We have all been there, it doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned player or if you’re fairly new to the poker felt, we will all go on bad runs and run bad in spots where if we had just held with that hand we would have won a lot more money.
It’s one of the most frustrating parts of playing poker, but can also be very common, let’s say you play a tournament with 2,000 players, we will need to run very well to go deep in this tournament, we will probably be all in a decent amount of times and need to win a good amount of coin flips, so poker has a lot of variance in these types of game.
Study more
When you bust out of a tournament, study the most difficult spots from that game, this is going to help our mindset because we can start playing poorly otherwise known as tilting when we go through these periods of running bad.
Making sure we don’t have leaks in our game is a big part of it, are we shoving too wide with our short stack? Are we not calling wide enough in the Big Blind because we are just too used to losing in these spots, we need to check on these things to try and maintain a healthy mindset that we are playing well.
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Play with Less Emotion
This is one the key things we end up doing when we are on bad runs, we make bad calls and folds because we aren’t thinking calmly and logically anymore, we start to make emotional-based decisions.
We can be stuck money in a cash game for instance and someone is just running us over and winning nearly every pot, so we make our big stand with a worse hand than we should just from the emotion of, we want to win a pot.
This is the time to take some time away from the table, cool off and learn on the logical side of our game, learn about how we should be playing these spots where we lose big pots, review the hands and learn from our mistakes so we don’t make them again.
Don’t Get Too Nitty
So many players will be going through such a bad run that they will start to play much tighter and only want to risk their chips with premium hands, but we can’t win at poker like this, poker is a game where we have to be making moves and building stacks in good spots, not just sat there waiting for pocket Aces.
Practice Good Bankroll Management
We will want to not go on tilt and start playing higher stakes to win back our losses, if anything as we lose buy-ins we will want to drop stakes until we start winning again.
If you play cash games and are going through a bad run try using a stop loss tactic, where if you lose say 3 buy-ins ($10 x 3 at NL10) then you just quit the session and do something positive, like go for a jog or clean your kitchen.
Doing things like this will get you away from playing with the emotional downside of being on a losing streak and will allow us to forget about that little bad run and we can come back to the tables with a fresh mindset.
Every Session is a fresh start
We need to be going into every poker session with a fresh mindset and being ready to win, we need to firmly believe we are going to win a lot of money during our session and believe in our game and methods to do so.
If we are going into a session thinking we are on a bad run, this will probably just be another losing session, we should not be playing, we will need to choose moments like this to take a few days off and give our brain a break.
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