You’re sitting on the button with a pair of aces in your hand, looking down at a nice, low flop with few possibilities that you’ll be beaten. You go all in. The dealer calls. He flips up his flopped pair of 9s. You scream “hold”! The turn falls blank. You scream “hold”! The river brings a… nine. He scoops the pot and you are left wondering what happened. This story is all too common. Poker can be quite a challenging game at the best of times and having your pocket aces cracked by a newbie call is really not out of the ordinary. But every now and again, a real downswing sets in — a crippling reminder of poker’s foundation in statistical variance. It can be weeks, months, or even thousands of games without a win. That’s when a downswing gets serious. My worst ever downswing lasted for three months when I was playing every day. Thousands of tournaments and SNGs yielded little results and my bankroll whittled away as quickly as my hopes of making my rent payments on time. It was a living nightmare and it felt like there was nothing I could do about it. Why do you need bankroll management skills? A downswing can be defined as any point in which a player is running bad; when the cards are falling so out of favor that it seems impossible to win money back from the cost of buy-ins. Players who are usually profitable find themselves unable to win a hand, let alone come first in a tournament. Downswings are the main reason why you need solid bankroll management skills. Bankroll management is a concept that has been put in place so that you will have enough money in your bankroll to cover the damages of inevitable downswings — and you had better believe they are inevitable! A downswing is horrible for any player. Seeing your cards continually busted by someone’s shocking calls and your bankroll trickle away; these are never nice. But what makes it worse is that a downswing can cause you to start playing worse. You may try to compensate for your bad-runs with overelaborate plays or bluffs or you may become a nit because you are knowingly or unknowingly scared of losing more. All in all, you may find that you become unable to pick apart what is bad luck and what is a bad play. You may start to question everything from your own ability to the legitimacy of the site. Keep your head up no matter what When downswings happen to you then, it’s important that you continue to play your A-game, no matter what. Not doing so can make the situation a whole lot worse. Correct bankroll management is a good start. With a decent strategy in place, you should be able to push through until you are running good again (if you are, indeed, actually a profitable player in the long run). A general bankroll management strategy means having […]
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