What is the best way to end a downswing?

Should you play more volume or study more to boost your ROI? The answer may surprise you.

Volume is the best way to get out of a downswing. That is what the conventional wisdom has always said. If you are a winning player then your best option is to increase your volume, not take a break. A downswing can't last forever, so the more you play, the sooner it ends. But is that really the best approach? 

A more recent argument I have seen is that the best way to end or reduce downswings is to improve your ROI. If you are willing to put in extra time, it would therefore be better to spend that time studying, rather than grinding. You end the downswing by winning more, essentially. 

This is thankfully something we can put some numbers on, thanks to the variance calculators at Prime Dope. They are genuinely some of the best free tools out there so please make the most of these. 

Let's have a hypothetical comparison. We have a player who plays $11 MTTs with 11% rake. They have an ROI of 10% and they play 200 runner MTTs that pay 30 players on average. They play 1,000 MTTs a year. 

Over 1,000 simulations, this is what that player may experience:

What you are looking at there are 20 random simulations. In the best run our Hero won just over $6,000, in the worst run they lost close to $3,000 over 1,000 games. On average they win around $1,000. This player was 25% likely to be down after 1,000 tournaments and their required bankroll to avoid going broke was $2,710. 

So our Hero is 25% likely to have a losing year on the current form. What if they took the sage advice of increasing their volume? Let's say they played 3,000 tournaments instead of 1,000? 

This is what happens:

In the best case our Hero has doubled their potential winnings to around $12,000. In the worst case they have an even worse downswing losing close to $4,000 and at one point being down over $5,000. On average they will win around $3,000. Their probability of loss has come down to 13.1% and their required bankroll to avoid ruin is $4,108. 

So there are some worse outliers, but overall our player has a higher upside and had almost halved their chance of ending the year down. 

What if, instead, our Hero spends that extra time studying instead of grinding? Let's say with study they can triple their ROI to 30%, while playing 1,000 MTTs? This is not a perfect comparison because studying takes time and you see the benefits later, we can't make him better like Neo in The Matrix. With that in mind, this is what 1,000 MTTs looks like with a 30% ROI:

The best-case scenario is just over $8,000 in profit. In the worse case, they lost $2,000. On average they made $3,000. Crucially their probability of loss was just 2.3% and their required bankroll was $1,571. 

Don't get distracted by the fact that our Hero wins more in the best-case scenario when they increased their volume, that was an outlier. Most of the time they were much better off boosting their ROI and especially if they wanted to avoid a losing year. 

These simulations are not perfect, they ignore human factors like the fact players tend to get better over time and tend to play worse while they are losing. Our simulation was not perfect because it assumed an instant improvement in the studying example.

It does show, however, that while volume is very important, study is too. Crucially the benefits of study last a long time, while the benefits of volume do not. The lesson here is that if you have some extra time to devote to poker, spending it studying the game might be your better option. 

What is your study-to-volume ratio? Let us know in the comments: