Bad Streak In Poker
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She decided to learn how to play poker to better understand the role of luck in our lives, examining the game through the lens of psychology and human behavior. If you are on a bad streak, you. The longest win streak in college football history is held by the University of Oklahoma Sooners, who won 47 consecutive games between 1953 and 1957. Streaks – runs of good or bad luck – are quite common in poker, but one doesn’t necessarily have to win or lose a large number of consecutive hands for it to be considered a good or bad streak.
You quit, and take the loss. You're in a bad situation, and poker is about making good decisions-get out now! Poker isn't about winning streaks, or daily results. It's about making the best decision that you can in every situation. You're going to have a losing day sooner rather than later, so don't make it worse by making that loss bigger. The term poker staking means that a poker investor (“the backer”) puts up money on behalf of a poker player (“the horse”) in exchange for a cut of the profits. The backer typically assumes all the risk – any money the horse loses is on the backer, but if the horse wins, the profits are shared according to the terms of the poker. You have to remember that every hits a big poker downswing from time to time, and it's simply a bad dose of variance slapping you about for a few sessions. The only thing that is going wrong is your ability to have a bit of good luck once in a while, and there is nothing you can do to get that back on track.
At times it feels the world just doesn't like you. Here take that - your car breaks down - and that - my course geek turns out to be a brick and I need to start again with a new guy - and an upper cut to the jaw - weather cancels my promo trip and money twirls down the drain. I hit a dry spell at the tables just as my expenses mount. As you can see, I've been having one of those bad runs. And like poker, you need to stick it out. Keep your loses to a minimum. My three month old son smiles at me as I pick him up this snowy morning. Stay focused on what is important.I'll always remember an interview with a WWII vet, Frank, who went back to visit the battlefield in France where, in 1944, he was assigned to sit in a foxhole and wait for the Nazis to pass by. Then he and the other foxholers would sneak out at night and attack their rear. Well things went horribly bad and a gang of Nazis discovered the ploy and were going from foxhole to foxhole and unloading seven or eight shots into the heads of each American G.I. Imagine what Frank felt as he saw and heard each of his buddies plead for their lives as they raised their hands in surrender and then be cold -bloodedly killed. There was no escape. When they got to Frank's fox hole, he stood and raised his hands as his comrades did. The Nazi pointed his gun at him, then smiled. He did not fire. He just inexplicably threw the camouflage netting back over the hole. That night, Frank snuck into the woods and made his way back to the American camp.
Frank was now in his late 70s and he said since that time when he had accepted his inevitable death, nothing can ever get him down. Nothing is as bad as it seems. Everything passes. Money is only money. A career is only a career. If there is love and respect, relationships can be repaired.
Poker is good training for adopting Frank's enlightened outlook of the world. Some stretches you just can't win no matter what you do. The cards are against you and there is nothing you can do about it. You need to get through it the best you can- minimize your losses. Easier said than done as your bankroll dwindles and you wonder how you are going to make rent next month. Then it happens. In one magical hand, all the despondency of the past is washed away. It's like the past never happened. You're back on your feet again.
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Utah reached those depths of despair. He hit bottom and lost faith in his quest. But he cleansed himself mentally and reawoke with a soldier's mentality. As Edna said, 'Don't give up. Don't ever give up.'
Recently I walked away from a cash poker game after the shortest session I’ve played in several years. Let me tell you about it.
I was at the only legal card room in my state, Harrah’s Cherokee. I more than doubled up in the first five minutes at the table, when I flopped trip threes with my to crack another player’s aces. Over the next couple of orbits I raised with and flopped trip sevens, then raised with -offsuit and flopped trip queens. In the last hand I played, I raised with , flopped for a gutshot straight draw, hit it with a on the turn, and felted a player who had flopped top two pair with .
I had started with $200 in play, and now had $595 after 35 minutes. The technical poker term for this kind of luck is “running like a god.”
The question then became the one famously asked by The Clash in 1982: “Should I stay or should I go?”
