A Statician's take on RUNNING BAD!

Every poker player has his own favourite bad beat story and in every poker forum there's a bunch of whiners posting bad beat hands and complaining about running bad. People love to get sympathy from fellow grinders and want to be reassured that they aren't playing badly, only "running badly".

I don't believe in running badly, and today you'll learn why running bad is just a myth. The first reason is because we have selective memory. We remember the bad beats vividly because both hands get to showdown and we lose. Losing money hurts. Losing big pots hurt more. However, there's a ton of other spots where we lose money and yet we don't think as much of it (unless you're a perfectionist). For example, not valuebetting the turn or river. Or not value betting bigger. If you realize after the hand that you missed a 100$ value bet on the river, then you've just lost 100$. You should feel this emotional pain as much as when you get sucked out on. That's a free 100$ you just wasted. But missed hypothetical bets aren't remembered as much as suckouts. This myth gets perpetrated even further on lp (especially by Oddeye and formerly by Capaneo) by posting all the hands where they got the money in as a favourite and lost.

Another example is getting pissed off when your opponent "sucks out" on you with T3s hitting two pair on the flop, turn, or river against your overpair. Well buddy, if he hadn't improved, there's no guarantee that he would have called any of your flop/turn/river bets. In fact, if he had missed the flop completely, he would have just folded and you would have forgotten about that hand. How many times did he fold T3s on the flop and lose his 4-5bb? It's impossible to know because he didn't show. How many times did he try to set hunt and whiff-fold? In fact, you have to be lucky in order to get paid off. If you have AA and your opponent calls with T3s, 71% of the time he flops nothing. What is a good flop for you? You want him to flop one pair, or a flush draw. 27% of the time he flops one pair, and 11% of the time he flops a flush draw. And think of all the good turn cards you need for him to continue. For example if the flop is T56 and the turn/river are two of {JQKA} it'll be hard for him to call you down. The board has to run off nicely for him to call you down. In fact you need really improbable flops to come in order to get paid off. Like A33 flop. But perhaps you still believe in running bad.

The main reason people believe in running badly is because they do not understand statistics. A common running bad myth is the "OMG I lost all my coin flips today. I should be up half the equity in those pots". This myth is perpetrated by thinking on an expectation level (correct) applied to a small sample of hands (incorrect). The reasoning used is this: "since each event is independent, the probability that I should have lost those 7 coinflips in a row is .5^7 = 0.007. "OMG BAD BEAT. FUCK FUCK FUCK. I lost ANOTHER coinflip. This is so unfair." Let me debunk this myth with the following sequence of 100 randomly generated coinflips (http://www.random.org/integers/?mode=advanced)

2221212221222212112221222121211112222222121211222111112211222222211211121111222122111221111212112211

If you are player 2, then there are:
2 sequences of length 7
0 sequences of length 6
0 sequences of length 5
1 sequence of length 4
6 sequences of length 3

Even though a sequence of length 7 has a probability 0.007 of occuring when you flip 7 coins, the key difference here is that we are flipping 100 coins. The sequence 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 could theoretically occur between hands 1 through 7, or 2 through 8, and so on. This now becomes a combination problem and these tiny 0.007 probabilities add up. If you're a multi-tabling grinder, then you will get into a ton of coin flip situations. Formally, there is actually a mathematical proof of the following fact: if you specify a string of arbitrary length, I will guarantee its existence if you allow me to generate a long enough random string. Now quite rightly if you ask me for 100 consecutive 2s, I will need a very very long string. Way more than the total number of hands that you will play in your lifetime. However, on a practical level, it is a mathematical certainty that you will lose 5 or 6 coinflips in a row many times in your poker career.

Now think of the "i lost a ton of set-ups today i.e. set over set overpair vs overpair" myth. The same reasoning occurs as above. By itself, getting specifically KK vs AA preflop is extremely unlikely, but if you play enough hands, it is a mathematical certainty that you will get dealt KK vs AA in back to back hands. Ask Leatherass or Nananoko and I guarantee they will have legendary set-up stories.

You've just lost 7 coinflips in a row. Doesn't this mean it's more likely that I'll win the next one? Shouldn't it regress to the mean? Nope, this is commonly known as the gambler's fallacy. The next event is independent of the previous 7 and therefore still has a 50-50 chance of happening. The correct interpretation of "regression to the mean" applies to the following situation:

Over the last 10k hands you've won 2bb/100 hands. You play 100 hands and win 10bb/100 hands. In the next 100 hands how much should you win? In this case you will "regress to the mean", meaning you should win between 2bb/100 (mean) and 10bb. The most common analogy given is population height. If the average male is 5'10 but both parents are 6'10, the son's height will be between 5'10 and 6'10. His most likely height is not 6'10. Another common analogy is taking medicine when you're at your sickest. Most of the time you will regress to the mean-get well-and you will attribute your cure to whatever quack medicine you just took, but in reality you're just statistically regressing to the mean.

Now before I go off on too much of a tangent, what does this mean for your poker career? There is no such thing as running good or running bad. You will see spikes in all directions, however, your long term profit will regress to the mean. What you make in poker is actually what you should have made. If you lose money over a long period of time, it is because you are a losing player. Poker is a negative-sum game (RAKE RAKE RAKE), therefore skill is mandatory to break even.

