Analysis of a downswing

[poincaraux]

good post and good luck.

[yad]

This is a good post, and I hope that you manage to recover quickly.

I think that you're taking the wrong lesson from this if you become too cautious in moving up though.

I think it's probably important to be really cautious about moving up once you reach high levels where the money is a lot more than you could get in other ways. But at these small stakes, going busto just isn't that big a deal. If you have a reasonable job, $500-$1000 is just not a lot of money in the overall scheme of things. If you lose it, that stinks, but it's not like it's going to change your lifestyle.

To me, the point of playing small stakes is to have fun and learn in the hopes that eventually I'll be able to play at higher stakes where I can actually make enough money to make a real difference in my life. So it doesn't really make sense to stay at a lower level a minute longer than necessary. If I move up before I'm ready, it costs me a few hundred bucks. No big deal. But if I don't move up soon enough, I'm improving slower than I could, so it'll take me longer to get to mid and high stakes, which will cost me lots.

My point is basically that if you are smart and have confidence that you will eventually be able to beat at least the mid-stakes games, then don't waste time to save a little money. Once you get to $400NL, those 4 buyins at $50NL won't seem like much.

What I think is a good plan is that once you feel your game is ready, build up 2-3 buyins for the next higher game. Use this money to play that game, 2 or 3-tabling at most. If you lose it, repeat the process (unless you've realized that you were wrong and aren't ready). If you don't lose it, well you've just moved up (though be ready to move down for a while if you hit a significant downswing).

Also, as you do this, I've found it really good to focus a lot on table selection. If you see a total donkey above your current level, it often makes sense to play him. I play $100NL and am trying to move to $200NL, but I have played as high as $600NL when I find really terrible players. It hurts when I occasionally lose a $400 stack or something at these limits, but on net it has been very profitable. I just make sure to do it with money that's been built up for taking shots (i.e. not right after losing in an earlier shot, but only after I've rebuilt).

This has worked well for me anyway, from a few days of $2NL up to my current project of trying to move to $200NL.

[bueno09]

I just can´t see how you went busto and still thinks 10buy-ins is enough, it isn´t, regardless of your style.
1-Relative size of the bets compared to your bankroll, aka the pressure of bigger bets. It is something that shows up when you move up, because of that (even if u don´t think you do) you will play scared, you will take lines that try for a cheap showdown, when the right play is to get value, you will be afraid of reraise AK sometimes and make big CBs, well, you won´t be able to fully use your skillset to make money.
2-As said before, downswings happens, just for example, saturday i lost 4 buy-ins at NL100, but since i had 26 in my BR, i didnt need to drop down, and didnt play afraid because of that, since you have only 10 buy-ins when you moved up a 4 buy-in downswing (which is pretty normal) is almost half of your bankroll, you will drop down and play frustrated or stay at NL50 and play tilted.
Also, it may not be relevant to the discussion, but since January, i moved up from NL10 to NL100, and all times i mvoed up, my first 5k hands at the level were break even poker, afther that, i started betaing the game at my usual rate, what i mean by this is that i didn´t have diferent skills once i started to beat the new level, the only thing that changed was that the new money didn´t mean a lot to me and i was able to play with confort, not being afraid of paying what was a full stack in the previous level calling a bet in the river.

If u want to see any of my graphs to see the lines of when i moved up, PM me.

Just to make a summary, have 20buy-ins for your current level, even if it is NL25, after some 16k hands you will probably have the bankroll and the experience to play the next level, then mix some tables and move up.

Sorry about my english, it is hard to try to write of something not usual as downswing in a language that is not your main one.

Good luck man!

[BigJimSlade]

Nice post BW.

I've just read through the thread and i'm really surprised at the number of people that are playing with 10x buyin. Considering a lot of advice that is given towards marginal situations is "if you are properly bankrolled, taking this gamble wont be a problem", I assumed that people would have 20x buyin (15x minimum).

This rule became even more important for me after I first moved upto 50NL. I finally got my BR to 1k and felt that my game was good enough, my roll high enough and I was confident I could handle playing for bigger stakes.

So I made the move and WHAM! Within 2 hours I lost 4 buy-ins from horrible luck (set under set, AA all-in twice pf and lost to KJ and JJ, that kinda thing). Then I went onto lose 2 more buy-ins from tilty bad play (i'll describe this form of tilt further down).

So now i'm looking at a roll of only $750 and I had to ask myself "What now? Drop back to 25NL or continue here? If I continue, how much can I stand to lose before I drop? If i'm worried about the money, can I play good poker?".

So I decided to drop back down. Ever since then i've considered even a 20x buyin to be too small for me because I saw for myself how quickly things can go wrong. When I got my BR back to $1250, I felt confident enough to move up again because even if a horrible downswing happened, i'd still be at what I consider to the minimum BR required for that level and could make a decision on whether to continue.

I'm actually now close to the BR required for 100NL, but I know I wont be making the move for a long time.

Tilty Bad Play...

A lot of people will believe they aren't tilting because they're not calling big raises preflop with any 2, or becoming super-aggressive and attempting to push someone off a hand when you have air. When i'd tilt, this is something i'd never do, it'd probably be better if it was because it would be much easier to spot I think.