There were compelling arguments for my continuing to play:
- It’s an hour’s drive each way, so it didn’t make much sense for me to play half an hour and then quit.
- This was obviously a table with players willing to pay off my big hands, an essential ingredient for making a big payday.
- I now had a fearsome table image, and should have been able to bully, intimidate, and bluff to my heart’s content.
Normally, those considerations would indeed be enough to keep my keister planted in that seat for as long as conditions remained so favorable. This time, however, there were countervailing factors in play.
They all stemmed from the fact that I was having one of those losing streaks that are inevitable if you play poker. Specifically, I had lost the last six times in a row that I had played at Cherokee. I was feeling snakebit. In fact, not long before on the drive to the casino, I had been actively suppressing thoughts that I shouldn’t bother with this trip, because I was just going to lose again.
Losing streaks can wreak havoc on one’s mindset. Jesse May described this in his poker novel, Shut Up and Deal:
Then I go on a losing streak. Or have one bad night, or whatever. Just something that makes me question everything I know about poker — no, everything I believe — and consider giving up and be scared to go in the card room and not know when to fold or when to raise or when to play or when to stop.
But the best description of the psychological effects of a losing streak I’ve ever read comes from Larry Phillips’s little book, The Tao of Poker:
Maybe you’re in over your head; maybe you never understood this game from Day One and you've been fooling yourself all along. Your opponents had your number all along and you didn't know it. Oh sure, a period occurred when you were running well, and that threw them off briefly — and allowed you to keep the fiction going to yourself — but by and large they had your number all along.
All real gamblers know the Inner Scream. It's like the face in that one painting, “The Scream,” the oval-headed guy with his mouth open and his hands on his cheeks. It’s exactly like that, only it’s on the inside. It’s a scream for just average luck, not even for good luck anymore. For that wondrous state of affairs where, every time you get annihilated, there is some kind of offsetting win of some kind, somewhere. It is pleading just to break even.
I wasn’t quite to that point yet, but things were heading that way. I wanted to put an end to it.
A direct consequence of this state of affairs was that after that last big addition to my stack, I could feel myself starting to get defensive. I wanted to protect my win. I could foresee that as a result I was going to start playing more cautiously.
Bad Streak In Poker Tournament
Cautious poker is weak poker. It’s bad poker. It’s losing poker. In order to win, you have to be willing to lose — and I wasn’t. I had reached a point where I was sensing my own unwillingness to risk loss. That kind of tentativeness and fear is incompatible with strong play.
Bad Streak In Poker Tournaments
Tommy Angelo gave this piece of excellent advice in his book Elements of Poker:
When you are winning, and you reach a point in the session when the happiness you will gain by winning more money will be much less than the pain you will endure if you lose, quit. Away from the table you can examine how and why this imbalance occurs. Meanwhile, learn to trust the quitting voice, and to react without question.
That perfectly describes where my mind was.
Finally, I remembered this advice from Ed Miller:
Go ahead and book a win. I know a lot of people think booking wins and setting stop losses is hogwash. But playing top poker (particularly no-limit) requires confidence in yourself and your decision-making. And if you lose seven days straight, your confidence is likely going to be in the can no matter who you are. So if you start a session and you’re up a few buy-ins after a bit, wrap it up. Book the win. And pat yourself on the back. You’ll be more confident during your next session.
So that’s what I did.
Could I have won more money — maybe a lot more — if I had stayed? Sure, maybe. Or maybe disaster would have struck, and I would have left feeling even more loser-y than when I began, which would make it even harder for me to overcome the psychological baggage of the bad streak the next time I played.
I was winning, I was mentally fresh, and I was in a situation that looked favorable to continue winning more. Ordinarily, it’s a huge mistake to leave a poker game under those conditions. But once in a while, it’s reasonable to let other considerations prevail.
After all, as The Clash’s song says, “If I go there will be trouble / And if I stay it will be double.”
Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the “Poker Grump” blog.
Bad Streak In Poker Odds
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