Steepest Downswing So Far

The first three months of 2018 went very well.  I hoped that it would continue for a while, while knowing that a bad month was inevitable.  It's happening.  At the end of March my bankroll on Juicy Stakes Poker was over $500.  Just eight days later, it's $435.01. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.  I've talked about negative variance before.  It's here.

The last thing that I should so in this situation is panic or immediately make a lot of changes in how I play.  Baseball players have batting slumps.  Poker players have negative variance.  It happens and it will happen again.  The question is what, if anything, to do about it.  If it's just negative variance, there isn't much that I can do.

My job is to analyze the situation when things like this happen.  I have to make sure that if I make changes I'm making good decisions, not just reacting.  As the saying goes, there is no crying in baseball.  Well, there is no panic in poker, unless I want to make things even worse.

I looked at results and thought about my decisions over the last week, and this is how I see it:

1. I made some playing mistakes.

Most were not incredibly stupid mistakes, but one or two misplayed hands can mess up a tournament.

I unintentionally cut way back on my continuation betting.  After studying that topic and working on it for a while I had good results.  Continuation betting takes discipline because it's counterintuitive.  It's a semibluff on the flop, an aggressive play made when I might or might not have a good hand.  In poker aggression is a huge part of the equation.

I'm not aggressive by nature.  I'm a careful, logical, planning, long-term thinking, step-by-step problem solver.  I had to get way out of my comfort zone in a lot of areas to become a good player, and with c-betting I crawled right back into that comfort zone.  I made a few other small mistakes as well, but c-betting frequency is probably the biggest issue.

2. Information overload.

Being the step-by-step A to B to C planner that I am, I study best when I concentrate on one thing at a time.  I usually have one main topic of study for a month, but this time I let myself get sidetracked.  I was running some scenarios on a poker equity calculator and that led me down several what-if tracks.  When my bankroll is running down, looking at theoretical situations where my hand would have at least a 0.1% equity edge against multiple players over thousands of trials shouldn't be a priority when I might have some big leaks.  I shouldn't panic when my bankroll drops, but I shouldn't ignore it either.  When I lose 10% of my bankroll, I need to decide if I have to move down to lower buy-ins to build it back up.

3. Negative variance.

Variance is the main culprit and there is nothing that I can do about it.

I don't need to move down, at least not yet.  If my bankroll goes under $400 I'll drop down to playing only $1 or $2 tournaments for a while, but for now I'm going to ride it out a little longer.  I can't fix variance.  I need to either drop down to lower buy-ins or ride it out and I am not yet ready to panic.  I'll ride it out. The things that happened in the first eight days of this month aren't going to happen every week.

The main problem boils down to one thing.  I lost when I had the best hand.  It happened a lot, especially at the highest buy-ins.  In three straight tournaments I was all in with an ace and I lost to a weaker ace, for example, I had A9 all-in against A5 and there was a 5 on the flop.  This isn't sour grapes or observer bias or making excuses.  I can look at my 17-column spreadsheet and see everything that happened, every day.

I did OK in the $1 tournaments but I got killed at anything higher.  In a $6 rebuy tournament paying five places ranging from $51 for 5th place to $200 for first place. I went out in 6th place, and yes, I lost with the best hand.  That's the difference that one tournament, one hand, or even one card can make.

I'll work on my game and whatever else I can change.  I'm going to back off a bit on setting alarms for tournaments when I really need the sleep.  I will definitely be doing more continuation betting.

"This too shall pass"--Persian adage


Comments and questions are welcome (see box below.)