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Message: [QUOTE="Irexes, post: 760038, member: 13873"] The $40 was for that session from start to finish but before I ran into uberdonk I was $200+ up for the session. I'm currently enjoying a $300 downswing if I go from the highpoint. My tolerance for this is I think based on my MTT experience where a couple of months can pass where you get nowhere near your "highpoint" while at the same time playing good poker. I've had 1k downswings a lot and a couple of 2k ones. Chasing the win over a long period (metatilt?) by changing the principles of a winning strategy can be really bad, so I try and concentrate on sticking to my guns and reassuring myself that the win will come. Reading my blog posts I finish a lot of posts with "a win is just around the corner" or "if I keep playing like this I'll be back on track soon". I think this kind of positive reinforcement is essential through the downturns. On the flipside I try not to post bad beats very often and when I do it's not to look for sympathy. I have got absolutely locked into my brain that losing runs and beats are an unavoidable part of playing winning poker. With any beat I try and first assess whether it was my fault (and when it is resolve not to do it again), then congratulate myself on playing the hand/session/tourney well, then move on. The big gaps in my blog usually reflect the losing streaks. I see no need to publicise or revel in them as I don't want to dwell on it. The wins however are great and I want to constantly reinforce to myself the positives. This is not to develop arrogance but to put myself in the right frame of mind to deal with the next inevitable low. I absolutely agree with this and you cannot be concerned with losing for the sake of the money, you should only be concerned with losing because you played bad. Fortunately I'm not in a position where the money is an issue and could reload if required. I do play at levels where losses are not critical for the amount I have online and move down when I enter the danger zone for buy-ins. I think establishing exactly where this is varies from person to person as being discussed in other posts. Yup, I'm determined that poker will never be "gambling" for me so I don't buy-in direct to the big tournies or take a stab at higher stakes than my skill and online bankroll can tolerate. Yep, I'll play maybe a cheap tourney when not in the right frame of mind, but I try not to put myself in a position where I'm less likely to win. I'm sure this varies from person to person as well. This is the big one I think. Watching people post huge successes followed by post after post of "shocking beats" is often the result of false assessment of skill based on limited samples and a poor understanding of variance. I'm well over the million hands and maybe even 2 having played nearly every day for 4 years at least a couple of hours and usually 4 or 5. I think you do get a sense of the long run even if it never fully asserts itself. If you are objective you can separate the bad luck from the bad play and not worry because the maths will assert itself and its probably balanced not just by the luck you are owed in the future but also by the luck you've had yourself in the past (when I bust out of a tourney with KK v QQ I think back through the tourney and consider the AK v 77 I won or the flopped flush that let me triple up, it's usually easy to find that the 4 to 1 shot you lost to is more than balanced by similarly fortunate events going your way over a remarkably short period). I've only recently started playing with PokerEV but the graph for my downturn of $300 shows that if I was "normally" lucky with the all ins I would have broken even over the same period. This is reassuring and hopefully means I haven't got some big hole in my game all of a sudden but I'm not going to wallow in it (which is why I'm not posting it). Instead I'll look at the horizon again and post a graph showing the downturn once it's been overcome and I'm ahead of where it started. Going back to the internal dialogue there are a lot of people (some on this board :) ) who commentate on their play, pointing out the bad luck, or the missed opportunity "OMG I folded Q2 there and would have hit the straight!". They explain that they are having no luck, that it's all against them, then when they hit the miracle out on the river they react as if they "deserved it". What they are not getting is that they "deserve" the bad luck as well as the good, it's all part of the same thing and embracing both is the key to staying calm and balanced when you lose and when you win. What they are doing with the internal dialogue is explaining to themselves (and everyone else) that they are really a good player who is just unlucky. They are externalising the problem in order to soothe the bruised ego that wants (or needs) to win every time. They are going to be forever dissapointed because no matter how good they get they are still going to lose a huge % of the time (I'm going to write some more about this one day when I want to really offend some people :) ) Yes and this is pretty much where I started thinking about writing all this. I attended a training programme the other week which spoke about "positive self-talk" which is about managing the internal conversation so that you think in positives in order to affect behaviour positively, which in turn leads to successes which make positive thinking easier. I'm summarising terribly but that's the gist of it. Contrast this to the "I'm unlucky" thinking which finds easy reinforcement, which leads to bad play which leads to further "bad luck" and I'll take the former every time. So there we go, really long post and probably a tldr :) but thanks to anyone who did. [/QUOTE]

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