Not a pro and just a suggestion. Mix in some sng’s when time is an issue or just to work on your push fold game.

Pull up 2 or 3 low stakes sng’s and you will probably get some rungood in at least one.

Play solid, pick your spots and have some fun away from the long grind.

I do this alot when I am on a downswing. One of my probs with mtts is they just take so long.

Then when I go back to mtts I feel a little fresher and hopefully the rungood will come.

The vids and advice you get here is spot on! If you continue to play solid and use what you learn here,

then late in an mtt your AK shove will hold and boom your in the top 3! GL!

Totally agree with what swet1 says above, if your a recreational player [as i am] the swings can seem to last a lot longer and you begin to question not only how bad your running but also your ability. Keep studying, try and make the correct decsions and do not be too results orientated — if you work hard you will eventually hit an uspwing and be rewarded.

But are we talking about variance as far as coin flips or do good players also have long streaks of losing as significant favorites? I know its been said that winning or making a really deep run in any tourney will take winning some flips but what I’m not as clear about is the losses as a significant favorite, not the coin flips. It stands to reason that solid players are often getting it in as solid favorites or they probably wouldn’t be good, lol, but extended streaks seem to defy the very logic of percentages. For example, I would think the odds of losing as a 85% favorite on average 25 times in a row, while certainly possible highly “improbable”. So where I struggle is not the coin flips but scenarios where if you are to win 85 out of every 100 times and lose 15 times (on average) doesn’t losing 50 straight as that much of a favorite seem statistically nearly impossible, even if not improbable? Thanks again , everyone’s insight is very much welcome and appreciated. Really glad to be a member! Run well!

I do it this way. Benny seems to be a bit of a whiz in this sort of stuff so if it's wrong, I'm sure he'll point it out.

Let's see how probable losing 25 85% in a row is. I would say it's impossible. Let's just do 8 in row and look at that number, it's about the maximum my calculator can handle.

(15/85) x (15/85) x (15/85) x (15/85) x (15/85) x (15/85) x (15/85) x (15/85) = 2562890625 / 2724905250390625

So to lose 8  85% in a row the probability of that is a 1 in 1,063,215 chance. Hmm 25 in a row, don't think so, but then again,  nothing surprises me anymore in this game. 

Saying that, I have had a 1 in 30K, was mind boggling, but it happened.

…..37-chance/

Hi, not a Pro either yet, but still want to respond as I too have struggled with it and at times it pops its ugly head up again. So here goes:

In nov 2010 I was rolled a bit better bankrollwise and decided to finally try and crush cashgames where I in fact am a tournamentplayer pur sang, but wanted to try as I had a plan to just pick on bad players bigtime. Thought that could not fail. In the course of 2 to 3 days I targeted some guys i figured to be real bad players at 100NL. Creating big pots whenever I was convinced I had the best of it, the money went allin at flop or turn holding 2p, sets, str8's etc. Each and every time when the villain called (or i called) I was the favourite bigtime, sets vs 1p, str8 vs flushdraw on the turn etc etc. I did not win A SINGLE ONE of those allins 14 in a row and lost about $1200. (15th was a frustration allin and ofc i did not suckout when i was the one with a trashhand)

That was huge as my normal bankroll would be between 200 and 400. I wanted to go for it and got beat up severely, so i quit the cashgames alltogether again for the time being. Since then i made a few small retries with the same technique but lower rolled and sadly experienced the same “bad luck” 8 outta 10 I guess, so it does not seem to be a one time event but rather standard for me.

I had severe discussions with my bro about this and i insisted that the rng was simply reversed expectationwise somehow. Discussions got real heated (lol) before i made clear that I have no problem with loosing with best hands regularily, but I defenitely do if the math says i should win majority of times. So in the end I apparently had problems seeing longer runs and series of good hands loosing from bad hands.

Lets take dominating hands as another example: Sometimes I think Ax seems to win from AK a lot more than mathematically would be correct. Why?

Is our mind playing tricks with us and we only see the times this occurs? Well, we sure tend to forget the better hand that won versus the times it looses. A good way to get a real answer to this is diving into your hem or pt database and see how these hands perform.

What other explanation might there be?

Its somewhat a nono I feel to talk about rigged poker rooms at serious sites. And most often it is ridiculised. But for the sake of argument:

What advantage would a pokerroom have to willingly skew the RNG towards letting better hands win (somewhat..) less?

1. Good playing regs will loose more often and the money stays at the room where it can be pumped around from A to B to C.  Which is good for the rooms rake right. I guess we can't deny that.

