General Discussion Poker Forums

I was browsing the forums and i came to a post from a coach (his name is not important) where he mentions the losing months. I was under an assumtion that good players never have losing months?! (i guess its kind of naive)

So i was thinking to open up a thread about this... i would like to expand my understanding of variance by doing this...

I am interested in people who beat NL200+++ with solid winrates(3BB/100++) on regular basis (doing this as full time or half time job)

I would like to know how often does a losing month happen, biggest streches of break even/losing which are mostly caused by variance not playing carelessly or anything in that manner (sure a lot of times your overall game drops when you are running bad for a long time)

thanks

I have had 2 losing months in the last 12. (both were close to BE though -500 and -1200)

I play limit holdem, so the variance is a little different, but I play 5/10-15/30.

The longest i've broken even for is around 15k hands

Interesting question, but I think the term "month" is way to unspecific because it entirely depends on the number of hands / sessions played per month.

As natural as it is to package your results into a "month" or "week" or "session", its probably best not to assign much value to any given period of time. Poker is a game of the long run, and looking at results in a very long window can help de-stress the bad runs and de-emphasize the good ones.

That being said, yes there are definitely losing months. More of them if you play with high variance and low volume, less of them if you play with low variance and high volume. But you can't worry about them.

the idea of the losing month needs to go out the door unless you're considering poker's impact on your monthly finances. if it's just your results from poker, think in terms of hands. can you have 50k hand stretches where you are losing at the end of them? more often than you want to think unfortunately

the idea of the losing month needs to go out the door unless you're considering poker's impact on your monthly finances. if it's just your results from poker, think in terms of hands. can you have 50k hand stretches where you are losing at the end of them? more often that you want to think unfortunately

Yes, if you're 95% (st.dv 40bb) confident that you have a winrate of 3pt, then at 50,000 hands you're winrate lies between -.5pt and 6.5pt..

So it's theoretically possible to be a "winning player" and still a loser after 50k hands (couple months for most players)

durrrr had a million dollar down month,... took him like 4 months to make it back. Hell yes pros have huge swings. they are generally playing high limits, tough villains, and pushing small edges. They are FAR MORE inclined to have down months, and more up months!

I used to think I would never have a losing month. Then, I turned pro and couldn't just go surfing or goof off when I was running bad. Then, after playing 100Ks of hands I realized you can run quite bad at this game for a long time and losing months were inevitable. Then, after playing some more, I realized no matter how bad you've run before you will always run worse sometime in the future and that multiple losing months are definitely realistic.

Losing months will occur if you play high enough that you are just +ev in the game. Such as a good player playing 25/50 that beats the game will probably hardly ever have losing months if he had to go and play NL600 or lower. Where as at his normal stakes the variance is higher and it's possible he will have multiple months of losing because competition is better.

Some people have outrageous stretches of 100k hands or so of breakeven or losing even though they are +EV in the game.