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Dealing with the emotional impact of bad runs in poker

Bad runs are sort of like the in-laws of your poker experience. You know they’re inevitably going to show up, even if you aren’t always sure when or why, you know that no matter how hard you try, there’s nothing you can really do to make the experience any better, and, worst of all, once they’re around, there’s absolutely no telling when they’re going to leave.

I’m not going to pretend that I can improve your relationship with your actual in-laws, but I can provide a few words of wisdom for dealing with their poker equivalent. Bad runs are a fact of life for every poker player, and the good news is that they’re an equal-opportunity offender. Put simply: everyone gets the same luck. The bad news is that while we all experience the same amount of bad runs (in a purely objective sense), the choices you make about dealing with those stretches of misfortune play a huge role in determining the impact bad luck has on your attitude, your game, and – inevitably – your bottom line.

So where does that leave us? Well, if we know that bad runs are inevitable, and if we also know that there are choices you can make about how you deal with bad runs, it stands to reason that handling bad runs properly is a skill that not only can be developed, but must be developed if you’re to be a successful poker player. Finally, we can assume that since bad runs have the potential to inflict a strong, focused emotional impact on you as a player, our development of a coping strategy would be best built upon a foundation of rationality and long-term perspective.

If you’re a regular reader of my articles, you know what’s coming next – my standard caveat. I’ve yet to hear a piece of poker advice that applies universally to every player in every situation, and the advice I’m about to dispense certainly isn’t going to break that streak. What I’m going to offer are general guidelines that can be digested one of a few ways. They may work wonderfully for you just as they’re typed on the page, they may require some serious tweaks based on your individual situation, or they may be useful only in the sense that they start you on a line of thinking that winds up dropping you off at a completely different (yet ultimately useful) action or conclusion. Whichever of the following ends up being the closet to your experience, the basic point is still the same: I’m just providing you with a point where you can start – it’s up to you to determine where you head and when you stop.

With that out of the way, let’s get into it. The following are three tactics for building positive habits that should help you cope with bad runs. Each focuses on a combination of short term and long term approaches for reducing your emotional entanglement with a stretch of bad luck, drawing on the premise that the more rational your perspective on the relationship between luck and poker is, the more control you’ll have over the resulting relationship between luck and your approach to poker.

Tactic one: When you’re experiencing a bad run, raise your threshold for wanting to play.

A common tendency that I’ve observed in my own play (and the play of countless others) is to treat bad runs as a sort of finite problem that can be solved through sheer force – essentially that bad runs can be powered through if you simply play enough hands. The logic behind this approach is obvious and somewhat appealing: a bad run is just a statistical clumping, and if you increase your amount of play, you’ll force the math to flatten out. The basic flaw in the logic, unfortunately, is just as obvious: the math will only flatten out if you’re playing all of those hands optimally, and the chance of you doing that while you’re in the midst of a losing streak is pretty slim. However, that flaw isn’t always so easy to spot when you’re three weeks into an incessant drubbing and desperately searching for any reasonable answer that might make the onslaught of lousy luck cease, so we need to account for that inevitable weakening of your ability to rationally evaluate the quality of an answer.

A solid solution is to demand a higher than usual level of interest, ability and mood from yourself before sitting down to play when you’re mired in a bad run. Only playing when you really (or maybe even absolutely) want to and when you really feel capable of executing at a high level for an entire session can help you sidestep a few frustrations that you’re a bit more vulnerable to when the cards aren’t running your way. First, it helps you avoid allowing losing to become a habit. No matter how strong you are mentally, there’s a number of consecutive losing sessions at which you’re going to start to expect to lose – clearly a terrible starting point for any session, even if every other condition is optimal. It also helps you to avoid the self-flagellation born of post-session regret: “I knew I shouldn’t have played before I sat down and, sure enough, I lost. I’m just not a very good player if I can’t trust my own instincts.” Last, but not least, only playing when you’re 100% interested and invested makes it less likely that you’ll pull the tilt trigger as soon as things start to go south – a dangerous cycle that can multiply mistakes with near-exponential force: “This sucks – I didn’t even want to play and now I’m down 2 buy ins in 15 minutes … well, I think I’m beat here, but what’s one more buy in?”

Tactic two: Resist the urge to make radical changes to your game during a bad run.

