Winning and loosing session

I just noticed that 2/3 of my sessions are slightly loosing ones and 1/3 are highly winning ones. I'm not worried about the result since it is quite positive but my expectation was that in a winning player, most sessions were slightly positive and a small number of sessions were negative for bad beats, card dead, etc and a small number of sessions were very positive for having big hands and so on.

I would like to hear what is the CC'ers experience regarding this.

What sample size of sessions are we talking about here?

Regardless, it's not that unusual. Most of your winnings come from winning big money from big hands and not things like getting an extra half-BB from a thin river value bet or correctly making a really marginal call/fold or suchlike. In the sessions where you get big hands and big action, you'll tend to win a truckload - in the sessions where you don't you'll tend to run pretty miserably profit-wise.

As long as you're ultimately winning, it's nothing to be greatly concerned about. It's possible that there are some big leaks in your game but it's impossible to comment without more information. I could say something like "Well you're probably playing too tight because you seem to be reliant on big hands to not make a loss in a session", but that's just idle speculation - it's probably just as likely that you could be playing too loosely or overplaying certain hands or any one of a multitude of other possibilities.

Thanks for your feedback.

More than wanting to analyse what's the issue with my sessions, I wanted to hear if it is somewhat normal since my expectation was different.

To be honest my big loosing sessions are the ones where I make the biggest mistakes, not really the ones where I get a couple of bad beat or something like that. I guess that's what makes sense.

On the other hand it is also possible that since I'm playing 2NL, each table is so different that I change my opening and calling ranges a lot. So if I get a tighter table I'm looser and getting small value mostly from stealing but if I'm on a looser table I tighten up and get paid with big hands.

But yes it is indeed speculation in a way and I guess it's caused mostly because of my expectations.

With 2nl i think the basic expentancy would be for one to have a larger than usual proportion of big winning and big losing sessions, due to opponents being bad. Again though if we're just talking results over a small sample size, well, anything can happen.

But really as I said, it's your bottom line that matters. If you want to assess your play, just review interesting hands and don't get bogged down by the small stuff, especially at 2nl.

(also if you get a tighter table, you should be moving tables. )

RVladimiro said:

I just noticed that 2/3 of my sessions are slightly loosing ones and 1/3 are highly winning ones. I'm not worried about the result since it is quite positive but my expectation was that in a winning player, most sessions were slightly positive and a small number of sessions were negative for bad beats, card dead, etc and a small number of sessions were very positive for having big hands and so on.

I would like to hear what is the CC'ers experience regarding this.

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There is a lot of factor that determine how a session goes (number of tables playing and time played) besides the tight/loose table you are playing.

As for me,i disregard most of my sessions status until the end of the week so that i could really evaluate something with a sample size (although i do like to see a lot of greens,although most of them are under 1bi)

You need to start thinking of poker as one long session, rather than a series of "chucks". For each time you play, have a pre-determined amount of hands that you will play, or play for a certain time frame. Avoid playing long sessions to "get back to even", or short sessions "Because I'm up". Learn to spot when you are tilting, and just learn the game.

Tilt problems can be super destructive.No one can really banish their tilt problems but one can control it.

Definitely 'ride the heater' and stop the losses early when you're not playing your A-game

tenbob said:

You need to start thinking of poker as one long session, rather than a series of "chucks". For each time you play, have a pre-determined amount of hands that you will play, or play for a certain time frame. Avoid playing long sessions to "get back to even", or short sessions "Because I'm up". Learn to spot when you are tilting, and just learn the game.

Click to expand...

Thanks, that's solid advice. I don't play to get back to even, been there, done that, it's spewy. The "Because I'm up" is unfortunatelly the only thing I can go for right now, but I really see your point.

I'm not really sure if my OP makes any sense right now but I won't get to that since it may very well just be a upswing right now. We'll see...