Swing Sickness

Winning in poker is the easy part. It's the losing that makes you or breaks you. Losing is frustrating, and when you keep on losing for longer periods this frustration turns into a pain so repulsive that you start to feel physically sick. I have written on this state of mind before in my article "When You're Stuck" but as I have been running bad lately I decided that it was time to revisit this dreaded place.

One interesting phenomena that is associated with prolonged losing streaks is how it affects your spirit. The longer you have been running bad, the more severe the pain is every time you get outdrawn. When you are running good it is easy to shrug it off and forget it, dismissing it as the objection to the rule. But when you have been running badly and your spirits are low, beats sting and keep stinging for quite a while. It's like you have a battery-powered shield for taking the swings of the game mentally. When the batteries are running low you take the full blow, but if they are fully loaded you hardly realize that you have just been on the receiving end of a couple of sucker punches. I expect that most of you can nod in acknowledgment to this phenomenon. But dealing with the feeling is important in its own right for getting your game back in shape.

The problem with swing sickness is that it weakens your spirit. When my spirit is so weak that my stomach gets sick, I am usually prone to get several things wrong with my game.

The first is that I start to feel desperate. When my top hands get cracked all the time, I start to give up and loosen up. If they can win with shitty hands why shouldn't I try to get even by using their own medicine? This is obviously not a very clever strategy. But at this particular time it hurts me doubly. Because as my spirits are low I fail to make timely aggressive moves on scare cards, effectively turning me into a loose passive calling station. So as a rule of thumb it makes a lot more sense to play loosely when your spirit is strong than it does when it is shaken. Having a loose start hand selection is not necessarily a bad thing in its own right, but for you to succeed with it, you have to take down a fair share of pots with the worst hand. This requires a lot of guts and a great sense of timing, both things you usually don't have when your spirit is weak.

I also tend to get the feeling that my weakened spirit shows, and that the good aggressive players start to run me over (which is quite often true). This makes me play back at them with sub-standard hands. This is not in itself a bad thing either. When somebody keeps bullying you, you have to take a stand somewhere. But the problem with this strategy is that I risk a lot more then he does because if he ends up sucking out on me I get really hurt emotionally. If I win, it doesn't really boost my spirits either, as I will know that I let my guts preside over my brain and got lucky. Getting overly aggressive will increase your swings tremendously, and will make you more likely to lose some huge pots, as folding a hand when facing heavy action is a lot more difficult when you are in a weak state of mind than when you are on top of yourself, your game and your opponents.

But how do you get cured from swing sickness? In my experience there are only two ways of healing: A prolonged break from poker or a prolonged period of winning. The size of your winnings is completely irrelevant here. Several days with a small win every day will do the trick, whereas one monster day usually won't. The reason is that it takes a while to rebuild your confidence and reload your shields. If you start out on the wrong foot the day after a monster win, it doesn't take long before you are down and out again. Three days in a row where you book a small win, on the other hand�

This realization should have some implications for your general strategy. You generally should appreciate the value of minimizing your swings in this situation. This means that you should avoid aggressive games. Even though a game with two maniacs in it might look good, you should realize that in your current state of mind, it is not good for you. Moving down limit is often a good idea too, not only because it will help preserve your bankroll, but also because the level of aggression usually go down, and more players become easily readable.

It might also make sense to leave the game early as a small winner. Leaving while a small winner will help in improving your spirits, whereas leaving a loser after having been up during the session will seriously hurt your spirits. I have often seen people respond to weakened spirits by trying harder. The only thing that will do for them is to make them fail more frequently hurting them even more. You have to go with the flow. And you have to accept that there are no shortcuts to recovery. You can't fight it, but you might be able simply to let it go.

Here is a classic case of how a weak spirit turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy; this hand played out in a live $40-80 game. It was checked around to the button who raised. I looked down at A4 and decided to re-raise, as I knew the button player to be a very active steal raiser. The flop came J108. That is not a nice board for me, as there are two cards in the playing zone plus a load of straight and flush draws possible. Expecting my bad luck to continue I check, and the button duly bets. As there are so many draws he can hold that I can beat I call. The turn is the 3 and I check-call again. The river is the Q. This is a bad card for me, as it will make some kind of hand for most of the draws that he can hold. I checked and he bet again, and as the pot was now too big to fold and I could still beat a busted flush draw, I made a crying call. He showed down KQ for a pair of queens. He was indeed on a draw and got there on the river, which makes it feel like I was sucked out on. But the truth is that I never gave him a chance to lay down his hand. In this particular case, I probably wouldn't have succeeded, as the draw he held was a very strong one, but in many cases a bet on the flop or a check-raise on the turn would have kicked him off the pot. But with my weak spirit I failed to make up my mind and I failed to attack him at some point in the hand. This leads to him getting a lot of cheap cards against me, and this in turn will lead him to catch up on me a lot more frequently then he would have if my spirit was strong.

Thanks to Leigh Lightfoot-Martin for proof reading this article.

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