The last few days in Vegas have been a seriously rough and humbling journey.  My ass has been kicked, my face rubbed in a giant pile of humility, my ego dented beyond recognition.

I am running bad.  I could regale you with some fairly dazzling bad beat stories – but we’ve heard them all before anyways.  Boat over boat, set over set, boat versus quads, nut flush versus straight flushes, runner runner whatever.  They’re all the same stories; only the faces, places and pot sizes have changed.

Vegas, this week, has given me my share of these stories to tell, and I’ll probably tell them next time I’m at the table or when people ask how the trip went.  But what I want to do here is share my notes on what running bad means to me, and what that teaches me about the meta aspects of this game.

It’s Not The Math Stupid

When you first pick up the game, math is touted as the mystical key to unlocking consistently winning play.  The more serious players will dedicate hours and days and years to mastering pot odds, positive and negative EV, folding equity, probabilities.  They will chase after this secret knowledge under the assumption that it is the gateway to becoming the next Phil Ivey, Gus Hansen, Tom Dwan.  But at a certain level, math simply becomes a mechanic of the game and the player progesses to the more meta aspects of poker such as table image, social game, psychology, analyzing situations and context.  At this certain level of play, those things are more important elements to have mastery over than deriving percentages of winning or the odds that you’ll make your flush on the turn.

What running bad teaches you, if you are willing to endure it’s painful lesson, is the game of poker has multiple layers of mechanics and that it’s not good enough to just be good at one aspect, you must be good at all of them.  The simple reason being that at certain points of whatever crest you are rising on, or falling off of, you will have to rely more heavily on one over the other.  If the mathematics are failing you, to win the game – or keep your head above the water – you’ll have to lean on social play to give you the edge that you need.  And vice versa.

Life Lessons

The first thing that you do when you are running bad is suffer a crushing wave of self doubt, depression, desperation.  When cards aren’t coming, flops aren’t following, this is a very hopeless, lonely feeling.  Also, running bad doesn’t always mean being card dead, it can also mean an extended period of running into bad rivers and gamble gamble suck outs.  But either way you cut it, the end result is the exact same: you keep stacking lesser opponents, donking off buy-ins on pure speculation, calling with the third best hand and so on and so forth.

So how do we cope with these bad runs?  Sane people quit the game entirely, realizing the swings aren’t something they want to choose to deal with on a semi-regular basis.  But those of us with passion for the game, we wade through the muck and pray for the clouds to lift.  We clutch to a hope that things will get better, and they almost certainly will, but there are a lot of valuable insights on the game we are missing by not embracing the bad run and using it as a period of introspection, analyzing our relationship to this game and what this really says about us as a player.

When you are running bad, your instincts are to lament your misfortunes, to blame luck and deny culpability to the situation.  To power through the  bad run, you’re going to need to do some serious self-analysis.  If you fail to do this, you’re losing an opportunity to improve your game when conditions improve and you simply perpetuate the bad run even further.

This particular trip has taught me a number of things:

It’s Not Just a Game

When I run bad and bitch and grumble about it, a lot of people say to me “It’s just a game.”

That’s the attitude you expect from people who don’t play with the same passion as you.  The people who don’t get it.  But what don’t they get?  They probably don’t get that you are, in one way or the other, uniquely qualified to play this game.  Either it’s your analytical skills, your ability to read people or the chameleon-like capabilities of your personality.  For those devoted to the game, there is some aspect of who they are, or where they come from, that makes for them a connection to the game that can’t be explained to anyone without a similar connection.

For myself, the social aspects of the game are what draw me in.  Shifting your personality to gain favor amongst strangers, to assert yourself into the dominant personality on the table – these things I am uniquely designed for.  When my social game is at full bore, it gives me an undeniably distinct edge.  It allows me to make moves when the math isn’t always in my favor.  It allows me to extract information from people on the table which gives me a keen insight on how they handle the game, how they react to specific situations, even their capability to analyze you.

The first negative thing I must deal with when running bad is a shattered self-esteem and the impact this has on my social game.  Remember, when you are running bad, math is not on your side and you’ll have to use skills beyond it to pursuit a profit.  To win the game, you have to switch gears and find those other edges, advantages, and set them to work for you.  But if your self esteem is crushed, your social game, your social tools, are crushed right along side it.  Instead of being the happy joker at the end of the table, you are the sullen donkey.  Instead of the intimidating quiet guy, you’re the weak, scared guy.  Nobody likes the unpopular kid and people will be more than happy to call you down.  Consider it the meta version of bullying the weak kid on the playground.  If your social game is running right, nobody wants to crack the nice guy, the funny guy, the “good” guy.  Nobody want to tangle with the rock, the tough guy.  You want to be either one of those guys.  But you cannot be if you do not have the self-esteem, or confidence, to assert yourself in either position.

Keep Playing

When I tell people I am running bad, they almost always tell me to stop playing or will ask why I keep playing. The easy answer is that this bad run will eventually come to an end and that end could be today, it could be tomorrow, it could be a decade from now.  You won’t know unless you keep on playing.

But that answer is disingenuous at best, addictive rationalizing at worst with very few shades of gray in between.   We, as human beings, love to lie to ourselves about the things that makes us most uncomfortable, explain them away with good sounding non-sense.  But if you do not face the facts, and if you do not analyze the circumstances, if you are not fully cognizant of the situation, you might be nursing larger problems than just being on a bad run.  If you’re playing your rent money, your mortgage money, your kid’s college money, you are clearly working an addiction and need help.

