Brian Townsend's Downswing (for all the Brian Townsend haters)

[silver book]

I dunno why everyone is so worried about brian. He just needs to watch some muddywaters videos to get his game back on track.

[Victor]

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You know what would be the greatest.

One day soon we wake up and there is no aba, no sbrugby, no brain townsend in the poker world.
He just ups and leaves us all. Takes his roll and quits poker for good.

What respect I would have for that kid. Pulls his 7 to 8 figure hard earned bankroll and moves on.

No more variance, no more poker stats, no more upswings and downswings.

He proves he is better and smarter than us all.

Then he truly would become a poker winner.

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ya this is what i was alluding in a roundabout fashion in my other post. i just dont see why he would continue to play when inherently one is always on the brink of losing 20x60k+

[tautomer]

All he needs to do is write an autobiographical poker strategy book and he makes millions. Even the haters will buy it. The railtards will definitely buy it. I'm sure he knows this.

[SteelWheel]

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Live 1/2NL plays like 10/20NL online.


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I hope you're kidding. You've got it exactly backwards.

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I wish I even understood what the original comment-er was trying to suggest here. Am I supposed to believe that the players in a live 1/2 game are of the same skill as 10/20 online? If so, I disagree. But then again, my own experience is that I'm much more successful playing 10/20 NL in a B&M, than online. I know everyone is going to tell me about the faster pace online, and how there are so many more hands played, multi-tabling makes for even more profit potential, blah blah blah.

But when I play live, I get to see my opponents--I can tell which ones have been drinking, who's on tilt, etc. Plus, average stack sizes are much larger in a live game than an online game of the same blind structure, thus allowing for my opponents to make larger mistakes. For me, live NL is always my preferred choice over online--online is just something I do from time to time when I'm home, and not in Vegas, LA, AC, etc.

[mephisto]

Okay, so aba is down big, apparently whitelime is down big and taking a break from poker according to his blog, so his is gaining from all this? Is it lars luzak, phil ivey? Who is the top of the hill in NLHE?

[AggroFish]

Didnt even read the whole thread but I'm not suprised I havent seen and Sbrubgy posts lately.

[corpseartist]

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Live 1/2NL plays like 10/20NL online.


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I hope you're kidding. You've got it exactly backwards.

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I wish I even understood what the original comment-er was trying to suggest here. Am I supposed to believe that the players in a live 1/2 game are of the same skill as 10/20 online? If so, I disagree.

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You and the guy you quoted were leveled hard and too stupid to know it.

[rokstedy]

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Every time Townsend experiences a downswing of magnitude, he blames his play. He asks himself tough questions about his psychological/emotional state and his concentration. He looks on the problem in terms of opponents, to paraphrase "I should be able to crush these guys."

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Isn't it wiser to try and find faults with your game instead of just calling it a downswing or variance?

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Sometimes. And sometimes you just have to admit to yourself that you're NOT SUPPOSED TO WIN ALL THE TIME! I agree with busted's evaluation of Brians situation. He's thinking too much. He just needs to play poker. The only other advice I might give is take a LONG break. Maybe 2 months or so.

[rokstedy]

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I get the strong feeling there aren't too many experienced traders on these boards. Definitely not traders of my vintage.

Surviving as a trader/gambler through extreme variance without going broke is something that can only be learned from experience.

It's entirely possible for talented traders/gamblers to shoot the moon early in their careers. Normal distributions say it's possible and it does happen. However, shooting the moon doesn't mean you have the ability to survive extreme fluctuations in bankroll. More specifically, it doesn't give you the experience and tools to spot oncoming extreme fluctuations in bankroll.

Ideally, you want to avoid putting on (two-sided) risk outside of your ability to understand its origins, and most importantly your ability to anticipate and control an outsized random component.

This is what has just happenned in the mortgage-backed credit-markets. The sub-prime mess, as it's called. The players running the hedge funds that are all going to go busto shortly were not at all stupid, and they were not inexperienced either (at least at lower levels of risk, and/or in other games). However, in terms of outlier experiences, they had little or no experience. By all playing the same game, even as many other players distanced themselves from it, effectively they boxed themselves in into an illiquidity trap that sprang when even moderate negative events occurred for their models. Bottom line, when it became imperative to offload risk or die, there was no one to buy it.

The above obviously is not a direct analogy to poker.

However, all gamblers who experience a tremendous upswing without ever having experienced the game itself go suddenly ferociously wrong, tend to trap themselves in the same fashion. They gradually "modify" (semi-consciously misinterpret) events so that the world conforms nicely to their attribution of success primarily to their own ability or patterns they have perfected.

This is what I refer to as the first rule of professional gambling: never mistake what you think should be happenning with what is actually happenning.

How could the game go wrong for Townsend in a sudden ferocious manner ? I don't really know. I don't play poker at that level, at those stakes, against those players. I'll throw out a guess: within increased visibility comes increased scrutinization and his opponents are onto many patterns in his play.

But knowing why the game might change is not nearly as important as recognizing that it is in the midst of changing and you need to get out and re-invent yourself before playing again. (Get out for practical purposes, not get totally out.)

9-12 months ago it's entirely reasonable to think that some of these highly-levered mortgage-backed hedge fund guys could have recognized that the game was changing, and they could have unwound their positions and moved on to something else. But I'll bet 99% of them didn't. They were making too much money, they were superstars, everyone loved them, they were smarter than everyone else, etc., etc. In short, they had long ago stopped asking themselves the question "Is this a game I want to play?" because they had in many ways become the game.

I see some of this in Townsend's blog. He seems to be veering into thought territory where the game must always conform to him (e.g. he can always figure out the leaks in his game, concentrate better, ride through variance, study his opponents more and figure them out, etc). If he had gone busto from on high before, he would instead be looking at the variance (downside AND upside) that he is experiencing this year and be seriously asking himself if he should just get out of the game.

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Geez, I think we might have found the most intelligent post on this forum ever.

[costanza_g]

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If there was ever a lifetime graph I'd like to see...

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