DUBLIN BELLYBUSTERS

As many of the subscribers to this blog will know, I am a moderator and avid poster on the badbeatspoker.net forum. A truly excellent site with an intelligent and analytic membership, I often find the discussions I have on there both stimulating and inspiring. A recent thread started by Ryan Meyer, a fellow Bellybuster, prompted me to think about my own current predicament. Despite being an excellent and profitable player, he is currently struggling to make money from poker. His poor run has gone on for far longer than 'normal variance' and I couldn't help but see a huge similarity between his situation and my own. I wrote the following response which was immediately appreciated by several of my fellow forumers. I hope that it may be of help to other players who get into a funk from time to time:

"I myself have been running horribly of late and it is my belief now that bad luck is being compounded by bad play on my part. When things aren't going your way, I find that it can go one of two ways:

1 You loosen up in an effort to bash your way through the field... this takes the form of dinky-shipping (shoving for more than 10BBs with too wide a range from too reckless a position - yes PureProfitFour, there is such a thing as too wide and too reckless!), raising marginal hands from EP and getting caught having to make difficult decisions on later streets, re-raising with marginal holdings to late position raisers too often because your feeling like gambling, etc.

2 you become nitty in an effort to navigate your way through the field... this takes the form of playing too narrow a range from late position, never re-stealing with marginal hands, not c-betting when you miss and allowing yourself to be blinded down to the 5-7 BBs range before making an all-in play.

I think over the past two months, I've lost faith in the game that had made me a lot of money. I have developed the belief that it is no longer a profitable game, that mine has become an out-dated strategy, too exploitable and that the ever-growing number of pro-standard players on the 45man circuit have, for the most part taken the game onto a level which is forcing me to adapt my style.

Firstly, I think there is some truth to this. The game is tougher of late with far more profitable players per game on average. That, in itself, must lower ROI expectations and thus, we must lower our longterm profit goals per game. There is also the fact that poker has entered a new paradigm; it is no longer correct to wait until you have 5 BBs (in a game with no antes) before you should be All-in-Or-Fold as it was 10 years ago. It is no longer correct to wait until you have 7-8 BBs as it was 2-3 years ago. It is now imperative that you consider a 10 (possibly even 12-13) BB stack as a stack with no more poker to it. It is a stack which forces you out of the realm of regular poker and into a game of intimidation whereby you apply maximum pressure on your opponents by playing their calling-hand-ranges against them. Good players have realised this and have adjusted their calling ranges appropriately. They also recognise that endgame poker has become an all-out war for whatever fold-equity is left in the game. To these guys, the cards have not only become less relevant. They have become the enemy! Showdown is the enemy! If the cards are the luck factor, then for f**k sake, don't let them into the game wherever possible.

I would say that my game was a tighter, trappier game than that of the majority of online pros. My counter-strategy to their over-playing of hands (I don't use this term negatively) was to trap them so that we play big pots when I have a 70-30 edge. To do this, I limped hands like AA, KK, QQ, AK, AQ and JJ with 12-15 BBs in EP and midP, hoping that a later position player would either shove light or raise, in which case I would call or reship all-in. The downside of this strategy was that I allowed the blinds to see flops with raggy hands and catch up on my QQ and AK with hands like K4 and 95. In these instances, I had to be willing to make some big folds and accept that as the hand panned out, I had lost the value of my hand. I had to take these small hits because the occasions where I got my opponent all-in 70-30 or 85-15 compensated me for them.

For a decent amount of time, this counter-strategy seemed to work. It was lucrative and I was making consistent money, maintaining a 25-30% ROI. That was until September when a period of bad variance became 8 weeks of break even results. For two months now, I have been treading water. I had never before had a 2 week period without profit and now its been 4 times that. I have been deeply analysing my game for over a month now and I realise that somewhere along the line, I have thrown the baby out with the bath water. Adaptations to my game were necessary but I didn't need the kind of over-haul that I got it into my mind that I did.

With things not going my way, I have compounded the negative variance by being guilty of both 1 and 2 above. Trying different things with no real consistency of thought, I have been both overly aggressive and too nitty. I have oscillated between different strategies at different times, never making any meaningful adaptation to my game. I have even tried different games, desperately looking for soft spots on the site.

Thus, my advice to Ryan and anyone else out there who is suffering a prolonged downswing is fourfold:

A
Know that every poker player goes through this kind of thing (except PPF!) and when your losing money, it quickly becomes irrelevant to you how much money you have made. A lack of confidence hits you at your core... its akin to the existential condition of 'being-in-the world' (Heidegger), that abyss beneath you, that lack of control over the results of your decisions. So, your first mission is to get confident again... a poker-player without confidence is never going to have the proper disregard for money necessary to make good decisions in marginal spots. This might require a short break from the game, a refresher read of your favourite poker book or just generally re-asserting your importance in the world in general and not just in a poker sphere (family, friends)

B
Do an honest analysis of you game. Watch back a sample of you games from the past month. Post some of the marginal hands on the site and get input from your colleagues/enemies here on the forum. Having coached a few players, I find that the problem almost always lies exactly where they don't think it does - eg. They fixate on how many final table bubbles they're having and believe that it's because they are losing all their crucial flips/70-30s but in reality they have been far too inactive earlier in the tournament during the period where they could have built a stack that would have withstood a badbeat or lost flip. They remember their crucial lost flip only because it knocked them out. Another aspect of this analysis should be a redefinition of attainable goals. IE: If the game has gotten tougher, readjust your target to an attainable ROI and recognise the acceptable swings that may be implied by this lowered figure (you will be making less and the downswings will be more severe from both a money and time standpoint)

C
Be brave and pull the trigger in marginal spots. This obviously ties in with A. Don't wait to have the best hand all the time. If you are playing well in a 1500 chip tournament with 6minute blind levels, you should find yourself getting it in with the worst hand (but with what you perceived as fold equity) an awful lot. Those guaranteed 30-32% hands (the AceX-sooteds) are the hands with which you want to make your moves. If there is good fold-equity, they are perfect because they play great when called... You'll take the beats less hard when your getting it in bad enough to deliver a few of your own!"