It’s human nature to either want to keep playing poker when you’re losing or quit when you’re ahead. Nobody wants to finish the day as a loser. But to be a successful poker player, you have to learn to let go of these emotions and think about the long run.
You can’t judge your success as a poker player on one session, or even a weeks worth of play. There’s way to many variables that can occur in a short period of time that can influence your results one way or the other.
You have to play upwards of 20,000 hands before you can conclude your approximate earn rate. This goes for every time you move to a new limit or switch to a different poker game. The more hands you play, the better you can zero in on your long-term win rate.
Even as a winner in the long run, it can still be hard to take a big loss without wanting to quickly win it back. That of course is always a bad idea and often makes the situation much worse. I find that one way to overcome this is to chart your daily wins and losses. After you get a lot of data, you’ll find that as long as you’re a winning player, the losses should look like a drop in a bucket compared to your long run results.
I know how bad downswings can be – right now i’m going through a hellish week. Set on set, aces continually cracked by all kinds of muck, KK into AA repeatedly, you name it! It’s got to the stage where when my money goes in the middle I’m alsmost certain I’m beat!
Just got to keep grinding away and the luck will even out eventually…..