On teh recieving end of bad beat for 7 days straight, nonstop.

ventrolloquist said:

Maybe I should just lean more towards an ABC style at NL2?

I can't figure out if variance is screwing me or if I've gotten reckless.

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ventrolloquist said:

Hi guys. I've been on a 25 buy in downswing for 7 days straight and cannot figure out if its and beats or if I've started playing worse and giving other players less credit for big bets.

I'm literally missing 90% of flops for 7 days straight. These past few nights a huge proportion of my bluffs are getting called, my value bets kept getting folds, my strong hands like nut flushes would get destroyed by a bad river I'd never expect to complete a full house, top pairs would get wrecked in 3 bet pots by somone's pocket 2's that hit a river set, etc.

Basically I would keep losing my nonshowdown winnings in one hand. And I'd always be on the recieving end of bad beats.

Then when I'd fold borderline playable hands an unusually large proportion of them would have hit a strong hand. Tonight, I am not exaggerating, about 70% of my folds have hit! My ace and king raises pre would get folds all round the table at an unusually high rate.

Today I continue to hit bad beats nonstop (full house vs better full house) and continue to see my folds hit monster hands VERY often... Then the damn software glitched saying I have insufficient funds and the timer ran out causing me to fold a set mining hand which would have flopped a full house. This happened on both tables with the same cards at the same time (except on of them flopped,only 2 pair after i folded). It feels like the software is purposely trying to tilt me [emoji24]

I cant figure out what's going on and feel like I'm going crazy.

The worst part is that the opponents dont fold when I bet big to deny equity with my strong hands and often hit their flush or whatever, meanwhile I do fold to similar sized bets and watch as the river completes my folded flush/straight. So the argument that the opposite situation will eventually balance out bad beats doesn't even apply because I don't like calling draws with bad odds.

Maybe I should just lean more towards an ABC style at NL2?

I can't figure out if variance is screwing me or if I've gotten reckless.

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Aballinamion said:

Hi there Nick, thank you for posting. Lemme try to help you.

I think you need to prepare your mind before entering into cash tables. As I said before, cash games can be very boring, because sometimes we stay more than 100 hands without getting any action: we raise and they fold, we 3-bet and they fold, our c-bets for values are folds, etc.
The variance can be great too, we can easily stay 100 k hands being breakeven or even losing. I don't know but I think it is possible to us to suffer a variance of 3 months without making any 'profit'. (be happy because MTT grinders can suffer huge variances and stay more than one year or two without making any dime).

Cash compared to MTT:

Compared to MTT, where there is a ton of adrenaline because there are the pay jumps, the bubble, the people praying for us outside the game and watching, so without any doubt MTTs have much more emotion than cash games, which are very much the same everyday.
Some players start to get bored, because we play for a very long time, even many tables and nothing happens and maybe we start to add hands to our range that we don't usually play, we decide to bluff on spots we should be usually checking and etc.

Tilting

One of the things I do to avoid tilting situations, is never to look for results! When I say results, I mean, when we finish our session and we jump right into our tracker to see if we make a good winrate or a bad winrate: this is bad because if we win too much during a session we might want to play more when we are already tired, thus losing, or we make a pretty sweet winrate during a day and the other day we decide not to play because we don't want our winrate to go down, etc.
The same goes for when we make that terrible session when we lose 5, 6, 8 buy-ins or more, we might get desperate, eager to recover our losses, and thus allowing ourselves to enter into phychological traps of our own self:
It works for me, it may not work for you or anyone, but I do two things when I am grinding:

A) Hide Balance: I never look into my balance because I know I always have a healthy BRM, so don't need to be worried if I am winning too much or earning too much.
I can sustain pressure for more than 3 months, if I am playing any cash game limits from 2 NLHE to 200 NLHE, I must have the proper Bankroll, or do not play until I have it.

B) Never look into session results every day: try to look for results once per week at maximum. The ideal for me is to look my winrate once per month and sometimes I stay two months without looking into a tracker's results. (let the ego becomes a baby).

Talking a little about ego:

I use to get very emotional either when I am winning to much or when I am losing too much (ego), this is why I look my results once in 15 days or once in a month. It was not easy for me, because I was very eager to see results every minute, so I started working myself, and stayed one day without looking into it, two days and so on.
One thing most professionals and regulars are always telling us: do not play result oriented! When we start to look too much our results we are going to play depending if we are winning or losing and this changes our style/ranges/emotional control.
We look our results and see that our winrate is 30 bb/100 for 2000 k hands played, so we start to 3-bet more, open more hands, we start to be more aggressive on spots we were not suppose to be doing so, so we are being oriented by the result of our session and thus making mistakes based upon it.
On the other hand, if we look into our results and see that we are losing too much we might start to fold hands that we are usually calling, and making more mistakes based on the past results of our sessions (we get emotional, letting our ego take over).
Have a neutral way of behavior, without passion, behaving like a corporation with the sole objetive of making profit. Play in a way that you are never emotional but a 100% analytical when you are sitting at a cash table.
Don't try to level with other regulars, actually try to avoid them, remember that our mission is to play versus recreational players.

How to really avoid tilt?

Personally, I use the "Stop Loss" strategy, which consists basically on quitting the game when I feel that I am:

A) Tired, bored, or for any reason simply not focused, motivated, thinking about spots easily, this is a good reason for quitting a session.
B) Tilted: when I call 4-bet with KK and comes an ace on the flop and I complain "Again! oh my god no!". So, when I am complaining I know I am starting to get tilted because it happens everytime, we have KK and comes an ace on the flop, but when we are bored, tired we start to get emotional and care for things we usually ignore. When we do start to complain "omg they pay too much" is the best sign you are starting to tilt, because this is why do we play versus weak players, because they pay too much, and suddenly we got ourselves complaining of our most rich souce of profits? We quit the session when the tilt starts to appear not when we are like All-inPAV, breaking computers, this is a real bad example of him and I guess it should be punished for the poker rooms who are always claiming the Responsible Gambling and their paramount flag.
C) Cold Table: if you are playing regular tables, and you see there are not even one fish to exploit, and the others are all regulars, or nits, we don't need to be leveling, we need to find the most profitable table, where we can have fishes sitting out of position in relation to us, let's let our ego aside and play a 100% analytical game.
D) After we do play 1 hour and 1/2 we do quit: our mind cannot process too much information, we are not computers! Let's take a break of at least 20 minutes and relax, make some yoga, take a walk, make exercises, clean your mind and prepare your body for hard times.

This is one of the most complicated subjects in poker, I stronly recommend you check this article:

https://www.pokervip.com/strategy-a...s-dodson-law-key-to-optimal-poker-performance

Regards;

Carlos 'Aballinamion' Barbosa

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