Looking for some insight and possible answers.
One of the worst things happened to me at the very end of my last live session.
My mind broke/snapped, my brain told me I had lost a hand that I almost certainly won if I called. I had the second nuts I realized this about a couple of minutes after I folded. When it happed, I felt so sure I had lost on the river, I also got very angry at the runout believing that I had been rivered. If my brain had been working correctly I would have never thought this.
Some background on me, I don’t get enough sleep. Even if I go to bed very early I end up waking up very early in the morning, like if I go to bed at 9PM I end up waking up 2-3 AM. The day this happed I had been playing chess and I was losing to ranked players much lower than myself that I can normally beat with ease.
Has anyone had an experience like this at the poker table? I’m a for profit player and it’s kind of shaken me, I had a net loss of about 1000 dollars given the money I lost for folding and the money I would have won if I called. My main concern though is preventing this from happening again. I can’t be a very winning player if I fold the effective nuts on the river.
It could be a lack of proper sleep that caused my brain to malfunction, the chess results also suggest to me that I was probably cognitively impaired.
Has anyone had something like this happen?
Were you playing too long?
Did you believe you had a lack of sleep?
Did you figure out why it happened to you?
Were you able to find a solution to prevent it in the future?
5 Replies
Bad things happen. We make mistakes.
I used to play 20/40 LHE all day and well into the night. What I found was people who were down tended to play through the night. When they were exhausted. So they could get back to even. Which rarely happened.
Then I saw that I was doing the same thing. So the rule I made for myself was to not play after I was down $2,300. That helped me avoid really bad spots.
Oddly one time I played through the night and was down some money and I left at like 9:45am. As I was walking out (at Foxwoods) I went by the tournament area upstairs and realized that a tournament was starting at 10am. So I bought in even though I knew I couldn't think straight. Even more oddly I won the tournament. So sometimes not thinking can help. Apparently.
You know the answers already.
Don't play when you're tired. Don't play when you are frustrated. Poker is always there. Play another day.
The bad news I have for you is that this won't be the worst thing that happens to you in poker. You're going to have even worst days ahead. That's part of poker.
It's common sense that if you're sick, hungry, intoxicated, sleep-deprived, etc., you won't play your best and may even make basic mistakes. Of course, nearly every poker player has misread his hand at some point, if not on multiple occasions, for no other reason that we weren't paying close enough attention.
Just try to take care of yourself physically and accept that you're a person, not a machine.
OP, there's even a slang term for what you described, MUBS (monsters under the bed syndrome). Basically you can convince yourself that your opponent has the one possible hand that beats you, no matter how improbable it may be. I suspect it's linked to our emotions and fear of loss overwhelming our rational mind in that moment.
This exact issue (MUBS) was never really my biggest problem, but I've gone through stages where I habitually made various thinking errors at the table.
What helped me was to create "mental guard rails" to help prevent whatever error I was struggling with at the time.
For example find a question that you can ask yourself each time you're in one of these spots that will force you to reevaluate. The obvious question that comes to mind is, "where am I at in my own range?"
If we're near the top of our range, we should almost always be calling, betting or raising. Folding shouldn't really be an option. If we're at the bottom of our range we should typically be folding or possibly considering whether our hand would make a good bluff candidate. If we're somewhere in the middle of our own range those tend to be the more challenging spots where multiple options can have merit.
Just asking yourself where you're at in your own range can snap you out of the headspace where you're thinking about folding the near nuts. Mathematically we have to continue with a certain percentage of our range and the top of our range is basically "must continue" territory. There's no avoiding the occasional cooler where our very strong hand gets beat by an even stronger hand.
Another question you could consider asking yourself is, "Does my hand beat any of my opponent's value hands?" If you beat a portion of their value range then you're typically back in "must continue" territory as it indicates your hand is stronger than a mere bluff catcher.
Anyway, hope this helps and good luck at the tables.
We all have occasional blackouts. We can only try to bring the frequency down as best as we reasonably can. I think the previous post was very good. Range thinking, if needed just suck it up. We just need to play our better hands, with what else would we play.
