exaggerating to say the least, but since no one could check them a winrate of 2-3PTBB was considered "decent" and 5PTBB+ was considered good. Now, almost no one is winning more than 3PTBB+ at NL$200 on stars/tilt except for a very few select players, and even then we would expect there to be a few 3ptbb+ winners on PTR even if no one has a true winrate that high just do to variance.
I've read many threads about downswings, and often you have some players saying you can't have 20+ BI downswings without playing bad. Obviously this isn't true, as http://www.evplusplus.com/poker_tools/variance_simulator/ has shown just how insane variance is. For example, if you take thirty 2.5 PTBB winner and all have them play a 200,000 hand sample, the player who runs the best will absolutely CRUSH and run at something like 4.5-5 PTBB over the sample, whereas the player that runs the worse will basically break even. This of course causes many problems for players trying to higher coaches, because someone who has a nice winrate over 200,000 hands might be reasonably priced and a very good player, but what if he's mediocre at best and on a heater? Yet if you want an established player with almost a million hands, they usually come with a much higher price tag.
Anyways, back to downswings. One thing I noticed talking to people who play cards, whether it be on AIM or the forums, is you almost always see people who think they are playing way better when they're upswinging than when they're downswing. You almost never see someone say "I lost 25 BI and played great" or "I won 25 BI but played awful." That makes sense though, right? If you play good you win, and if you play bad you lose, easy enough? I don't think that's actually the case, and I want to try to explain why starting with a few assumptions.
#1) Almost everyone runs average or better when they first start playing.
I don't think many people would disagree with this. If you run poorly when you first start playing, you're likely going to quit. There is absolutely no way most reasonable people could start their first 30,000 hands experiencing a huge bad run of cards and get through it. Most successful players are pretty smart but had to start somewhere, and most smart people would think after what seems like such a huge amount of hands to a new player they weren't very good at poker and they should just go back to whatever else they were doing and successful at.
Since most people start out running well, when they do experience a bad run of cards they will think they are running worse than they actually are, because they compare that run to how they remember poker being when they started.
#2) You can run bad in EV adjusted, coolers, and getting into "shit spots."
EV Adjusted: This one you can see on HEM. Your best guess of you winrate just from data alone is your EV adjusted winrate. Anyone that says EV adjusted only makes up 5-10% of your winnings or doesn't more accurately suggest your winrate than the actual money you've won has no idea what they are talking about, and is probably a lucksack looking to justify why he's run 100 BI over expectation and still has a very small winrate.
Coolers: These are tougher since you can't just look at a program and see how good or bad you've run in coolers. Experienced players who are honest with themselves will know whether they're running good or bad in them, but in general it's difficult to define exactly what constitutes a cooler and whether or not you should have lost less money. It's sometimes tough to tell a cooler from a "shit spot," as we'll see in the next paragraph.
Shit Spots: These spots are the most interesting when running bad and what most of the new stuff in my theory is based around. A "shit spot" is when you play a hand correctly up to a certain point, and get put in a terrible spot that was unavoidable. If you're in a bad spot, this means even though calling may be +EV at that point, it's going to be -EV for the entire hand. While I'm not going to post stats on all these players, assume I had no amazing reads and my line was correct up until the river.
http://weaktight.com/3168438
http://weaktight.com/3168863
http://weaktight.com/3168869
You get the idea.
Now for the new stuff!
So let's imagine we're experiencing a downswing, so we're running poorly in some combination of EV adjusted, coolers, and shit spots. The first thing we can do is look at EV adjusted and take out that fraction of variance, and as I said, it's a huge fraction. Were you supposed to win 30 BI adjusted but instead lost 10 BI over 100,000 hands? Then it's business as usual, nothing you need to worry about just try to run better with flush draws and flips. Modern software is awesome for this and wasn't always around, so appreciate how helpful this is to letting you know when you actually aren't nearly as good as your winrate or PTR would have others believe, or are running poorly and actually a much bigger true winner than your money won suggests (but as I said, there are fewer of these people since people who run bad tend to quit, and many players aren't good enough to get through a big downswing).
The next part of variance is just the straight out coolers. Now, I realize some coolers will be a "shit spot" as well when you ask yourself "Do I really need to felt AKs or QQ here to this players 4-bet cold?" Nevertheless, a lot of coolers are just plain and simple cooleres. AK vs AA, KK vs AA, AQs vs AK button vs blind, set over set, overpair vs set in 3-bet pot, etc etc. If you truly are a winning player and have played a decent sample of hands, you probably can very quickly say to yourself "Well, the RNG just decided to give my opponent a free stack from me."
