Many online poker players have gone through never-ending downswing playing the game. Nothing seems to be going right whatever they try. Their dominating hands don’t stand up and the river seems to kill them if they turn doesn’t.
When nothing is going right and your bankroll is in freefall the single most important thing to do when your drowning in the depths of a downswing is to:
There are two simple possibilities why you’ve found yourself in a bad streak or a downswing.
1) Your actually not that good a player
In reality, you’ve either ridden a combination of good luck and reasonable play to build a decent bankroll that you’re now seeing disappear – restoring you to at best a break-even player.
Or you’ve really ridden your luck and briefly defied the poker online odds and not much more and you now going to pay back for your lucky play in buckets in the “downswing” when in reality it’s just your total lack of skill and the better players winning their money back from you.
2) You’re actually a good or at worst a better than break-even player
You’ve either genuinely gone “card dead” and/or you’re genuinely getting sucked out while selectively playing the best online poker hands seemingly consistently losing to worse hands.
Even though you might be a genuine winning player the “luck” factor of other players is winning out against you for the moment. You could have previously had both the “rub of the green” with a good portion of luck AS WELL as a fundamentally sound game.
Interestingly the solution whichever type of player you are is to for essentially bad players who have got lucky and now they’re poor play is earning them what it’s worth the solution is simple.
Luck is temporary but class is permanent
So, work on your game, read as much online poker real money strategy as you can, and develop at the very least a solid tight-aggressive game and understand the rank & poker hand odds … stop relying on luck & see it doesn’t last. However, for the essentially winning profitable player with at least an above break-even game – dealing with a downswing can be more tricky
If you’ve honestly looked at your game and you know its fundamentally solid then you need to look at why this isn’t working anymore.
The end of the downswing
It’s really important to recognize that there really isn’t any reason why luck / bad luck or good cards and bad cards have to run in short evenly distributed runs … so a downswing could be a genuine run of bad cards and bad luck and it doesn’t have to follow the rules of probability over the short or medium-term despite what your poker odds calculators tell you, after all, how can we define the short or long term?
That doesn’t mean probability is nonsense – it just means you can’t set it a fixed short-term boundary.
Don’t give up, pull yourself together
Nobody knows what cards are coming, you could have a run of 6 months of bad cards & bad luck but one thing is for sure no amount of getting tilted and negative about it, allowing your previously reasonable game to get all beaten out of shape will change the cards or bad luck.
The good player will check their game, stick to it & ride the downswing out to the other side ready to make hay when then cards come back. The most important thing in a downswing is to make sure your game is at its best and not suffering compounding the downswing and making it seem to last long then it has to.
Happy playing!
Read more:
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6 Lessons to Learn from Online Poker Rules