Hello hardlife66,
I have seen you starting quite a few threads where you make judgments about your play or the effectiveness of your strategy based on a sample of a few hands. I need to be honest here, you really need to change the way you think about poker.
First of all, as I just said, you keep mentioning tiny sample sizes, like 25 hands in this case. To put it into perspective, most people typically play sessions of 500-1k hands. If you want to play shorter sessions, that's completely fine, but please note that you'll need
at least 10k hands to make
any kind of judgment about your short term success, and more than 100k hands to even start making predictions about your true winrate.
Moreover, you always seem to judge your play based on the eventual outcome of the hand. This is commonly called "results-oriented thinking", and it is a trap that every poker player needs to avoid. The only thing you need to care about is that you are making +EV decisions, as long as you do that, you
will make a profit in the long run (keep in mind that you need well over 100k hands to make any statements about "the long run"). It is entirely possible that a player makes all the right decisions throughout a session and still loses stack after stack, the same way as a player can make poor decisions and win for a while. Those are just the effects of variance, and you need to know how to handle this if you want to be a winning player.
In this thread, for example, you mentioned that all the hands you were dealt would have lost, even the ones you folded. There is no reason to even care about this. Good players don't win because they receive better hands than everyone else. They win because they know how to make the most profit out of good hands, how to avoid losing too much with less good hands, and when they can take down a pot without even holding the best hand. These skills can be learned, and in the end, they are what separates the winners from the losers.
You also once mentioned in another thread, that you don't reload your stack to 100BB if you lose a few chips. While it is possible to play with a shorter stack, it is recommended that you keep a full stack in front of you at all times, and most strategies you can find here are made with this in mind. Shorter stacks can be tricky to play, as they sometimes require a different strategy. The reason most players have auto-reload enabled is not that they want to "hide their losses" as you once assumed, it is just widely considered the most effective way to play. Please note that you don't need to be afraid of losses with a full stack as long as you stick to solid bankroll management guidelines.
I picked out three videos for you on the topics of variance and volume, and I really recommend that you watch them:
1.
The Mental Game: Variance in Poker
2.
Volume and Variance
3.
Goal Setting - Variance Affecting Our Calculations
If you want to play SNGs instead of cash games now, that's fine, but please be advised that the variance is actually even higher in this format compared to cash games. One advantage of them, however, would be that losing streaks have a lower impact on your bankroll, since losses are capped.
If you do decide to get back to cash games, I recommend that you give Zoom games (or any other form of speed poker if you're not playing on Pokerstars) a try, in order to get a better understanding of volume and the short run vs. the long run.
I apologize if I came across as too harsh in this post, I am just trying to help you get on the right track to improve your game.
Best of luck!
- Very solid and thoughtful advice Harrier88!