2. More Bad players who would get crushed by pros time and time over when they get it in with their measly 3 outers would get frustrated within a week or so and look for another hobby that won't eat their fun budget that fast. By getting “lucky” more often they don't even realise they are playing awfull poker. BUT they will stay around and play, generating more rake again

3. Poker rooms are being accused of this anyway constantly so why not do it…

So is this really happening?

There are some BIG arguments against the above theory.

Pokerrooms do make vast profits on the regular rake, independant of what player wins. Would they jeopardise all of this to maximimise their winning even more by skewing the RNG?

I have to admit, there was a time when i figured the answer to be positive as human greed and stupidity is infinite at times…

But same human nature dictates that a scheme like this would be impossible to hide year after year without some personnel coming out with the truth or being discovered some other way. So I think its unlikely though still not impossible. I have my doubts sometimes to be honest but i feel its best to push it away..I am still winning at poker.. (little note at my monitor says mountains and canyons in poker but you are still ahead in the game..!)

That leaves me with some thoughts I had about mtt's lately:

If I have gotten chips in at numerous spots in a mtt and managed to create a big stack and now we are late stage and its a lot of push/fold from than onwards, I seems that my good hands DID hold up alot of times. (Same must happen to you i guess) So when i finally get donkraised with my AK on a A82 flop by a superaggro and he spikes a 4 at the turn or river holding A4o. Do I need to get upset? The 70/30 or better is due to loose at some point.. 30! times out of 100 to be exact.

Any time i get chips in, i am in fact part of some russian roulette..if I pull the trigger often enough, the darn thing will fire for sure at some point. Maybe I used up my 70% and it got time for the 30%.

So what about series of bad luck?

Cards have no memory and if all is well you should get your rewards for playing well in the long run any which way nevertheless. It's the sign of a good pokerplayer to get kicked out of mtt's holding the best hand often or getting it in correctly with lesser hand counting on fold equity. So if decisions are right, can we still loose that often?

My guess is that we can indeed. The hidden part that luck plays into our game might be much more extended than we realise at times.

The cat spilled the milk somewhere in a kitchen in Peru and I fail to win the Sunday Million again! Impossible? Weird?

Well follow this sceario:  the cat spilled the milk, man and wife get into a quarrel (happens with spouses at times), he leaves the house for the bar and does not play the sun mil that night. Because of that he is not at my table and does not loose an extremely BIG pot to me with KK vs my AA. I do not survive a suckout later and I am out of the tournament.

The kind of hidden luck/bad luck that must unknowingly play a role in our (poker)lives intreagues me at times and i can come to only one conclusion:

I try to make the best decisions possible in my games and count on the goddesses of karma to create equilibrium at some point in time, swinging back the pendulum of fate in my favour and let me suckout numerous times. I than win three Sun Mils in 3 consecutive weeks to make a point and keep laughing all the way to the bank with the echoes of acquisations humming in my head being the worst luckbox they ever saw 😀

Quote from vballfanatic1 “For example, I would think the odds of losing as a 85% favorite on average 25 times in a row, while certainly possible highly “improbable”.”

if you have an 85% chance of winning then you have a 15% chance of losing. So that's where I got the 15/85

Yea, thanks it might be wrong, don’t know, it’s been a long time since I did statistics. I remembered it was a simpler way of working probabilities out, but maybe i’ve missed something and doing it wrong.

In regards to the 2 standard deviations, might be different in general, but all the graphs for Blackjack, the worse or best it could get was 2 standard deviations from the mean, saying that, my graph did just break 2 standard deviations to the left, I remember it well, (lost 65% of my bankroll) use to go home literally crying and broken, ready to give up, but I don’t know why I persevered, but I did, and lo and behold within a couple of months had a dramatic rise back to the mean. (Got my losses back and doubled my bankroll, and never looked back after that) The line was literally 90% back to the mean. It was a whirlwind, and it was fun that’s for sure.

Incidentally, the main reason the UB scandal was exposed, was because the poker players that started to keep track of the cheaters, saw how many standard deviations to the right they were playing and realised this is mathematically impossible, which began their investigation.

Hey Bytie… I went through similar grumblings during my FullTilt days… I wrote an article about it, thought it might interest you. It’s on my blog, which I’ve neglected for about 12 months. …..pot.com.au

“WTF! All in with cowboys and got smashed by Ace rags again!”, “Ace lovers beat my 5%’er every freaking time!”, “FullTilt’s gotta be rigged!”… these are just some of the pained comments I frequently hear when talking to regular online players.  It astounds me that their losses are blamed squarely on the online poker room, as if the sole purpose of the host is to destroy their ability to build a bankroll.  Aces do appear to regularly pop up on the board and cause havoc, but do they appear more frequently than say a 2, or a 6?  Aces are typically noticed and remembered more than most other ‘bland’ cards as they are highly revered by poker players and do the most damage.  It’s just like your dodgy mate trying to pick up at a classy nightclub.  He gets rejected at the same frequency by a series of regular women, but it’s the ‘smokin hot chick’ that rips his heart out and leaves a lasting impression.
 
