Some Thoughts on Swings

Most serious poker players know that poker is a game of skill. Some even seem to believe it. And most poker discussions are discussed under the assumption of the “long run” i.e. that the event has been repeated enough times for short-term fluctuations to even out. Yet luck matters tremendously. Poker is a game of skill AND luck. Even if you have good skills, you still have to deal with the luck part. I know of several highly skilled players who cannot seem to win for months. Former world champion, Tom McEvoy, claims that he had a year over which where he a netted measly $400. This is just to tell you that even if you are skilled enough to win the WSOP and write poker books, you still have to deal with luck.

What is luck? In normal terminology, there is a distinction made between luck and skill. Skill is the effect caused by your actions whereas luck is the effect caused by events outside your control. In the Western hemisphere we have a strong belief in rationality, i.e. that by performing a rational analysis of the data available we can control the outcome of our actions. And while I believe that this is a good way of doing things, it sure has its limitations. Or rather, we’ll have to accept the fact that neither the cards nor our lives are completely controllable. So when the outcomes are as you desire, you shouldn’t congratulate yourself too much, as luck sure has played it’s part too, just as you shouldn’t berate yourself too much when you lose, because only some part of it is due to your bad decisions. The other half is probably due to bad luck.

Cards are not supposed to be fair - they are supposed to be random. And randomness usually involves clustering. What this means is that even though you should expect to get dealt pocket aces 1 in 220 hands, you shouldn’t be too surprised to find them back to back, and neither should you be surprised to have to go without aces for a full day,. There are many ways to be lucky or unlucky, but a good indicator is whether you get the number of premium hands you are “supposed” to get. The premium hands (AA, KK, QQ, JJ, 1010, AKs) are the big money makers in hold’em. If you don’t get your fair share of these power hands, you’ll need to get lucky to break even. Another way to look at luck vs. skill is to acknowledge that most huge pots are pretty much about luck, as it takes two strong hands to build a big pot, and the hand would normally play out pretty much the same no matter who holds what hand. Skill is more prevalent in small pots, where you win or save an extra bet and sometimes make a play to take down a pot with the worst hand. One of the reason premium hands make a lot of money is because when you hit with them, someone else is likely to hit the board as well, but with a lesser hand. The big AKs pots usually involve nut full house vs. straight, flush or lesser full house, or flush vs. lesser flush, set or two pair. When one of those match ups happens you stand to win a big pot.

Now what happens when you don’t get your fair share of premium hands? First of all, you don’t get to show down many winners. This, off course, is bad. But it’s actually worse than it seems. The problem is that when you never get to show down a powerhouse, your opponents subconsciously begin to lose their fear of you. It’s like once bitten twice shy. When they never feel your bite, they will begin to play more with you, simply because you are not a painful experience. This in turn means that you will get called down more often, making it really hard to make plays for loose pots. When you fail in trying a few times, and maybe get river beat a few times on top of that, you start to feel unlucky. Here another process comes into play. When you start whining observant players will smell blood. When I realize that someone at my table feels unlucky I’ll do anything in my power to prove him right. I know he expects bad things to happen, so when a scare card hits the board it automatically belongs to me. When this happens to you it is time to leave.

The above discussion refers to a bad session. But sometimes the bad card cycle hit you several sessions in a row, sometimes for weeks or even months (my personal record is 11 losing weeks in a row). As shown above there really isn’t much you can do about it, except to leave. But when a bad card cycle continues for a week or longer (fort some people a couple of hours is enough) it has the power to crush your game completely. Realize first that we learn from every hand we play. When we face a decision we look into our memory of previous hands, and we look for comparable situations that ended up in the desired outcome. We start looking at the newest hands first, and we keep looking until we find a cause-effect relationship that we think is applicable for the situation at hand. This is how the human mind works. But when you have been suffering from a bad card cycle during recent memory, the analogies you find will reflect this. And in this way the results start to affect the way you play. It will for instance tell you to stop bluffing, as you have had poor results with your recent attempts.

Another odd thing about it is that the memory that tends to stick around for the longest time is the memory of the frequency of pots won when you were running well. You will remember this long after you have forgotten the details of how you won them. I think this is how card cycles develop into game cycles for me. I can handle good luck and bad luck. But I am most vulnerable when I encounter an abrupt and persistent change between the two. When this happens, my long term memory keeps me focused on a pot winning frequency that just is not possible with the current run of cards. At the same time my short term memory keep giving me advice that is based on the fact that I’m running bad, i.e. a somewhat weaker game then my A-game. And when those two frames of mind start to interact I usually loosen up (in order to try to win my long term pot frequency), play more aggressive preflop but less aggressive and with a poor timing post flop etc.

My A-game is usually a finely tuned machine with a lot of things in a delicate balance against each other. It is so finely tuned that I sometimes do the opposite in almost identically situations, based on my evaluation of my opponents, their view of me, the board, the number of opponents still in, and a lot of subconscious inputs that I will group under the name “feel”. My A-game runs like a motor. I don’t have to think about it while I play. It runs on automatic and adjust to the situations at hand without a conscious thought process involved. When one variable change due to the dynamics of the table, the other variables against which this one is balanced automatically swings into this new tune. A bad card cycle ruins this self-adjustment mechanism completely, and I have to think a lot about what I do. Furthermore, as explained above, my data for this thought process is not very reliable. So in the end I just lose the balance completely.

At this point in the article, it should come as no surprise to you that I am currently running badly. Most of my articles are written as an attempt to structure my own thoughts, as much as for your reading pleasure. Luckily it is not the first time I’ve been running badly for prolonged periods before. And here are some experiences on how to handle this process.

While there is not much you can do about a bad game cycle, except to duck and cover, you can indeed do a lot to limit the length of the game cycle that usually follows. By game cycle I mean a period where you don’t play your A-game, due to the mechanisms discussed above.

The first thing to do is to realize what is happening. Many players simply reject the fact that something is severely wrong, and try to push harder to get through it. This is why many otherwise skilled players just don’t stay in the poker community very long. It takes a special psyche to go through this, and before you have succeeded, you are not a real poker player by my standards. What you are winning doesn’t matter if you lose it all here. My previous article “When You’re In A Hole - Stop Digging” address how you discover that you are in a hole, and is, in my humble opinion, worth a read or reread.

When you have realized that your game is out of balance, you will have to break it down and rebuild it. By breaking it down I mean the process of getting down to basics and then adding on specific plays and concepts one by one. You need to rediscover not only how specific strategic concepts and plays work, but also how they interact with other parts of your game. In my opinion, the strongest tool in this work is notes on your game taken during previous downswings. It is usually the same issues that pop up whenever I’m running badly. Therefore rereading old notes usually gives me a head start, in that I know what to look out for to begin with. This is also why I always play less and write more when I’m running badly. Given the fact that I’m bound to lose when I play, I invest my time much wiser in trying to rethink my game from scratch. Usually I come out ever stronger on the other side.

There are no guarantees in this game. Card cycles can run for a long time. And contrary to what most people believe there is nothing in statistics that says that you shall ever receive pocket aces again. But if you plan on playing for months and years to come, this is indeed a highly unlikely event. You can’t do anything about the card cycles. But you can severely shorten your game cycles. Oddly enough this is a place where experience really shows. The more bad cycles you have experienced, the faster you will realize and deal with the game cycle. Just like a mechanic gets faster in reassembling a motor the more times he’s done it before. Dealing with the luck part of poker, probably is one of the toughest skills to learn. Yet there is no way around it, if you plan on poker being a long-term part of your life. Good luck with it.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to Leigh Lightfoot for taking the time to proof reading my articles.

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