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Learn of your bad streaks

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By A. Aguilar

When you sit at a poker table, you never know what will happen. Some days you will win; others days will lose. And yet others will be just average days, without real wins or loses. Even the big poker players have significant losses some days. These losses can continue for several sessions and can produce what is called a Bad Streak. Many times players suffer these bad streaks without apparently having committed errors of any magnitude; perhaps it was aggressive rounds which did not fall on their side, or simply it was bad luck.

Conversely, you can achieve a series of sessions with gains; this is perfectly plausible.

This is known as "variance". It's a statistics term that tells us how other values are scattered around an average.

It can also happen if you were earning almost daily before it went to the opposite effect; you were having a good run before, out of the ordinary.

The response from a player to a bad run can be disastrous. He may try to recover lost money by leveling up the amounts of his bets and playing much more aggressively. This could lead to a nervous state or "tilt" which sometimes causes a partial or total loss of your bankroll (money disposed to play poker). It can also make you play more fearful of your hands and force you to not use some of your usual moves; making things like doing a re-raise with a JJ to test the strength of your hand, or bet with face cards in hands where you have several outs (number of cards that will serve to complete a move) to link a very strong move.

There are players that on the other hand try to capitalize on the bad times, and when they are going through a rough spot spend more time on other important aspects of the game other than actually playing poker; reading books and articles on tactics, studying data about the game to try to identify some errors, etc. Most semi-professional players who play online use aid programs to evaluate a multitude of statistical parameters about the game of their rivals, and their own, too. Sinking deeper into the sea of facts and values, you might just find some parameters that you should adjust in your game, with some visible improvements. Carefully studying hands that make you lose big pots can often help you find that error that won't let you leave that Bad Streak behind.