SWINGS

So in this post as I said previously I wanted to talk about a particular topic, I covered a bit about swings in my old blog but wanted to go into it again as it was a pretty good subject and definitely relevant to the games I'm playing.

First of all I would like to say swings happen in poker, no1 can withstand them, for some people they may be crucial loosing 100buyins + and for others they may just be a smaller win rate over a big sample size eg some1 consistently beating a game at 5% roi and goes 1k games winning at 2% roi.
Loads of things effect swings, way more than most people think at the time a swing is occurring. I'm going to focus on just 3 of the many aspects of swings; confidence, tilt, simply the maths.

Confidence to me seems to be one of the main factors in swings, this isn't for everyone but for me a lot of my game flow plays/ thinking outside the box happens when I have just ran good over a sample size and decide to make a couple of ev+ plays to keep things flowing and I 'expect' them to bring a return on ev+ play I make. I use the word 'expect' as obviously if I am making an ev+ play I am always expecting them to bring a return but when confidence is booming you tend to think more positively about taking them. With confidence low it can bring a scared factor into it and can prevent you from taking an ev+ play even though you know it will bring a return but if it doesn't then the variance of the play will make you feel less confident again and then can cause your thinking to start rejecting some ev+ spots to reduce variance but really missing them spots are what will increase variance and in turn make a downswing last longer.

Tilt; I decided to talk about tilt after confidence because I think confidence is a big factor in tilt. I feel main parts of tilt can come in two different forms when we are considering confidence being the cause for tilt. I feel that when confidence is low and I may start missing some nice spots and then I realise I have missed some spots I begin to tilt because if I'm missing ev+ spots then I am playing bad poker imo (this excludes the times I choose to not take a slight ev+ play because I feel I can wait out a more ev+ play against a particular opponent). So the way tilting can effect a downswing can make the downswing continue further as you now realise that you are playin bad and when 'trying' to play better a player can make even more ev- in order to make up for the good spots they missed. This is getting pretty hard to explain but a good example of this is in an mtt I played back in November. I was on a final table with 2nd in chips and had been getting 3bet/4bet quite a few hands in a row, my plays were certainly ev+ and was obv running under ev in the small sample size on the final table, a spot came where I had perfect stacks for a 3bet 5 handed and I opted to fold because I wanted to slow down the pace of the game as I had been played back in 'a few' spots I had tried and wanted to reduce variance for a few hands, I then realised I should have taken the ev+ play and was a lil annoyed at myself, I then noticed a few hands later I decided to 4bet in a really bad spot which was probably even ev- given I was oop to a super aggro opponent, this situation laid it down clearly to me that 1 I should have taken the 1st ev+ situation and 2 I shouldn't have taken the ev- situation and unconsciously I believe it was down to confidence becoming low and tilt kicking in that caused this to happen.

Tilt can also kick in when confidence is booming and you are running over ev in a bunch of situations, If a player is playing extremely confidently and picking a bunch of spots (both ev+ and ev-) and there working out in a good way this can cause a player to become over confident and a superman effect can come on the player where they feel invincible and nothing they can do can go wrong, this is again because their results over a small sample size has been overly good and the good results of this small sample can keep the ev- plays in their game un noticed for a long period of time (maybe infinitely if they don't work on their game constantly enough) and can cause downswings to continue extremely long without realising the problem.

Maths is obviously going to be a key factor in downswings and upswings, and the best and easiest way to explain it in terms of a break even player would be to take a coin and flip it a thousand times, if you was to plot the results on a graph you would certainly see points in the graph where heads was running super under ev and equally when tails was running under ev but if you was to do it say 50,000 times then its pretty certain that their would be no correlation - or + for either heads of tails and this is the same for a break even poker player, they will have some good days and some bad days but if they consistently played break even poker then they would in the long run break even its when the other factors such as confidence/tilt kick in where they can go from being break even into being a ev- player. So when you see a player with a consistent 10% roi over 15k games at husngs then its pretty clear that they are playing at a 10% roi level and same as with a loosing player over big samples its pretty clear these are not long up n downswings that these players are winning what their level of play dictates them to win. (When talking about swings in terms of games I don't want to include mtt's as these are pretty different as results do not always determinen the level of the player involved)

Ok so this is kinda just some quick writing and probs the first bit of thought processed writing I have done since writing essays at uni so in parts my point may seem unclear and the grammar and punctuation will be horrible I expect as I am TERRIBLE at English but I just wanted to write about a topic and thought swings would be a nice one to cover as it is so relevant. I will do another post in the next couple of days to talk about Feb and will include my week with Jasonc6 one of the sickest Husng players online at the moment and a bunch of fun things that happened in the month.

Jan summary and Feb goals

Jan ended a super sick month for me, in fact the best grinding month (bar when I can 2nd in the brawl) I have had, I played 1816 games which is probably the most volume I have ever put into a month. I used my ftps to buy a 1k bonus and I had enough Iron man medals to get me a $600 bonus. I thought about whether or not I wanted to put my results on here for each month and decided against it as those interested can always check scope and those who aren't it doesn't matter.

I feel really chilled out, been exercising, drinking a lot less and been spending a lot of time with my girlfriend. In terms of health I think this could possibly be the healthiest; mentally, socially and physically I have been since I used to play rugby at 16, so I am really happy.

Feb goals:
I have just moved up to $350 games and have some swings already, pretty excited bout it as if I run well could be another sick month, started out well already but can easily change.
The goals I'm going to make are pretty much to play 1800 games again and to keep watching videos from mersenneary and maybe some other coaches I have never really given time to watch.

Pretty boring post but just wanted to some up Jan and intro to Feb, for my next post I think I'm going to write about a particular subject I will think about it and post when I have something worth reading.