One story that really sticks in my head involves a guy I was having a cigarette with between hands at Mohegan Sun.  He was telling me how it was his birthday, that he had come down right after he got off work and had cashed his paycheck.  His wife had been cooking dinner for him, waiting for him.  But he had decided to head to the casino to play some cards instead, hoping to make a quick hit and still make it home in time.  It was his birthday after all, and birthdays are “lucky”, aren’t they?  He lost his entire paycheck on the tables because he was on a “bad run”.  Worst still, he had forgotten to fill up the tank of his car before heading to the casino and now he didn’t have any money to pay for gas to get back home.  He is several hours late and his wife is at home, angry, eating a cold dinner she had made for him as some sort of expression of fondness, probably of love.  The only thing I can say for him is that he wasn’t asking for any money and when people offered, he turned it down.  But he still made me sad and angry.  Sad for his wife, sad for watching someone hit a bottom with such blunt force, angry because he places me in this weird moral dilemma where I might have had a hand in causing harm to someone.  I will tell you I had to do some moral self-examination for a few weeks afterward and though I’m pretty much over it, it still bothers me sometimes when I crack a guy I know is playing his food money.

The reason I keep playing through bad runs, though I will certainly slow down the amounts and time I play, is that because I honestly believe that I am good at this game and that I am suited to play it.  And I think this fundamental aspect of self-esteem is what differentiates good players from competent players.  So though I’m getting raped on the river, sucked out on like senators in airport bathrooms, I simply can’t give up something I know I am good at.  But, if I am not learning from each and every failure, than I am merely delusional and am no better than the guy that just lost his entire paycheck.  The only difference is that I might be able to hide behind a facade of “bankroll management”.

Sometimes, Shit Happens

Let’s face it, shit happens.  There are almost certainly times when you’ve played a hand so perfectly that only the shit end of a random universe can screw the entire thing up in such dramatic ways.  But I am willing to wager that 75% of the time there was some aspect of a particular hand that you did not play as well as you thought.  And hindsight is always 20/20, but of anyone I know, poker players can delude themselves like no others.

Which is not to say to beat yourself up for each hand that isn’t played to perfection.  What I am trying to say is that consider how that hand went south and what you could have possibly done to reverse the outcome in your favor.  A bigger bet on the turn to shake the guy off of his draw?  Raising enough preflop to shake deep stacks off his 52 off-suit that quaded up on the river?  Cultivating your table image to give more weight and meaning to your bets and raises in general?  Too much table talk while the hand is in play?  Playing into someone else’s social game, instead of having them playing into yours?  There are so many aspects to the game, and the situations it creates, to consider that you almost certainly were flawed in at least one mechanic.

And you need to examine it from a macro level, you need to take it from the top of the session to the particular moment in time when everything came crashing down.  How is your table image?  What do you believe your perceived strength to be?  How tuned in are you on how other’s are playing?  Inventory that and work it into future sessions as a mental checklist.

So often we point the finger at the other player but I think that’s lazy.  But even then, shit happens, that’s the game.  You cannot escape it’s random elements, only minimize their impact.

Your Not As Good As Other Players and They Aren’t As Good As You

I really think ego is a powerful thing in poker.  A healthy ego gives you the strength to make amazing calls, but an unchecked ego will get you into a lot of trouble.  There will always be a better player than you, and you will always be better than other players.  This is a fundamental poker skill, being able to recognize and categorize the general aptitude of your opponents.  It is such a huge factor in the way you play a specific hand or draw against a particular opponent that it’s importance can’t be understated.

But when you are running bad, your ego is deflated and it’s harder to pump yourself up because running bad can make you feel like one massive losing donkey. If you can recognize that you are running bad, the factors that are contributing to it, it might make clear the path to accepting it, allowing you to more easily damage control your ego.

Scale Your Idea of Success

Most hedge funds return well below 50% and anything over is pretty impressive.  It’s therefore a fairly sensible thing to scale your expectations for session profits to this range when you are running bad.  It’s amazing how tied our esteem about a particular session is to how low it’s ROI is and how that can actually feed into the preconditions for a bad run.  Bankroll management is so incredibly key to keep your bankroll in relative safety but also to require you to be more focused about your game.  Also, being more realistic about your expected rate of return will also keep you from playing too long.

I don’t do this very well, but am getting better at it.  Practice makes perfect.  Unfortunately.

You Can’t Play Perfectly Every Time

As with anything, you probably won’t get it right until the third or fourth time, so as long as you are showing some sort of improvement, regardless of the aspect or mechanic, your eeking something positive out of a largely negative experience.  Harvesting all of the negative energy around a bad run into something positive and you will eventually come out ahead, perhaps not fiscally at first, but your game will get there.

And it’s not any fun either, but it’s one aspect of the game that you have to get skilled on dealing with because it’s inevitable, no matter how good you are.  Time heals all wounds, as they say.

Have Faith

My final note on running bad is to have faith that there is another side to it.  There is always a loser at the table and sometimes that loser is going to be you.  But there is always a winner, and if you work hard enough at it, that can be mostly you most of the time.  But it won’t be overnight, and it won’t be cheap – financially or emotionally.

In the end, if running bad is going be a reoccurring thing, why not learn to deal with it?