What a Downswing Is Really Testing

Every poker player knows the stretch.

You are playing well, maybe the best you ever have, and the results are going the other way. Hand after hand, session after session, the graph keeps going down, and the game you used to trust starts to feel like a stranger.

You want answers. You want fixes. You want it to stop.

Just yesterday, on a group call with my Poker Athletes, two players brought me exactly this, from two different angles. Both were doing almost everything right. Both were being quietly taken apart by the same thing.

When You Are Playing the Same and Still Losing

The first player ran red hot last year and ice cold this year. Same win rate. Almost identical game. And a swing of around $150k between the two in actual results. On paper, nothing had changed. In his head, everything had.

The mind cannot sit with a result that does not match the pattern it expects, so it starts hunting for a culprit.

First it points outward: this is unfair, I am unlucky, why is this happening to me. When that changes nothing, it points inward: I must be doing something wrong. He became hypercritical of every hand, picking his own game apart in the solver, convinced the mistakes were the reason. And so, trying to fix a game that was not broken, he started deviating and spewing, changing things that did not need changing.

Here is how I told him to approach it.

A downswing like this is poker handing you a brutal, fast lesson in control.

You get to choose the inputs. You do not get to choose what comes out. The mind hates that, because it loves patterns and predictable cause and effect, so when the results stop matching the effort, it squirms and demands a fix. But there is nothing to fix.

The work is acceptance, and here is the part most people miss.

Acceptance is not a logic game, it is a feeling. He said it perfectly: "I understand it, but I don't feel it." You cannot reason your way into accepting a downswing. So instead of chasing acceptance, go the other way. Go into the part of you that will not accept it, and find what is underneath. For him, it was this: "I have worked too hard to accept these results."

So I got him to pause for a moment, and zoom out on the bigger picture.

He wants financial freedom in ten to twelve years, and when we did the maths on a normal run of variance, he was not behind, he was actually ahead of schedule. His whole panic was his mind reacting to a tiny short-term sample while he sat exactly on track for the thing he actually wanted. This realisation made him feel more at ease instantly.

Now picture yourself ten years from now, looking back at this month. It is a footnote. A bad patch of variance that smoothed out. You are in the depths of winter, furious that it is not summer, when summer was always coming.

By the end he said he felt peaceful, and more patient than he had in months. Nothing about his results had changed. Only his relationship to them.

When the Losing Turns Into Fear

The second player had just had one of his worst week results in years.

Around a thirty buy-in downswing over fifteen thousand hands. One winning session in twenty. Reload after reload. He would flop the nuts and watch the board run out horribly. After months of five-figure wins, confidence sky high, it felt like it had all evaporated in a week and a half.

But the losses were not what worried him. It was the fear creeping in. He was starting to second-guess simple spots, feeling that flinch before he pulled the trigger, and he did not like what it was doing to his game.

For this one, I told him how to approach this from completely different angles to the first player.

First, I told him to cut the bad week off.

At the end of a brutal week, let it be brutal. Grieve it. That is a lot of money and a horrible stretch, so feel it fully. And then start the next week at zero, not at minus thirty. The trap is carrying the baggage forward, telling yourself you are "on a downswing," trying to win it back. You are not down thirty going into the new week. You are at zero. New week. Chasing the losses is exactly how a good player turns a bad week into a bad month.

Second, to understand the fear.

Fear is always bluffing. It is the nervous kid going "this might go wrong, this might go wrong," trying to pull you away from the very thing that leads to your growth. When you are losing, the pull is towards risk-aversion, and the moment you start playing scared you lose the edge, the exploits, the style that made you a winner in the first place. So do not retreat from it. Lean in. Feel the frustration, the doubt, the fear, and double down on your principles anyway.

And then came the real unlock for him.

He was already making the brave plays. He pulled a big bluff in a four-bet pot, ran into the top of their range, got snapped off, and felt that sinking "why did I do that." The decision was fine. The problem was the story he told himself afterwards. So I told him to flip it. When he pulled the trigger, stuck to his read, and got snapped off, that is the moment to feel proud, not stupid.

This is when he needs to say to himself, “Well done. I trusted myself and I went with my read. Most players would not have had the courage to do that, especially right now. I backed my game, and I will do it again.”

You reward sticking to your principles, not the outcome.

This player has built his game around going with his reads and trusting himself. Now he is feeling fear in these same moments and the mind is judging when he gets things wrong. However, when he feels that fear and still has the balls to go with his read, that should be celebrated.

A “well done for being brave” over “I shouldn’t have done that” changes everything.

Side note: this player has been crushing his player pool for the past 6 months. He knows his game is good and his reads are on point. He had just let some bad results get in the way of him trusting himself, and got caught in judging his decisions too much on the outcomes.

What To Do When On a Downswing

Notice that neither of these was a strategy problem.

Both players were playing their game. The downswing was not testing their poker, it was testing their mind, and that is what a downswing always does.

So when you are in it, and you will be, here is the work:

• Stop hunting for a culprit. It is not you, and it is not rigged. It is variance, plus the normal mistakes of being human. The mind wants a job to do, and there isn't one.

• Accept it as a feeling. Go into what you cannot accept and find what is underneath it. There will be a fear there.

• Zoom out to the long game. You are almost certainly more on track than your short-term results suggest. Look back on it from ten years out to see a new perspective.

• Cut off the bad period and start fresh at zero. Grieve it, then reset. Do not chase your loses or hold onto your downswing narrative.

• Lean into the fear instead of shrinking from it. This is your opportunity to step into your fears, to be brave and play your style of poker no matter what happens

• Take pride in sticking to your principles, whatever the result. Give yourself a mental pat on the back, a well done for trusting yourself, when the easy option would have been to play it safe.

A downswing is going to take your money either way. Whether it also takes your game, your confidence and your peace is the part you actually control.

Now It’s Your Turn

This is the work I do with players every single week, in exactly these kinds of conversations, in a small group where we go deep on what is really holding you back.

If you would like to join my next group of Poker Athletes, you can apply here.

I have helped hundreds of poker players build a bulletproof poker mindset and become crushers in their games through. If you are tired of letting downswings take your game along with your money, and you want to work on this properly with me, this is where it happens.

Adam

P.S. Applications close on Saturday and we start on Monday .