Couple of thoughts/tips 1-Play with variance poker calculator. You'll see that 15 bi downswings are relatively common even for high WR. 2-Zoom out. Whether or not you are on downswing depends also on what you take as starting point. Most players take their peak as starting point by doing this you are almost always on some kind of downswing. Given how high variance in poker is, you should look at your last at least 100k hands preferably even more. When you look lifetime or yearly graphs of winning players you can barely see 20bi downer. Statistically speaking anything below of let's say 300k has pretty much no significance unless your WR is super high. 3-Table select really hard and maybe lower amount of tables you play. If I'm not confident in my mental game I'll always play only the softest tables. That way i know I'm +ev even with my B game and maybe even C game. Which relaxes you a little bit and makes sure you don't put yourself in -ev spots (which is very dangerous). Also increasing WR lowers the variance more then increasing volume. 4-Regarding dropping down in stakes. I don't think you should play only one stake. Players often get their ego tie around what stakes they play. This is nonsense. You can easily find NL50 table where you win 10-12BB/100 even more which is more $/100 hands then playing most of the NL100/NL200 tables. Play all the stakes that your BR allows you to and pick highes ev tables in terms of $/100 would be my advice.
A well documented psychological bias is people's intuition of mean reversion, and this often feeds into poker tilt in my observation. Your poker results should follow some kind of random walk with drift, but if you think it's mean reverting then after a downswing you start to expect large positive sessions to offset your losses. In reality, that's not going to happen, so you're going to end up on average disappointed, and the tilt grows. I don't hear many people talking about this, but it can also happen in reverse, i.e. after an upswing, I start to expect losses as payback, so I instinctively start playing more passive to try and minimize the losses. I found it's helpful to just try to be conscious of this bias. If you're familiar with simulations, you can also play around with simulating random walks. I do it to try to remind myself how random poker outcomes are supposed to be.
The single biggest thing which has helped me with tilt is proper BR management. And by that I mean being WAY on the conservative side. Until an unfortunate recent event, I was multi-tabling 12-16, in a format which in itself has a huge additional variance component. And yet I was never risking more than 2% of my BR at any one time. When you have such a set up you also don't need to check your results daily, or even weekly. You can just look at the end of the month, which gives you more of a global picture. Basically, make sure that whatever set up you have allows you to focus solely on the decisions at the table in an abstract sense, and figure that all those thousands of small decisions will ultimately result in a + over a long enough period of time.
Really like Uri's advice. Also, often, the more one deeply understands what they are doing, the less tilt they will have. And the larger the normal edge one has, the less tilt happens, and the less likely tilt is to be a crusher should it happen. There are of course exceptions, such as having mental or emotional problems or being temporarily impaired, like playing when severely tired, and so on.
I've finally decided that poker is never going to be a main source of income. I would not be able to handle variance when taking care of my family. Since that decision, I study more, play more and have a way higher win rate as losses are not hurting and I just move on to the next hand.
Wow, I feel that you are the best Poker coach that can be found in RU-vid. This video about tilt with practical advice and the one where you show with simulations how probable a long bad run is, are gold. I would buy your course, but it is a bit over my budget and limit (maybe some day). Thanks for these videos!
Just amazing content as always. Really a legend , such pure positive vibes. Every video I smile at the fact that this super nice mellow chill human being is a online megalodon
Best poker content and analysis on RU-vid. Love how deep and no-nonsense all of your stuff is. No bells and whistles, annoying over-exaggerated commentary/personality pushing. Keep it up!
Identifying your level of focus with some sort of test can be helpful. I've opened a game of chess while playing poor poker and hung my queen on move 10 or no good reason. That let me know I'm not exactly thinking well and need a long break if not sleep.
