Hey everybody, today we’re going to talk about why you might in a downswing and, more importantly, what might be making it worse.
I’ve worked with thousands of poker players over the last 20 years from more than 60 countries, and one of the most common reasons people hire a poker coach is that they’re losing and they don’t understand how to turn things around.
Sometimes there really is an unusual or highly specific reason behind a downswing. But before you pay somebody $200 an hour to diagnose your game, let me give you some of the most common problems I see so you can check for them yourself.
Let’s get into it.
1. Your folds have turned into cold calls
This happens constantly when players are frustrated. It’s especially common in cash games where effective stacks are getting shorter and in tournaments where players start convincing themselves they need to 'make something happen.'
The problem is that speculative hands miss far more often than they connect in a meaningful way. When you call with a pocket pair, you’re only going to flop a set or better around 12% of the time, and suited connectors or suited gappers will flop two pair or better only around one time in 20.
That means most of the time you call with these hands, you’re going to end up in no-man’s-land. Unless the opponent is weak, predictable, or likely to pay you off heavily when you make a big hand, you can create plenty of uncomfortable postflop situations for yourself.
This is especially dangerous when reverse implied odds come into play. You might make a pair or a weak draw and convince yourself to continue, only to discover that you’ve built a large pot with a hand that was never particularly strong.
That’s why I want the potential payoff to justify the call when I’m playing speculative hands.
As a rough guideline, I’d like the possibility of winning around 15 times my call with a pocket pair, 25 times my call with a suited connector, and 35 times my call with a suited gapper.
When players are running well, they’re usually much better at recognizing spots where the upside simply isn’t there. When they’re frustrated, those folds suddenly become calls because they desperately want to participate in a hand.
That is one of the easiest ways to turn a normal downswing into a much longer one.
2. Your 3-bets have turned into cold calls
There’s an old poker concept that it can take a stronger hand to call with than it does to raise with. That idea becomes especially important when calling allows several other players to enter the pot behind you.
Let’s say a very loose player raises from the lojack and you’re sitting in the cutoff with king-queen offsuit. If that player is opening hands like king-eight suited, queen-nine suited, and plenty of other weaker holdings, king-queen can be a perfectly reasonable hand to 3-bet for value and isolation.
Now imagine that instead of 3-betting, you simply call. The button sees a good price and comes along, the big blind joins in, and suddenly you’re playing a four-way pot with a hand that frequently makes one pair.
Even when you flop a king or queen, you may have no idea how comfortable you should be if heavy action starts developing. You took a hand that could have been used aggressively against one weak player and voluntarily put it into a much more complicated situation.
This gets worse during a downswing because frustrated players start thinking, 'There’s no way they can have it again.' That kind of thinking encourages more passive calls, more multiway pots, and more situations where you talk yourself into continuing with mediocre hands.
If a hand is strong enough to attack a loose opener, don’t automatically turn it into a call because you’re afraid of building a pot.
Sometimes the aggressive option is actually the one that makes your life easier.
3. You’re forcing bluffs with missed draws
One of the most common losing bluffs I find when reviewing databases belongs to players who are frustrated that their draws keep missing. Eventually they decide, 'Fine, if I can’t hit the flush, I’m just going to make them fold.'
The problem is that missed flush draws are some of the most obvious bluff candidates on many boards. Your opponent can see that the flush draw missed too, which gives them a convenient story to tell themselves when they want to make a hero call.
People love having an excuse to call.
If they call and they’re wrong, they can tell themselves, 'Well, I thought he missed the flush draw.' That psychological safety net makes these spots worse for bluffing than many frustrated players realize.
There’s another problem here as well. If you actually go through all the flush draws in your database, you may discover that you’re not missing them nearly as often as you think.
Your brain is very good at cherry-picking painful examples when you’re running badly. You remember the six flush draws that missed at the worst possible moments and conveniently forget the ones that came in earlier in the week.
Don’t turn normal variance into an excuse to force a bluff. A missed draw does not automatically mean you now need to win the pot some other way.
4. You’re hero calling too much
Most poker players do not bluff nearly as comfortably as they would like you to believe. When people become nervous about bluffing, the natural result is that many of the biggest and most aggressive lines in live poker are still heavily weighted toward value.
If somebody check-raises you large on the flop, raises the turn, or puts in a massive river raise, they’re frequently not messing around. The same is true when somebody donk-leads huge, shows aggression into multiple players, fires three substantial barrels, or suddenly uses a large overbet.
Those lines can obviously contain bluffs. But if you have no special information telling you this opponent is unusually aggressive, you shouldn’t automatically talk yourself into a hero call just because you’re tired of folding.
Sometimes you simply have one pair and your opponent is telling you that one pair is no good. You’re allowed to believe them.
This is another area where a downswing can distort your thinking. After losing several pots, players start saying things like, 'They can’t have it every single time,' and use that frustration as justification for another call.
They don’t need to have it every time. They only need to have it often enough that your call loses money.
5. You’ve started folding everything
This problem is less common because extremely tight players can go broke or disappear from tougher games fairly quickly, but I still see it.
Some players respond to losing by deciding that nobody is ever bluffing them, so they start folding every marginal hand they face aggression with.
Fortunately, this is often easier to fix than excessive calling. You just need to start identifying situations where your opponent’s line doesn’t make sense.
For example, imagine there’s a flush draw on the board and your opponent checks back a street where many players would normally bet their strong made hands for value and protection. Then the flush misses, you bet the river, and that same opponent suddenly comes alive with a raise.
That line deserves your attention.
Many recreational players with top pair or better don’t like giving free cards when an obvious flush draw is available. They’re worried about getting drawn out on, so they tend to bet their strong hands earlier rather than suddenly discovering aggression after the draw misses.
That means the river raise can sometimes represent exactly what you think it does: a missed draw that decided to take one last shot at the pot.
Those are the types of situations where I would begin exploring some slightly looser calls rather than deciding that every large river raise must be the nuts.
The point isn’t to suddenly become a calling station. The point is to stop allowing a downswing to convince you that every opponent always has it.
A downswing can change the way you play
The dangerous part of a downswing isn’t simply losing money. It’s that losing money can slowly change your decisions without you realizing it.
Folds become calls because you want action. Three-bets become passive cold calls because you’ve lost confidence, missed draws become forced bluffs because you’re frustrated, and normal river decisions become either wild hero calls or overly cautious folds.
That’s why one of the best things you can do during a downswing is stop focusing exclusively on the results and start looking for changes in your decision-making. The cards may be running badly, but if frustration is causing you to play differently too, you’re adding completely avoidable losses on top of the variance.
Check these five areas before assuming there’s some mysterious problem with your game. Fixing even one or two of them can make it much easier to stop digging the hole deeper while you wait for the cards to turn around.
I hope these tips are beneficial to you and your game. Wishing you the best of luck on the felt.
Alex Fitzgerald is a best-selling author published by D&B Poker. Check out Alex’s most recent book, ‘How to Beat Players Who Never Fold.’
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