The Art of Preventing a Monster Downswing
I want to share an important lesson that I learned the hard way while moving up to high stakes last year. So far I have only written about moving up in stakes. This article is going to be about the opposite. I want to talk about when it actually makes sense to move down.
In order to illustrate the point, I’ll share my full graph to date below. To quickly recap my journey, I started playing full time at 200nl in 2019. Within about 6 months I made it to 2000nl and took a fairly epic shot that looked like this:
I won about 34 buy ins in my first 12k hands, and then lost about 23 buy ins in my next 8k hands. The result was I won at about 7 evbb/100 over my first 20k hands at 10/20. Pretty good, right? But it didn’t feel that way. It was actually fucking awful, because I simply wasn’t ready to go on a $45k downswing at that point in my career. (Remember, just a handful of months before this I was a 200nl player with a relatively small bankroll). This was the start of a rather dark period in my poker career that lasted half of a year or so, and I’m happy to have moved beyond it.
It wasn’t the downswing itself that was so bad, although that did hurt. In the end, I think it was the amount of time it took to rebuild at lower stakes that really messed with my head. Even after I moved down in stakes, I continued to run bad and run below EV. I probably wasn’t playing my best poker either, to be honest. I was in a big hole, and it felt like it took forever to recover.
To put this in perspective, here is my full graph since 2019 with the y axis in big blinds:
Graph To Date (Big Blinds)
And here is that same graph with the y axis in USD…
Graph To Date (USD)
Looks pretty different, right? That giant breakeven stretch between the two red arrows in the USD graph lasted about 7-8 months. I wasn’t playing this entire time; I took a three month break during this period dedicated solely to studying and making a new course for the Poker Detox cash game stable. But still, that’s a long time for a pro poker player to not make any money playing poker.
Nothing about my life really changed during this period. I had enough money. The lights were on, there was food in the refrigerator, and my car had a full tank of gas. I was still comfortably rolled to play 1000nl. But it didn’t feel that way—I felt completely burnt out.
Losing even a few thousand dollars in a day was now enough to make me quit my session early. I used to not even flinch when that happened. Some days I would just play 500nl, or even 200nl, because I couldn’t stomach the thought of putting in a session at 1k and getting crushed.
It took a lot of time, but I eventually recovered. I’m back to crushing my 1k games and thinking about moving back up to 2k soon. But I learned a valuable lesson from this period. When I take my next shot at 2k, I won’t go on another soul-crushing downswing like this. I’ll simply take a break and move down to 1k before that happens.
The Pros and Cons of Moving Down in Stakes
I think most people look at the decision to move down during a downswing like this:
The upside of moving down is it’s safe. It’s a lot less scary to play lower stakes, and it allows you to rebuild your bankroll with confidence.
The downside of moving down is you make less money for a little while, and it takes more time to recover your losses on average.
The upside of continuing to play at your current stake is it’s usually the highest EV option (assuming you’re still capable of playing your A-game). On average, it’s the quickest way to make the money back.
The downside of continuing to play at your current stake is you could continue to lose a lot more money, especially if you’re now playing badly because the money you’ve already lost has gone to your head.
That’s probably how most people look at it. But actually, I don’t think number four, i.e. the financial risk argument, is the real downside of continuing to play at your current stake. The real downside is the long-term damage to your mental game that is the result of going on a downswing 50-100% larger than you’re comfortable with, and taking many months to recover from it. For me, this led to playing significantly less volume and playing a weaker, more risk-averse version of my normal game. It also hurt my confidence in real life and made me a generally more anxious/depressed person for a while.
Small Jabs vs. Hail Marys
When I take my next 10/20 shot, I plan to take more frequent breaks at 5/10 when I encounter a downswing. My consecutive stop loss will probably be around $30k, or 15 buy ins, even if I’m up more than that at the stake overall. If I hit that threshold, I’ll move down to 5/10 to recover, and come back to 10/20 in a month or two to resume my shot with confidence.
This is what I would call the “small jabs” approach to shot taking, as opposed to the “hail mary” approach. Both strategies start out the same way: you start out with a certain bankroll for your shot, say 5 buy ins, and move back down if you bust that. The difference is, in the small jabs strategy, you also have a consecutive downswing stop loss based on whatever your personal “pain threshold” is. That is, whatever amount you’re capable of losing without having major negative impacts on your mindset.
For most people, a good stop loss at a new stake is probably around 15 buy ins. So even if you make 30 buy-ins and then lose 15, you preemptively move down and recover some or all of your losses at your previous stake before resuming your shot. This ensures that you never go on a downswing so huge that it takes many months to recover.
On the other hand, the hail mary approach simply pushes the variance to the limit. You stay at the stake until you either bust your shot or you’re too shell shocked to keep playing. Again, the upside of the hail mary is it is the highest EV approach in theory. If it works, it’s amazing. But if it doesn’t work, it really sucks.
The small jabs approach is safer, but more consistently annoying. There is a lot of extra time spent moving down preemptively to recover losses. On the other hand, the hail mary approach is riskier and can lead to either a euphoric victory or a devastating loss.
In practice, I think the small jabs approach is higher EV, even though it should be lower EV in theory. That’s because when a player exceeds his pain threshold on a downswing, it usually results in him playing less volume and playing worse poker. In extreme cases, it can result in him quitting poker. These outcomes are obviously far more -EV than playing lower stakes and reducing your hourly rate for a little while.
Of course there is a third option, which is to take a shot by mixing some higher stakes with your current stake. You could, for example, play 10/20 on the two softest days of the week, and then play 5/10 the other days. But still, there is always going to be a time when you have to decide to make 10/20 your main game, and I think it’s important to set some boundaries when you are making this transition.
I don’t want to say I regret the way I took my 10/20 shot, because I don’t necessarily regret it. The hail mary approach worked for me at 2/5, and it worked at 5/10. Of course, if I had gone on a $40k upswing instead of dropping another $20k, I would have felt great about my decision to stay at 10/20.
Also, this downswing is what inspired me to do about 3 months of research which I may not have done otherwise. This made me a much, much better poker player than I was before, and resulted in a new Poker Detox course that I have used to create a second stream of income. But I do think I could have achieved the same result in a much smarter way. Yes. everything worked out in the end, but if I’m being honest, I would have rather just saved myself from going on a monster downswing that was, in retrospect, easily preventable.
No Gamble, No Future?
There are some people in the poker community who preach a “no gamble no future” philosophy that goes against what I’m saying here. This approach has never really worked for me. It might work for some people with an abnormal level of risk tolerance, but for the average person I think it just makes life harder than it has to be.
In my opinion, there’s no glory in going on a giant downswing. At a certain point, you don’t come out stronger. It actually just sucks. Sometimes it really is better to take a more conservative approach, rather than setting yourself up for either a huge win or a devastating loss.
If this resonates with you, my advice is to simply think about how much money you’re comfortable losing in one stretch. Write the number down. Maybe it’s $5k. Maybe it’s $25k. Whatever it is, when you hit that point, move down, even if you don’t really have to from a purely financial standpoint.
Take some time to rebuild, and then come back with confidence. You can’t ever truly avoid a bad run, but you can strategically move down in stakes to break up your downswings so that you ever don’t lose way more money than you’re comfortable with.