If the urge to power through a bad run is alluring, the urge to overhaul your game as a method of escape is nearly irresistible. The tricky bit of the overhaul solution is that it rests on a logic that seems fairly unassailable: a bad run, in theory, should increase the contrast setting on your game, making it easier to discern which plays are winners and which are losers. The fact is, that logic is absolutely solid – but only to a point. A bad run does force focus on -EV habits that you may have slipped in to while times were good, but it also creates an environment where plays with smaller edges that are long-term winners start to seem suspect as well. The frustration that accompanies bad runs also increases your desire for ‘quick-fix’ solutions, raising the troubling possibility that you will over-correct parts of your game that required only a minor adjustment (if any at all). This wouldn’t be so troubling except for the fact that your approach to poker is basically a living, dynamic entity that is both interconnected and holistic. If you make a change in one area, every other area will feel some level of impact. The more radical the change, the greater the depth and breadth of the impact. Even worse is the fact that radical changes exert impacts that are both unpredictable and tough to trace, making it very difficult to both identify what damage has been done and how to reverse it.

In short, radical changes are likely to fail, both at improving the quality of your game and at helping you to cope with a bad run. If anything, the additional frustration you’ll feel as the answer you settled on (“I just need to play way tighter from every position preflop and on the flop”) fails to provide results (“I tightened up, but now I’m so predictable that I’m not getting paid when one of my damn hands actually does hold up”) will artificially extend the run and decrease your ability to recoup losses when your luck does turn around. When you start to sense your luck going south, make a promise to yourself to make any adjustments to your game in a measured, deliberate fashion. It might be a hard promise to keep, but a little discipline on this issue will pay major dividends thought the remainder of the bad run and far beyond.

Tactic three: Find an outlet for releasing your frustration

I chose to put this tactic last because, as the most obvious idea, it’s also one of the easiest to dismiss or overlook. Here’s the deal: poker is a game largely populated by people with egos, and people with egos hate to think that they aren’t in control of a situation. Some of us find the idea so distasteful that we’d rather lie to ourselves about how much control we have in a given situation than admit any truth involving a lack of control. Bad runs, frustration, tilt – all of these things involve an absence of control, so there’s the very real possibility that many of us will choose to deceive ourselves about our true feelings for any given session that takes place in those contexts. To paraphrase common advice regarding addiction, the first step is admitting that you need help. You probably can’t control the feelings of frustration and helplessness that naturally arise out of a bad run through sheer will alone, and that fact doesn’t make you any less of a person or a poker player. The longer a bad run goes on, the less likely it becomes that you’ll be able to handle the anger (depression / disillusionment / whatever particular emotional form bad runs manifest in for you) on your own.

The answer? Don’t try to handle it all on your own. Look beyond your natural defenses and coping mechanisms to some alternatives that you might not normally consider. Ideal mechanisms are ones that will drain you both mentally and physically, providing a type of reset function that helps you to strip the negative momentum from your stretch of bad luck. If you think that a total reset feels excessive, that a brief time-out will suffice for straightening out your head, ask yourself: Have you ever been in the middle of a bad run and you realized that you were starting to think of poker (or luck) as a sentient being that had something against you personally? Have you ever, in a moment of frustration, uttered a sentence along the lines of “It doesn’t matter what I do – I just can’t hit a draw!”? Both states of mind reflect a type of accumulated frustration that has resulted in you feeling like a passive victim of bad luck, a perspective that makes it pretty much impossible for you to have a winning session via any route save sheer dumb luck. Strenuous exercise, lengthy reading or writing sessions, time in the workshop – whatever allows you to wash off the emotional grime bad runs pile on your psyche, that’s what you need to do.

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For most people, the only inevitabilities in life are death and taxes. If you’re a poker player, you get to add at least one more to that list – runs of terrible luck with no apparent rhyme or reason. Also, you’ll probably eventually develop an aversion to sunlight, but that’s another issue. While the bad luck might be inevitable, a little foresight, planning and faith can ensure that permanent damage to your game and bankroll from that luck doesn’t have to be. Think of it this way: you can’t help when your in-laws arrive, but you can make a point to perpetually have enough alcohol and quality Tivo on hand to weather the storm as happily and sanely as any person can hope to.

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