Downswings and Plateaus: Sometimes, It Is Your Fault

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I had something of an epiphany today. I’ve been in probably the biggest downswing of my career to date over the last 2-3 months, at least in overall monetary terms, even though my ABI is perhaps two or three times what it was when I had a 1,000-buyin-plus downswing in 2012. It doesn’t worry me too much, since I have had a number of deep runs in big events that just haven’t panned out, and I know I’m running pretty poorly in some high-equity spots. However, it has got me thinking about some of the mental game issues that have affected me during some of my downswings, and today I hit upon the one thing that most MTT players almost never do during rough patches, and which I definitely didn’t do during my big downswing last year until someone looked at my graph and told me “that’s not variance, you’re probably playing bad” – take responsibility.

The nature of MTTs is such that anyone who plays a decent number of them over a reasonable period of time will come to realise what a huge determinant of short-term success variance usually is. Every MTT reg – and probably almost every casual player – has been through experiences where they’ve gone deep in a big tournament, taken a bad beat, busted out in 14^th or 8^th or 21^st or some other really disappointing position, and had to console themselves in the aftermath and prevent a minor tilt explosion. Usually the phrases we use to console ourselves are things like, “don’t worry, it was just variance” or “you played great, just gotta win that flip next time”. Over time, however, that approach stops bearing fruit.

During a prolonged downswing, the repetition of this process – the process of attributing our negative results to variance – starts to become semi-automated. After days, weeks or even months of losing those crucial flips and having our aces cracked at exactly the wrong time, we begin to get accustomed to ending a session by cursing variance and presuming we would have had a solid winning day if we had run better, in much the same way that when we’re on a massive heater we tend to end every session presuming we played great and ignoring all the times we got it in bad. The way this process conditions us to respond to downswings can, in the long run, be very damaging.

It conditions us not to blame ourselves, not to lose our confidence as a result of the simple fact we’re not running well lately, not to worry about results because we’re still playing good poker. The problem with this conditioning is a very simple one – it ignores the decisions that came before the negative variance, or in other words, it assumes that we’re still playing good poker and creates a reason for us not to look at how well we actually played. It’s very easy to review your game and pat yourself on the back when you’re winning – it takes guts to relive all your painful bustout hands when you’re in a downswing. We get a couple of months into a downswing, into week nine or ten of “well, another standard Sunday of bricking all the majors, sigh”, and the last thing we want to do is review our game and reinforce our perception that variance is the only thing keeping us from making money.

Soon enough, this process has begun to seep into the way we play. We see pocket sixes with a 15 big blind stack and we never consider folding to an open-raise. We open king-queen suited, get three-bet by another regular on a 25 big blind stack, and we never consider folding instead of four-bet shoving. We snap-fold third pair on the river and we never consider making that hero-call. We leave ourselves open to more and more and more spots where variance is the key determinant of whether or not we win the hand. We remove more and more accountability from our shoulders and blame our increasingly poor results on variance, as usual. Before we know it, we’re playing at no more than 60-70% of our peak performance, we’re unable to learn anything new because our brain is too clouded, and we’ve moved beyond a simple downswing into something far more crippling in the long-term – a plateau.

I’ve hit a plateau myself lately. In many ways, they’re a natural part of a long poker career – you make a step up from one level to another, you settle in at that level for a while, and then you progress again and move up again. In other ways, however, they’re a product of sporadic motivation. I’ll readily admit that my motivation for grinding out 5 days a week of MTT sessions was significantly lower back in July when I had a lot more money than I do now. My confidence was a lot higher, and I was probably playing a lot better too – but in theory, this is the worst possible scenario. At the time when my confidence was highest and my game was at its peak, my motivation was lower. I had money, I could afford to take days off, so if I didn’t feel like playing poker, what was the big deal?

Now, however, I’m paying the price for that plateau. I’ve hit a big downswing, my confidence is low, and I’m reasonably confident that I’m not playing as well as I was a few months ago. My plateau of learning and motivation are inextricably linked to my downswing, but the reason the plateau has happened in the first place is not because I started running worse at the tables. It’s because I left my fate in the hands of variance. I kept grinding it out and waiting until I binked off a five-figure score or two, and all of a sudden I had lost my awareness of how well or badly I might be playing. I was auto-piloting, or getting distracted, or whatever else you want to call it – there are a number of names for it, but in essence I was waiting for variance to save me from my downswing. After all, I couldn’t control which flips I won, I was powerless to stop the slide – wasn’t I?

In reality, however, I wasn’t powerless at all. I was just trying to protect myself from whatever blame might lay at my feet for getting myself into a big downswing. Of course, the coinflips I lost weren’t my fault and neither were the bad beats, but being an experienced player with a deep understanding of how variance works, why would I be concerned about that? Variance is variance. To be truly unconcerned with variance is to ignore it entirely, not to simply use it as a scapegoat for negative results. That’s not to say I, or anyone else, should set the expectation of making money even when running poorly – that’s unrealistic – but there’s no doubt that it would be in our best interests as poker players to establish mental processes that leave no room for us to ‘let variance decide’ in moments of weakness. To do that would be to neutralise our edge in the games we play, and to effectively resort to pure gambling.

What I would suggest, therefore, is that it’s actually a better idea for an experienced player who understands the nature of variance and has a high level of ‘baseline confidence’ (by which I mean, the foundation on which your decision to play in any poker game is based – a belief that you are capable of being, or at least eventually becoming, a winning player in that game) to adopt an intensely, almost unnecessarily self-critical approach. In fact, it’s almost a freeroll in some terms, in that there are very few upsides to having extremely high confidence. Taken to the extremes, blaming variance for every time you didn’t win a tournament would result in an incredibly high level of self-confidence, but never any in-depth analysis of your actual decision-making, and little to no long-term improvement (e.g. Phil Hellmuth – not that Hellmuth has never improved or isn’t a world-class player, but he doesn’t seem to have adapted his actual strategy to fit poker’s new era in the same way that someone like Daniel Negreanu seems to have done). In fact, confirmation bias might lead you to assume a sub-optimal play was in fact optimal, and you’d miss out on some EV.

Conversely, blaming yourself for every losing session would in theory lead to low self-confidence, but a relentless desire to improve, and a continually analytical approach to one’s own decision-making processes. Thus, assuming that it’s possible to prevent this approach from affecting your own level of confidence (and even to some extent if it isn’t), it would seem to be the case that blaming yourself for your own downswings is the approach most likely to inspire you to continually work on your game, focus at the tables, and fight your way out of it – all while avoiding the dreaded plateau. In this case, confirmation bias might lead you to search for every possible spot in which you missed out on even the tiniest bit of EV.

It’s true that sometimes we do get completely shafted by variance over long periods while playing our absolute best poker, and that’s a sad reality of life as an MTT player. I’m sure you’ve experienced it just as much as I have. It’s also true, however, that very few of us take absolute responsibility for the brutal downswings, because we want the safety net of being able to blame variance – we want to know it wasn’t our fault. You might feel you need to know that in order to maintain your confidence if you’re new to the game. If you’re a motivated and studious player, however, you have the ability to analyse your game and dispassionately, retrospectively determine which plays were mistakes and which weren’t. Perhaps you could work with a coach or a friend to do this – perhaps that person could also help you maintain your sense of accountability. It’s your responsibility to do whatever it takes to snap yourself out of the mentality of attributing all your losing sessions to variance, of jumping right onto that safety net. I don’t know about you, but I think I’m ready to fly without a net. I’m in a big downswing, and it’s all my fault. Time to go to work and set it right.