Hello! Lately I am feeling a bit frustrated because I have the feeling that I lose all the flips, that I miss all the 60/30, 80/20, etc. I constantly check my tournaments for mistakes but I would like to know if I may be going through a bad streak.
I have checked on PT4 and so far this month, in 150 tournaments, I have a 457bb difference between the "net expected bb won" and the "bb won with showdown". I'm not sure if it's a useful criterion for the situation. Any suggestion?

I am using All-in EV and Net Won in Hand2note. I believe that you need to play 400+ tournaments for a qualitative analysis. Analyzing your play and the play of your opponents accordingly.

for my part when I can no longer win my flips even with my AA for an extended period. I prefer the game of reduced variance which essentially consists of avoiding playing flips to reduce the effect of variance on my game. of course that does not allow me to go looking for first places on mtt but it does helps improve my results and reach ITM places more regularly

Need to be patience. Sometimes we only focus on the bad results and forget to look the times when everything is normal.


Remember that probability needs a lot of samples to proves true.

I am going through the same situation ... Worst of all, there is no way to avoid playing coin-flip, no matter how much we use other alternatives, we will face opponents who have left us no other alternatives, it is difficult to escape from certain situations all the time.

play only one knockout tournaments by bankroll, where the entrance will almost always pay off, and you will often find yourself in the prize zone, then the game will show a good result after a month. And if you never deviate from this path, then a positive result will be every month.

Originally Posted by jadaminato

Hello! Lately I am feeling a bit frustrated because I have the feeling that I lose all the flips, that I miss all the 60/30, 80/20, etc. I constantly check my tournaments for mistakes but I would like to know if I may be going through a bad streak.
I have checked on PT4 and so far this month, in 150 tournaments, I have a 457bb difference between the "net expected bb won" and the "bb won with showdown". I'm not sure if it's a useful criterion for the situation. Any suggestion?

Would you consider yourself a tight or loose player in general? The issue you are having could certainly pop up every once in a while in MTTs for a tight player. If you are only waiting for premium or close-to-premium hands in MTTs, it's going to be easy for other players to identify that and subsequently minimize the value on your monsters by either out-right folding or by only calling with similarly strong hands. In other words (and this is an oversimplification), if everyone knows your playing less than 10% of the range (88+, AQo+, AJs+), nobody is going to call you with garbage, and it's going to be a race no matter what. Just because you're a 4:1 favorite pre-flop with AA doesn't mean much if you're up against suited broadways and potential sets and boats post-flop depending on which cards comes out. I'd recommend having a pre-flop opening range chart and pre-flop calling range chart handy to make sure you are playing the right hands in the right positions.

Other than that, my only guess would be that you are getting it in too quickly with a strong hand that perhaps doesn't have enough equity to justify it. Losing all your chips in a cash game isn't the end of the world, but it's devastating in tournament play. If you're losing all your flips, try avoiding them for a while!

- Sundizzel

The main thing is to survive it. Requires patience and breaks in the game

Sometimes poker is just very rough and there's nothing you can do but play through it.

I'm nearing my 2 year anniversary when I started playing poker - for the very first time and I can truthfully tell you swings happen often.
I ran quite strong from the middle of this year for about 3 straight months. I pretty much stopped freerolling and moved up to micro stakes, then even moved up (same level) to only play in the highest micro stakes events possible.
I was running so good that I thought I was nearly ready to move up to low stakes 8-16 dollar buyins. Then I started running very badly, losing all the flips, and only min-cashing - not hitting the FT and top 3 nearly as often.

I'm pretty happy to say - I have come out of that slump and I'm running quite well again.

What I'm getting at is - just like in any other sport - same as in poker - we have hot streaks and we have slumps. Heaters and coolers, when we are running so well it seems like we can't be beat, and other times it seems like we can't win a darn hand to save our lives.

The slump will end - hopefully soon, but it might be a while. Gotta keep playing and stay vigilant. I know that isn't really helpful - probably, but I really do know - this is a slump and it will eventually end.

GL