[edit]: I think there's been some confusion about my last paragraph and I don't agree with the phrasing. The point I'm trying to make is to not focus on these short good and bad runs. They will inevitable occur as in any random sequence of events. You are guaranteed to run bad over a long enough stretch of hands. The key point is that you should not blame expected statistical occurrences of these runs as the main downfall of your poker career. It is useless and a waste of time to think about things out of your control. Instead, as a poker player, focus on what you can control: checking, betting, and folding.

Let me conclude with a Penn & Teller quote
"running bad is...bullshit"

I likey. Thank you

In my point of view "running bad" isnot the problem almost every time but how this affects your game.Playing scared money,missing value bets or even tilt shoving junk to find out that villain has the nuts(etc) usually happens after 3-5 coolers,bad beats whatever.I always thought that learning how to deal with this is the most important skill that makes a poker player better than others.
(and guess what i cant deal with this heh )

Very nice post. Hopefully this will help change my mindset.

"STATISTICIAN"

^^

I disagree, you can definitely run bad over a short-term period, and that's what most players mean when they talk about running bad. The longer the hand-sample they reference when complaining of running bad, the less likely they are in fact running bad. But it has happened to me, it has happened to my friends, and it has happened to many players on this site, you CAN run bad for 30k hand stretches at a time. You talk about regressing to the mean: this is true, that's how poker works when you play in the long run. When you run bad, your short term results do not match your EV (which is actually the mean you speak of), they swing wildly away from it.

You talk about strings of 6 or 7 coin-flips lost in a row as if it is standard. It clearly is not. This is what we would correctly define as running bad.

I think you'll find if you ran multiple string simulations of 100 flips, you would not commonly see 2 strings of 7 2's. You don't see a single 6 or 5 string in that sequence. In a 100 flip sequence, you'd have 93*0.007 (I think) chance of seeing a sequence of exactly 7 flips in a row. It is still quite improbable.

On August 23 2009 03:22 Day[9] wrote: "STATISTICIAN"

liking it

i don't get the point of this post, everyone knows there's more to running bad than losing flips or not getting your "share" of equity over a given sample of hands.

i mean how can you say "running bad" is a myth, it's a qualitative observation lol.

Great post I've always had this mind set.

so this mean i should stop when im up huh? coz every fucking session im up 3 to 6 buyins then lose it all when i reach my hand goals. i usually think "oh well, itll regress to the mean tomorrow". following day exact same thing happens so yeah its just bullshit. some people's luck just run out faster and aren't really sne material lol

nice post

well whamm actualy.. maybe you should finish your session earlier.. if that shit is happening to you a lot
maybe your focus goes down in last few hundred hands and you are autopiloting or something like that

this would be useful on a forum strictly for people who ONLY play live poker and have played for less than 2 years

we get it already

well myth there's still non-believers in this thread!

I don't think you're giving the people on this forum enough credit, I'm pretty sure most of the players and almost all of the winning ones know your points and agree. However, if I played 20K hands this weekend and got KKvAA 50 times, I'm pretty sure we can say I was running bad. We also acknowledge running good, and if you view each players' hands as one piece of a really long "string" then it's pretty easy to see how one person can run poorly over a decent sized sample.

We get it man, do you actually think anyone on LP thinks that the odds of winning a flip get better just because they lost one earlier?

On August 23 2009 05:48 whamm! wrote: so this mean i should stop when im up huh? coz every fucking session im up 3 to 6 buyins then lose it all when i reach my hand goals. i usually think "oh well, itll regress to the mean tomorrow". following day exact same thing happens so yeah its just bullshit. some people's luck just run out faster and aren't really sne material lol

What you think your mean is and what your mean actually is are two completely different things.

A lot of us here think our skill level is greater than it actually is. We have sessions where we easily win 5 buyins. We then think this is normal but in fact, our true mean might have only been 1 buyin. You may just have hit one of many of those many 5 strings of heads.

Another thing to consider is this: we always think about expected value when we lose and say "should have won 60% of x". Do you guys think the same when you win? If you win a pot as an 80% favourite, are you thinking "geez, I should have only won 80% of x. I got lucky. Phew." It's the exact same situation but (early on in my career for myself) I would think "damn right, I deserve that pot."

So maybe you are up 5 buyins in 5 straight hands. But your true equity in those 5 hands might only be 3.5 buyins.

Hey I ran good last month and I've been running bad this month since the quality of my play hopefull havn't deteriorated and the games I sit in is probably about the same as far as difficulty goes. Even so the results differs with between 70 and 100 buy ins or so for the medium stake I've played over this period. Over a long enough sample this is obviously not important, but to say that I've not been running good so far by coming to the point I am today is just ridicules. To begin with I could've goon broke the first hour I played and then probably missed a year or so of poker before I tried again.

To the forum: I'm not trying to insult anybody's intelligence on this board. Even though a lot of us are regulars on this forum and have met each other in real life, there are a ton of beginners and lurkers on this board. I myself just made a sequence of 100 random numbers yesterday and was quite surprised at how often "large" sequences occur. You can try for yourself at the link I provided.