Lastly, we get to shit spots. Now this is what I believe is the terrible, confidence crushing component of a downswing. You find yourself constantly getting into terrible spots on the turn and river, where every line you've taken up to that point has been the best possible line, and are now faced with a tough decision. Keep in mind once you're in a shit spot, you very clearly wish you could just take back all the money you've already put into the pot. For example, if you bet $60 into a $100 pot at NL$200 and your opponent jams for $90 more, you are risking $90 to win $310. If you are expected to win 25% of the time when you call, calling once you're in a shit spot is +$10 in EV, but if it's a +$10 EV call, you still expected to lose $100 on the entire hand (You put in $90, since the call is $10 +EV you get $100 back on average, and average losing $100 on the hand).
In addition, even if the call is +$10 EV, you're going to lose 75% of the time if you're running average in that spot. Since you're only expected to win a fourth of the time, you can quite easily run poorly once you make the call as well. Imagine the situation above, where we have a +EV call to put $90 in the pot and are expected to get $100 back. How often do you make that river call where you expected to rarely be good, get shown the better hand, and still feel good about the way you played it? Really think about that question. "How often do I feel good about making a thin +EV river call or bluff where I know I'm expected to lose money on the entire hand, but still feel good about it DESPITE losing the hand?"
Imagine now asking yourself that same question if you were on a heater. You've been crushing every time you sit down for the last two weeks, and when you have been making calls like this you've been good 55% of the time instead of the expected 25%. You probably still feel ok about that call now, right? You're winning at 4ptbb/100 and 2.7ptbb adjusted over the last 60,000 hands and people suck at poker, so you've got to be doing something correct, right?
Now imagine asking yourself that question while you're on a downswing. Over the last two weeks you're down 25BI, and have lost 15 BI adjusted and have lost an additional 10BI from running poorly in flips. You've called in this similar spot before 8 times in the last two weeks, and haven't won a single one of them (that's actually not that rare and happens 10% of the time). You were just telling yourself "Please call and don't jam!" right before you saw all his virtual chips move to the middle, and now you sigh and click the call button and get shown the nuts. Still feel good about the way you played it?
Obviously I wrote the last two passages in an extremely biased way, but that is your mental state once you're in an upswing or a downswing. So now we come to the cliffnotes of my theory, which is: When you're in a downswing, you are getting put in a disproportionately high amount of tough shitty spots, as well as being shown the nuts disproportional amount of the time, and THAT is what makes you think you're playing worse than you actually are. When you're on an upswing, you're getting put in a disproportionately low amount of tough shitty spots and being shown bluffs a disproportional amount of the time, and THAT is what makes you think you're playing much better than you actually are. Sure, getting coolered and losing 80% of flips isn't fun, but those are a lot easier to mentally handle due to tracking software and being able to see you got screwed when you flopped two pair against a set than constantly being put in tough, awful spots. Imagine this from the perspective of a struggling NL$10-NL$50 player. If you're asking for help on these tough spots, you either A) Have to hope someone better than you is willing to help you, yet he doesn't play at the stakes you play and often won't help you for free B) Ask peers playing the same stakes you are, who probably aren't very good and haven't been in these spots a ton of times.
I'll leave on this note: how difficult a session is to play will usually be defined by how many tough spots you're in. Usually the tough spots come when you're holding a marginal hand or a "bluff catcher," and rarely do they come when you're holding an extremely strong hand. Mathematically, you are also expected to win money when you have a nuts or air range (if you make a PSB river jam IP, you should hold value twice for every 1 bluff), and lose money when you're holding a bluff catcher. These tough, shitty sessions one right after another are usually what expose you to how "bad" you really are. You're not going to think you're only an average reg when you're flopping sets and nut flush draws and making everyone else make tough decisions, but you will feel like one where every time you flop TPGK or a good draw and you face either a raise or a fold on every single bad turn card. This doesn't mean it's less important to play well on a heater than on a downswing, rather that you should always be trying to play your very best to pay close attention and approaching each hand as objectively as possible. This way you'll maximize what you win on a heater and minimize what you lose on a downswing and will constantly develop as a player.
|
