It's Not a Downswing, You Just Suck!

+2 4 VOTES

Downswing is thrown around so much in the Poker industry. It’s more overused than employees at your favourite whorehouse. It’s also commonly misused.

It has been my experience in poker that not many people will tell you that they are a losing player. Now either I know a statistically unheard of ratio winning poker players, or some people are projecting themselves as profitable when they aren’t.

Academically I’m a pretty average student; I am an English/History major, which means the flipside of things is that Mathematics has never been my strong suit. (In fact I failed Society Maths in grade 12)

Despite the talk that Poker is an art-form, it is definitely a game more heavily rooted in maths, and so I’ve never been a natural talent. I spent two years as a losing player bouncing from micro-stakes sit n gos, to cash games, and over to MTTs, all the while thinking I was a great player and the lucky donks just ran good.

Eventually after blowing my meagre deposit for the billionth time, I decided to face the fact that I sucked at the game, and needed to work out where I was going wrong. After a month of “retirement” from Poker, I did some intensive study of how to win at micro stakes tournaments (just free information on the various poker communities out there) and began to run at a small profit in the smallest tourneys on PokerStars (sick brag etc).

I personally never liked the variance of tournaments and the fact that a winning player is often only cashing in 14 out of every hundred tournaments they enter. So I decided to seriously focus on the cash game side of things and read again the excellent resources that are out there, freely available on this and many of the other poker websites.

I’ve now found a level that I’m beating quite handily and happily enjoying having the fish spew their stacks to me on a regular basis. I’m not a natural at the game, but I did something that a lot of players need to do. Wake up and smell the coffee. If you’re constantly “on a downswing”, you need to question whether you are actually profitable at poker – and if you’re not, look into making some adjustments. You may be playing at a level that is too advanced for your skills, you may be making some basic errors in your strategy, or you could be like I used to be and think that limping Aces before open shoving them four ways on a 9TJ flop was a solid strategy.

If an epic failure at mathematics like me can profit at poker, you certainly can.