When major frustration kicks in?

Hey guys,

I've been playing poker online for quite some time now, and I've certainly had my fair share of ups and downs. But overall I've been profitable.

I play almost exclusively SNGs, and lately I've just been losing and losing and losing. My graph shows that pretty clearly.


Now of course I've had a rough time in terms of beats (two-outers hit all the time, sets lose to straights, straights lose to quads, you know the deal *yawn*).

The result of all this is that I'm really starting to doubt myself. How much of this is variance? How much is due to my play possibly being off? Am I in reality a losing player who merely had an initial 250-games winning streak?

Things have been going downhill for 100 tournaments now (~9,000 hands), and I'd kinda like to know how (ab)normal this can be considered?

Can you guys give me any advice on this and how to handle it? It's a major downer.

Hmm... I'm going through the same thing myself. I had an outrageous ROI on my first 300 sngs, and for the last 250 or so I have steadily lost little by little.

I have realized that it is variance, and there was no way possible you can sustain a 50+% ROI over hundreds of sngs, let alone thousands. It's the law of averages catching up to you. Just ride it out and you will probably begin to go back up as far as profit.

I have really concentrated on my game and reviewed my tourneys in PT to find leaks. Reading and reviewing my poker books has helped, and participating in this forum may be the biggest help to me. The key is not to panic and play "scared"... if you find a leak, fix it - and if there isn't a major one (because everyone has leaks) keep playing and trust that making the right plays will be profitable in the long run.

You're still up, which a lot of players can't say....this is a plus.

Can you give some rough numbers? How high was your ROI over the first 300, and how high/low was it over the last 250?

Are you back to winning now?

@mrrigel: yes, I'm still up, but seeing your bankroll shrink and shrink when you're trying to build it is extremely frustrating.

Playing 5/10$ sngs at FT, I was around 60% through the first 225 or so... then I just couldn't win and had a horrible slump where I was just breaking even with my wins. As you can see by this graph I still am slumping...


rob5775 (FullTilt)




My ROI over the last 200 games has been around -5% or zero. Overall it went down to around 21%. Still winning overall with MTT cashes, but hopefully the sngs come around soon.

Yes it is. That's poker school though. If you can make it through the storms you can enjoy the rainbows much more. You just have to find a way to have faith in the math. You have proven with your game that you can be succesful, and already are successful...that's a good thing. I try to tell myself when on a horrid streak that I'm still up, even after this horrible run...so I must know something and it has to come around. Then I drink a big martini.

It's easily attributable to variance - a sample size of 100 tournaments is nothing really. The best SNG player in the world will have 100 tournament runs with a negative ROI.

That said, the flipside is that your total sample size of ~500 is also relatively insignificant, so one can't definitively say that you're a long-run winning player either.

The best thing you can do is review hands after your sessions. Look at your big winning/losing hands, look at your late game push/fold decisions, check that you're making the right moves and if you're not sure about a hand, well, that's what the forum is here for.

Like losing KK vs AQ races ? or was that me.... I forget.

/snicker, /chuckle

Hey, I got to win one once in a while, or else I would stop spewing off chips... ya know, keep the donk playing kind of thing.

When I surfed the internet yesterday night I actually found a quite sobering excel spreadsheet (don't remember which site I got it from).

It allows you to plug in your ROI data and will generate random graphs based on this data. I've plugged in my rough current values: 1st: 12%, 2nd: 14%, 3rd: 12% for an actual ROI of 11.1%.

Here are four graphs based on this data, each simulating 400 $50+$4 SNG tournaments:


1) The first graph is roughly in line with expectation. The simulated ROI over 400 tournaments comes out as 15.2%, with the profit being $3.290 instead of the mathematically expected $3.000.
Between tournaments 180 and 330 there's a long losing streak of $1,700.

2) Hard to believe, but this graph is based on the same data. ROI after 400 tournaments comes out as 1.3%, with the profit only 1/10th of what would be expected.

3) But it can get worse. Once again the same data, this time we end up with a huge loss after 400 tournaments!

4) And it can go the other way too of course. The very same data now produces a profit of almost $8,000, with the simulated ROI coming out as 36.2% which is way beyond expectation.
The scariest part about this last graph is what you don't see. Since the ROI is way beyond expectation for so long, at some point this will almost certainly be followed by either a major losing streak or an extended break even period.

This was really quite the eye-opener because it shows that 400 tournaments don't even get you close to finding out your true long-term ROI. The fluctuations can be insane.

As sobering as these stats are, they make me feel much better because now I know that making a loss over 100 tournaments is nowhere near as unexpected as I thought.

Exactly^^. If you look up most players who have played thousands of sngs and made profit, most only have ROI's of between 3% and 10%. Check out some of the leaders at Sharkscope to get the idea. Thats why my "run" of late doesn't have me overly stressed out.

hey you are doing goood as far as I can tell. Continue to play solid. Probability will work its magic over time.

I think you can put to much thought into those graphs.We all know that the 5-10sngs are pretty loose.You cant control the chasing that goes on in those tournies.It's nuts.What Im trying to say is,as long as your not changing your game,its not you,its them.