Controlling Losses

[mixmastermattyk]

I originally posted this in Small Stakes Short-Handed as that's pretty much exclusively what I play and was told I'd find good responses here. I'm sure there are probably a thousand posts on this topic already, so sorry if there are.

Anyway, I need help with the mental side of my game, namely controlling my losses. My losing days always seem to be much, much greater than my winning days. I'm a winning player but whenever I lose, I tend to lose big. I'm not sure whether this is me being over-confident in my abilities to beat my opponents or whether it is something else altogether. I don't steam and if I do it really doesn't last long so it's not a raging monkey tilt issue. I'm not sure whether I ignore the other factors that are at play during any given session and this maybe the cause. SH Hold'em is about as swingy as any form of poker gets and I think often write off initial losses as variance and chase them, but end up down even more and often feel like I'm being run over by average players at the end of a session. I stop playing if I can consciously recognise I'm not playing my A game (perhaps I'm just not very good at objectively rating my own play) or if the table is crap and full of TAGs but my problem seems to be where I end up down fairly big at tables which look too good to leave.

What advice can you offer in regards to controlling losses? Is it a good idea to have set loss limits and adhere strictly to those even if a table appears to be +EV?

All advice/help is very much appreciated.

[Poker Fool]

if you have not learnt to walk away from a table with a loss, learn that skill. Stop losses are going to be useful in that initial training.

I suspect your losing sessions are a lot longer than your winning sessions coz you simply dont want to leave a table stuck.

there are many good reasons to bail out of a table when you start losing.

Sure you think you can beat it, but as most of us over-estimate our abilities then maybe you cannot.

once you start losing other players notice this and will play a different sort of game against you than the one they play when you are ahead.

you might well be playing below par, either coz of cards, opponents, your loses, whatever the reason, you are losing and at that particular moment in time it is likely you are not going to be able to do much about the factors creating that.

if you have an urge to play poker and cannot tear yourself, if you have pokertracker, satisfy yourself with reviewing the session in its entirety and see how you could have played differently.

[Mickey Brausch]

Walking away from a +EV situation on account of negative variance is generally a losing proposition, all things being equal.

When I was playing Blackjack, the last thing we wanted to do was walk away from a good table even if we were getting hammered. As long as we were having the advantage, we were supposed to put up the action until the last cent in our pockets and, if the gods of chance wanted it that way, lose it all.

I guess what you're trying to say is that you do not realize when -- on account of tilting or whatever-- you are no longer in a +EV situation. And you're losing big money not because of bad luck but because of (your) bad play. Well, realizing that, my man, is a much, much more difficult mental feat than getting up and walking away "when you have lost too much money". Rest assured that "walking away from losing" is not that tough.

So, essentially, this comes down to your ability in critical self-assessment. In knowing thyself.

Mickey Brausch

[DING-DONG YO]

I have the exact same problem. I chase losses and play way too long as a result. My winning days are 20-30BB for a 1-2 hour session and my losing days are 100BB+ for a 4-6 hour session. And I know I'm playing like hell at the tail end of the losing sessions but still keep chasing.

I feel for you, OP. I could use some advice as well.

[stickdude]

I used the have the exact same problem. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

A couple of times in the past, I had been able to come back from a 40-50BB deficit to get back to even, so because I had done it once, I could do it every time, right? Wrong. A 400BB downswing last month taught me otherwise. Much of that downswing came from me trying to get back to even after dropping 20-30BB in a session instead of focusing on making the best decision each hand. I had a few sessions where a 20-30BB loss soon became a 75BB+ loss. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

What changed?

First, I read a line in the book "Inside the Poker Mind" by John Feeney - in there he said, "The next hour of poker you play is the next hour you play". It doesn't matter if that next hour takes place in the next 60 minutes, or tomorrow, or a week from now. For some reason that line really pointed out to me that our poker career is really just one big session, and our results for a given day at a given table really don't matter. I realized how utterly stupid it was to try to get back to even in an individual session - it's like a football team switching to a hurry-up offense and throwing long bombs just because they're down a touchdown in the first quarter - there's still a lot of game left, and as long as they stick to their game plan (in our case, making good decisions in every hand), things will work out.

Second, I discovered a little program called TiltBlocker (you can search the forums for a link). It's a little opaque window that you put on top of your stack so that you can't see the size of your stack (because in limit, the size of the stack you currently have at the table is irrelevant, provided you have the 12BB necessary to cap every street when you get a monster). With TiltBlocker, I honestly have no clue how much I'm up or down. I usually have a rough idea if I'm up or if I'm down, but that's about it. Since I can't worry about chasing losses (because I have no idea how much I'm down), I can focus on the one thing that matters - making the best possible decision each hand.

And the results so far? September has been my best month ever. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]