Cold streak
I thought I’d start off the poker discussion here with a topic that’s been particularly concerning to me: the cold streak.
I’ve been taking a lot of bad beats lately. Ican remember 5 or 6 specific hands in the past week where I got all the money in as a 70% 80% even 90% favorite and ended up watching $800 pots pushed to another player. This hurts the mathematical part of my brain. I got into poker because I liked the odds, because I knew that I would be smarter than my opponent most of the time, and so to take a string of huge beats all in a row is the kind of things that makes the head spin. “If I’m doing everything right, how come I keep losing?” It’s pretty sickwhen you just can’t seem to get off the ground. It makes you want to give the game up entirely. I know I’ve sworn to myself and to friends several times that I’d never touch cards again, and yet I always break.
The idea is in the long run, if you play the odds, you’re going to come out on top. Short run misery can be brutal, though. So how do you keep your head up when the dealer always seems to turn over one of 3 river cards that make your skin flip inside out?
The logic I’m often offered when threatening to give up the game is, “This is why you play. You play because that magic two-outer on the river is always a possibility. You play because it’s a thrill, because anything can happen.” It’s kind of a counter-argument to those ridiculously poetic Full Tilt ads that never fail to make me cringe.
Often it seems the best thing to do is hang in there. Last weekend I was in Tunica and ended up losing nearly $1000 over 15 hours of play where I could pinpoint down to two hands where all my money had gone away, both of which where I was a huge favorite. Near the end of the 2nd day I had $40 left of the bankroll I’d brought. I almost got up and went downstairs to let it ride on red in roulette and go to bed even or busted. But I stayed at thetable. Instead of letting the math-defying odds break me, I focused harder. I looked for the best spots, and got my money in good, and the hands did stand up. In 3 hours I had turned my $40 back into over $800. I went on from there to end up in the blackfor the weekend, when I could have easily gotten up and went home busted.
You have to be able to shake it off in poker. Sometimes you have to be able to get up and walk away for a while. And know that they call it probability because it’s probably going to happen. But there’s nothing stopping a 10% chance from coming about several times in a row.
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