My tilt (and I think a lot of others) is when I no longer KNEW I had the best hand, it's when I PRAYED to the poker gods that I did. I'd look at the board and say to myself "Wow, that's horrible looking, but SURELY it's my turn to win a big pot! I mean i've sat here for an hour, had my big hands cracked by these idiots with junk and now I have top pair-top kicker, sure there's 3 to a flush but it'd only be fair for me to win here!".

This post turned out longer than I expected and probably didn't have a real point, sorry about that!

[BigJimSlade]

Personally, I think it's a bad idea to think of it as "it's only $25 or $50", it's all relative to your bankroll. When I get to the higher stakes, I know that if I lose a $400 buy-in it'll affect me the same way as if I lost a $50 buy-in now, i.e. not at all.

Also, what better stage of your poker life to learn bankroll management than at the small stakes? I sure don't want to have a painful lesson at the higher limits.

[AZplaya]

Nice post Slade. I have a similar problem with tilt in that when I tilt it's not the disgusting chip spewage type that's easy to spot, but it's a slow and painfull bleeding of my chips. When I find myself saying "[censored] it, I call" when a draw hits and a fish min-raises my top pair, I know it's time for a break.

[Blarg]

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I remember reading a post a while back where someone ran BB/100 and the SD on a computer program that spit out the normal distribution of the winrate for 100 players over 100K hands (I would be very grateful if someone had a link). The numbers he input where, I think, 2PTBB/100 and an SD of 45. This was for limit and this is a very good winrate. The program ran all the numbers and reported winrate for those 100 imaginary players over 100K hands. The results were that 4 out of the 100 people had a winrate of below .4BB/100 or almost break even over 100 thousand hands. Those are scary numbers. So, to really know your true winrate you might need more than 50K hands, you might need a million to be absolutly sure. This means that even the best poker players will have 20k, 50k or even 100k breakeven streches. And you never know when it will happen. All you can do is improve your game cause most people, even some excellent players, underestimate the true power of Variance.

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I think this is very true, and becomes pretty clear when you've built up a couple or few 50k samples. Especially if you look how much a single starting hand, a pair of aces, contributes to your profit total. I noticed in limit that it took very few aces coming out differently to have quite a notable effect on a 50k sample size's profitability. It was pretty unnerving, really, and a little hard to believe, how so few hands could skew the stats so strongly.

[yad]

[ QUOTE ]
Personally, I think it's a bad idea to think of it as "it's only $25 or $50", it's all relative to your bankroll. When I get to the higher stakes, I know that if I lose a $400 buy-in it'll affect me the same way as if I lost a $50 buy-in now, i.e. not at all.

Also, what better stage of your poker life to learn bankroll management than at the small stakes? I sure don't want to have a painful lesson at the higher limits.

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I disagree. Bankroll management is all about deciding when to pass up what you think are +EV situations (i.e. playing at a higher stakes that you think you can beat) in order to limit your potential downside and avoid going so broke that you can't play poker anymore. This is one area of poker that is very much about the absolute value of the money.

Another way to think about it is to realize that your true bankroll isn't really what's in your poker account. It's what's in your account plus whatever you're willing to supplement that with from your job in the event of a downswing. At low stakes, the latter is large compared to the former (provided you have confidence in your poker skills and are hence willing to invest from your other earnings). Basically, if you're happy to put in $1000 from your job when you hit a downswing, you don't need $1000 in your poker account to play 50NL.

[ajmargarine]

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Nice post BW.



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[JackAll]

I moved up to my current limit about 2 weeks ago after being very confident from my previous limits where I moved up quickly over the last few months. The first morning I moved up, I lost 3 buy-ins due to playing weak-tight from playing scared with double the money and decided not to be a pussy and stick to my game. Over the next few days I picked up 10 and was pretty happy with it and my confidence was at its usual high.

Then I had a horrific day. All those people that post about losing 3 buy-ins in a day should really stop bitching. Anyway, after that day, I went up and down to stay level for a few days, then lost a few more over the next few days. My confidence was at an all time low.

I think the main thing I learned wast how important bankroll management is. My level is about the cut-off for me as far as recovering lost money through other avenues. I had over 20 available, so that helped me not freak out and tilt. If I only had 10 buy-ins I'd have had no bank roll left and would probably feel a lot like giving up the game alltogether. The advice I heard from a friend is that a bankroll should be 20 at the current limit plus 2 at the higher one before you go up to the higher one (so 1000+200 to go from 50NL to 100NL), and if you lose the 2 when moving to the higher limit, then you go back down until you are back to 20+2 and try again. I didn't stick to this advice because, as I said, this level is borderline for recovering my roll. But from now on I'll definitely be practicing correct roll management. I'm also thinking that since luck (both good and bad) seems to come in bursts, I should stick to a strategy of leaving no more than 5 buy-ins available to lose in any one day. If that's gone, then the act of putting more in would hopefully make me realise I should take the rest of the day off.

On the up side, I did analyse a lot more of my hands and learnt a lot from it, whereas I rarely looked at my hands while doing well. So it definitely had a big benefit to my play. Still bruised the ego quite badly.

I guess this post didn't really help much, but I hope you realise you're not on your own with these big swings, and that we all learn how hugely important bankroll management is at different stages of our poker playing lifetime.

Hope your're back on your feet soon and in the game.