The Win-Loss Cycle Of Mediocrity

Still chugging along at dime/quarter... and trying hard to keep my little "1k by the end of July" goal out of my mind, but it's there. Poker isn't well suited for such things.

With nearing a year of data (and what ...half a million hands?), I'm starting to notice some patterns. I've got this little spreadsheet with stats and a graph, and the graph in particular has been a helpful thing to have. It's affirming to look at all the peaks and valleys and note the general upward trend. Two steps forward, one step back.

Also apparent is the way a run of negative sessions somehow always gets followed by a strong run up, and maybe more importantly, how a run of positive sessions gets followed often by a mini-disaster.

It doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here: bad luck, bad play, and bad beats, if they continue long enough, force me to tighten up and play solid no frills poker. Some of this is doubt... when things go wrong you begin to doubt your reads, doubt your ability to catch cards just like everyone else, and end up playing a conservative (and winning) style. Similarly, a burst of good luck, good play, and good reads, will have you feeling ten feet tall and bulletproof... reigning in this (over) confidence and riding out the rush to it's natural end just isn't that easy. What ends up happening is that your calls are looser, your bets are more agressive, and you start seeing implied odds around every gutshot. You've been hitting hard lately, and what you think is reality is dangerously far from it. Eleven to one is still eleven to one, no matter how big of a stack the LAG across from you has.

Larry Phillips in The Tao Of Poker (emphasis mine):

The feeling of a winning streak-- that wonderful heady feeling when it is happening, of being in that zone where you can do no wrong-- is familiar to most poker players. Things become almost laughably easy. The game becomes an exercise in giddy ease, frictionless euphoria, joyful light-headedness ... You can almost announce the cards before they appear ... The cards keep falling into your hands right out of heaven. Such sessions need to be maximized, and the profits protected by continued solid play.

The point here... is that I've been worried lately about hitting some plateau as far as growth goes... I just feel it coming. But I've also been looking hard for leaks, because man, there surely are some big ones lurking around here... Otherwise I wouldn't be playing break-even poker lately. Not paying close enough attention to the cycle of play described above, is surely an easy one to locate. For starters, if playing a conservative style can net some strong bankroll growth after a bad run... it can surely do it during a good one... arguably, most of the time when I'm winning and not just being plain smacked in the face with the deck, this is what's going on. A key area here revolves around the nature of big bet poker: you grind out a nice hourly rate winning smallish pots for the first hour, and then bam, in one misplayed hand it gets obliterated or worse. I don't even want to tell you how many river curiousity calls I've made in the last week, when I knew I was beat. The old "surely he didn't call the turn with that", even though his big bet is screaming "oh yes I did and now you're going to pay me off", and then I do.

Another leak associated with this cycle business, is calling with speculative hands pre flop. There's a fine line here that I know I have to walk... it just fits my style at shorthanded NL... but I know I have a tendency to see implied odds behind every pre flop raise. You know what I'm talking about... you just think you know that your 75o is going to get paid off if you flop a joint. Nevermind that the odds are less than 1% (or about 8% for flopping an open-ender). When you're hitting good, these situations blur from long odds to something like coin flips in your mind.

Anyway, sometimes I can be such a donkey, but admitting is the first step. Good luck out there!

Awful tournament beat of the week:
T900
Blinds 15/30
AA UTG
min raise to 60
player behind with T1150 re-raises to 160
fold around to me
reraise to 900 all in
insta-call
AA vs JJ
Flop, J

Motto of the week:
"I can outplay a player but I can't outluck a donkey."