Bad streak, Advice?

[resboard]

Been doing pretty good over the first 4k hands. Was winning about 3.1 BB/100. Friday night was great +75BB. Saturday the streak starts. Getting busted by everything. No i'm not complaining i know it happens. But i'm wondering when your in a slump what do you do to try to turn it around? Take off for a few days? Drop limits? or just keep going and wait for the upswing again? I'm down roughly 210BB

Any advice is appreciated.

[Str8Fish]

when I'm in a bad spot in poker, I study my ass off. In fact, I do more learning when I'm in a downswing than when I'm in an upswing. Review your hands, try quantifying the dollar amount in mistakes. See how much you're losing in BB/100 to mistakes. Post hands you have no clue on. Time to read SSHE again. Review, review, review.

[Bona]

Great advice. Review. Think. Find the leaks (tilts?) You will bounce back better than ever.

[tehox]

I always play fewer tables and try to focus on my play. Also focus on table selection, I think when you're running good you don't think about it, but its very important.

[sarsen]

Are you reviewing your sessions after you leave the table? Have you identified what's just variance, and what may be tilt? Also, sign up for a session review and get someone else to look at some of the hands for you.

BTW, 4K hands isn't really a lot of hands to have a good idea of your long term win rate.

[fabadam]

Review, and get a feel for what you think is your biggest leak, then try to focus on fixing that.
For example, I tend to get *WAY* too aggressive on marginal hands when I'm on a bad run. So whenever I think I notice myself doing that, I set up a session of very nitty value betting.
You may be just running bad (you probably are), but it's likely there's also some bad reaction to it in your play.

[resboard]

How i normally review my play is sort hands by least profitable. And work my way through. I replay the hands and try to notice what i did and where mabye i missed a read etc. is this an ideal way to review?

Mostly there haven't been many bad plays, not even lying i've really only lots with big hands. Sets, Flushes, Trips and 15 out draws. And i know it will turn around.

On a side note i appreciate the help and advice.

[celiboy]

Poker can suck man. I'm a winning player over 60K hands so far and my last sessions have looked like this for lovely 100+BB downswing

-19
-33
-42
-6
+51
-41

The main thing is that I have hit maybe 2 or 3 draws in the last 3000 hands for flush draws, oesd's out of 25 or 30. If I hit these at a normal rate, I'd basically be break even. It's very frustrating to miss an open ended straight and nut flush draw on one hand in a 20 BB pot and then a few hands later lose to a 2 - 4 outter to some donk in a decent sized pot. It can be fricking cruel sometimes

[TomTom]

I've noticed when I'm running bad I get the feeling "the game owes me something."

The game owes no one anything. If I start to feel I'm overdue for a hit, watchout, that's when I start peeling without the odds to back my play.

[OziBattler]

[ QUOTE ]
I've noticed when I'm running bad I get the feeling "the game owes me something."

The game owes no one anything. If I start to feel I'm overdue for a hit, watchout, that's when I start peeling without the odds to back my play.

[/ QUOTE ]

same here.....IMHO bad streaks are very rarely just bad streaks of bad variance, they are normally a a result of variance plus badplay/tilt. Over a sustained bad streak the bad plays can amount to more than you think.

As an example, I had a crappy session recently and bitched and complained to Str8fish about it via AIM (after all, thats what buddy groups are for [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]) and he did what he suggests OP do in his post. ie He did a review and summed up my mistakes. It turned out that had I actually not played like a total tard then I would have actually been much closer to breakeven than my actual results suggest. Of the 25-30BB losses in the session I made 20-25BB of mistakes....much more than I thought. Wow.

*BTW its not easy to quantify how much you lost due to mistakes since a mistake preflop can cascade and sometimes you win when you make a mistake but with non-result approach it can be done to a reasnable degree.

also IMHO its not the "oh [censored], I missed another draw but that [censored] always hits his 2 outer" hands that kill me when i have bad streaks...its the combined sum of the smaller mistakes that add up between those big hands that drains your money away a 1-2BB at a time.