I’ve managed to recover a little bit from my largest downswing so far. I reached the bottom after a little over 4,000 hands and 280 big bets lost at $5/$10 limit hold ‘em.  I had a really hard time playing when I was near rock bottom, as Chuck mentioned. I’ve come out of that slump psychologically, now. At least it feels that way. I suppose I don’t know how I would react to another brutal downswing of the same size now. But right at this moment, I’m feeling stronger and better than ever at poker. I’m playing better than I ever have, and the treshold that I mentioned in an earlier post has been crossed. Maybe it was a downswing that was needed for me to stop worrying about money and be more aggressive. I don’t know.

Someone suggested that I step down to 3/6 to plug the leaks that caused the downswing. I did, for awhile, and I did ridiculously well at 3/6 (I was running hotter than hell, honestly), but not so much to plug leaks as to regain a foot hold at a limit where the money wouldn’t hurt so much. The comment did ring a bell with me though, perhaps I had been playing really poorly over the last 4k hands? So today I did a few investigations with PokerTracker.

First thing that popped out was that during these 4k hands, AKs was a loser for me. I got dealt it 15 times, and I lost a total of $109, or 0.72BB/time dealt. That’s hardly the norm. Contrast that to the rest of the year, when AKs has earned me 1.27BB/time dealt. That was the first thing that popped out.

I also noticed that I had lost money on AJs, an otherwise big winner.

Then I went to the misc. stats tab. That’s when I realized that no, it wasn’t primarily because of bad playing that I was losing money. I had been running awfully. Really, really bad.

I had lost quite a lot of money with three-of-a-kind. Usually a huge winning type of hand, trips had over the past 4k hands cost me $250. Maybe you think that when you lose $2,800,  $250 is hardly the only cause. But keep in mind that I didn’t just lose $250, I also missed the expected profit. The rest of the time, trips have made me 2.6BB on average. Now, I had lost 1 BB per time. The difference between winning 2.6BB and losing 1BB per time means that I was down $1k just from bad luck with trips.

At this point, I started to feel better about myself. Maybe I didn’t suck so badly after all, maybe I had just gone through a really bad streak of hands. Of course, I had been tilting, there was no hiding from that fact. But hardly all of it, in fact probably only a small part of it.

But now that’s behind me, water under the bridge. I feel confident again. I can beat this game. Bad luck be damned.