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Keep this in mind when thinking about chasing losses. When we play poker as learned players we understand things like variance and winrates. When your playing in your usual game you may not have had enough hands to actually know your true winrate, but you have a winrate nonetheless. For example, saying you have a true winrate of 5BB/100 hands, that would net you a buy in every 2000 hands. Over a month you may play 25K hands which will earn you over 10.5 buyins. Pretty simple math, but the funny thing is we may have some good or bad variance in that one month sample and win more or less than our true winrate actually is.
In knowing this, why do we continue to play when we are down? We do it to win money back. But in actuality, over our longer term game we are really only going to win 5BB/100 hands. Meaning we will need to play 2000 hands more just to win back our buy in we have lost, but in all reality that is not what we think when we keep playing. There is another problem to this puzzle. Nobody plays the same poker game every time. We have levels of skill and I am sure you have heard about A game, B game and C game or some variation. Well, we tend to estimate our winrate by how we play our A game in our minds. When we have good sessions and string them together we have all started doing the math. "I can earn this much over this many hands and be mother fucking rich" we tell ourselves. But how often do we actually play our A game? That's a question you need to tell yourself the answer to, and if you don't like the answer then fix it. Things that will take you off of your A game are fatigue, stress, being focused on other aspects of life or the internet and mostly TILT. So basically what happens to our scenario of playing to catch up? Well we just tilted and have stopped playing our A game. We are now not playing at 5BB/100 but considerably less, maybe even playing our C game has us playing at -5BB/100, so we are in fact not playing catch up but we are playing donator.
Yea, sometimes you win back the money playing a C game by tilting and jamming some bad hand and sucking out, sometimes we will get AA two times in 55 hands and actually take down some nice pots, but over the next 6 months our C game will still run us at -5BB/100 so we need to eliminate playing that game, or minimizing it.
We need to do two things that are more important than playing catch up at that time. One, We need to work on our A game. We need to get better, and we need to learn more. One interesting thing is that you will never learn anything about poker while playing a C game (or on tilt) Just try it, send a hand history to someone when your tilted or burning after a session and watch how angry you get when they tell you you should have folded on the flop. You don't hear that, you may even close the MSN/AIM window, shut down IRC or just close FTR if it's posted here. You only learn poker in your A game mindset. AHA moments come in your A game mindset. We need to work on being in that midndset all the time. The other thing we need to do is work on our C game. Get that c game better. If your C game has you never tilting, never distracted, but it's the worst you can play and that is a 2BB/100 winrate type of game then it's a win/win. You will be playing in your A game more often and it will be a better A game. You will play in your C game less often and it will not be a hindrance to your poker life. The gap will be closer so transition will be easier and last there will be no more tilt.
Seriously, don't play catch up. I can tell you from experience that I have had some serious problems with c game type downswings causing me to lose almost my entire bankroll several times. I stunted my poker growth for over a year by playing tired, stressed and just not in a good place. I can tell you now that it's better to shut down the tables down 2 BI's and getting back into your A game either later in the day, or next week, than it is to try and eek out 200 more hands in the wrong state of mind. Everyone has losing sessions. Durr has losing sessions, Phil Galfond has losing sessions, even our very own Nutsinho, the best online player there is at the moment has $100K downswings. The losses happen, play your A game and get some sleep. The tables aren't going anywhere. And there is no way in hell you will make any life altering money in that very moment your tilted, bitching at the table and just hating life.
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Too obvious?
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Originally Posted by spoonitnow
3
): win 29.20% lose 70.80% tie 0.00% EV 0.292
): win 70.80% lose 29.20% tie 0.00% EV 0.708