Deal out any 5 cards from a shuffled deck and the chances of an Ace appearing is 34.1%, this is also the same for a K, Q, 3, or any of the other cards.
 
i.e. ([1-((52-4)/52)*((51-4)/51)*((50-4)/50)*((49-4)/49)*((48-4)/49)]).
 
To pair a pocket ace on the board your chances drop to 27.6%, and to make trips on a pocket pair your chances drop a further 8.5% to 19.1%.  So for our whinging punter holding cowboys against Ace rags he is a 72.4% favourite.
 
But what if FullTilt, or any other online poker room, is perceived to be rigged or Ace happy? How can you tell?  Well you can do a simple ‘first-cut’ check by analysing the relative frequency of cards that are dealt on the board and investigate whether it significantly deviates from the expected 34.1% probability. This can be done using a chi-square (X^2) statistical test which is frequently used by biological scientists and geneticists.  Prior to running this analysis, however, you need to only include those hands where you have seen all 5 streets and you need to have considerable replication.  There is no point running the analysis on 25 hands as the data wouldn’t have had sufficient time to converge and your output will be meaningless.  So aim for a couple of thousand hands. Also assume that you cannot see your pocket holdings, just the 5 street cards.
 
I investigated the observed frequencies of each dealt card over 6,731 ‘full’ hands and plotted them against their expected frequency of 34.1%.  The data indicated that, on FullTilt at least, the cards dealt aren’t significantly different from their expected frequency (X^2 = 0.23, df = 12, p = 0.99).  This indicates that the cards are dealt randomly and anyone who whinges about getting “smashed by an Ace every time” is clearly bringing too much emotional baggage to the felt!

Ron, totally get your point, I truly do. That is why I tried to state in my earlier posts I know everyone gets bad beats and everyone has bad runs in poker, it’s part of the game. And, you also need to look at the wins and make sure you are bringing those into the equation as of course, when you’re a favorite and win its expected but when you’re a heavy favorite and lose it stands out. This wasn’t mean to be a bad beat thread which in some ways I know is kind of taboo since all players deal with it.

I was more trying to get at successive runs of losing as a big favorite and how, on the surface, based on my limited understanding of odds and probabilities, seems exponentially unlikely the longer it goes. I was interested in 1) hearing thoughts from those better versed in statistics and 2) from solid winning players if they regularly or at least occasionally experience runs like this where they are losing consistently, not on coin flips, but as heavy favorites.

It truly was not meant as a “look how unlucky I am thread”, just something to improve my understanding. Hope that clears things up.

the one thing I have worked on in my game to have an EDGE which seems to be working and getting alot in the videos and podcasts on TPE is that you want to try and be ahead of your villians. You want to eliminate a possibility to get to that spot where you are coin flipping a lot. We know that sometimes you have to but there are times in spots that you can play your game and elimate the showdown and apply some aggression and make them tank. Make it hard for them to continue the street.

Exploit those tendencies. The game of poker is not the online site's fault or your local dealers fault. You got to make good play in your hands to prevent them from seeing the flop, turn and river. Remember, you may think you are 70% but a lot of times, your opponent is thinking the same thing. The EDGE is make him guess that he may be wrong 70% and then you can take it down before the river card passes.

more of those spots you need to take and less coin flips. If you want a coin flip go to blackjack. lol…just kidding. Look at your loses and wins and determine the best strategy to make them tank. Put it through pokerstove and see where you were really at, flip the turn and see villians line. You would be surprise that you could have most likely take him down on a turn with a simple c/r and or shove being 70% than the line you took.

work on cbetting flops when oppropriate. Play your position well and postflop play is imperative in MTT's to make it hard for your villians.

hope that helps.

Some great advice ITT already, but from my perspective the number one way to overcome running bad is very simple – play more poker. I'm currently playing over 200,000 hands/month and have played around 25,000 tournaments of various kinds over the last 3-4 years, around half of those since I started playing full time around 2.5months ago. Without a doubt, once you've played a certain amount you stop being even the slightest bit surprised by individual hands. That's not to say that a bad downswing doesn't hurt, but it's absolutely the case that each individual bad beat hurts less than the one before it, and each downswing hurts less than the last one of that size. The only way to overcome variance is to train yourself to really understand it, and the only way to do that is to play a hell of a lot of poker!