OVERCOMING THE DOWNSWING: A STRATEGIC PLAN

Awhile back, a player, henceforth known as One-eyed Jack, reached out to me for a consultation. The reason for the contact was that he had been referred to me to address emotional issues related to the game.

We scheduled a day and time for the call. Generally, in this initial get-to-know-you call, I tend to explore many aspects that go beyond the reason for the consultation.

Among these aspects, I delve into what I call in my work methodology as pillars: Sleep and recovery, Diet, Workout, Affective relationships, and Mental health.

On the other hand, I also inquire about topics within the game, such as ABI, the number of days they play, average table count, and generally how long their sessions tend to last.

One-eyed Jack is a player who has been playing Poker for several years, started recreationally and a few years ago transformed it into his main profession.

He told me that for several weeks he has been very irritable in different game situations and believed that this was affecting his performance. He blamed himself for not managing his emotions and accused them of being responsible for many poor decisions during his play.

The real reason why Jack reached out was because he felt incapacitated, stuck in this pool of emotions, and didn’t know how to get out.

When we feel this way, it’s not because there’s something wrong with us. Generally, this type of feeling indicates that we’re not using the right strategy.

Once we started to delve a little deeper, we found that beyond the difficulty of regulating his emotions, there was a trigger: He was going through a Downswing phase.

While he believed that emotions were creating negative results, when we started to dig into the problem, we found that the emotions began to fire much more often after he started to have many consecutive lost sessions.

That’s because Downswing is not just about losing many days in a row. When players experience Downswings, they also activate many more feelings and concerns:

1. Financial: They start to have financial worries, about spending instead of making money. Increasing their makeup implies that their Chop is farther away. Lack of income. Worries about spending their savings.

2. Career: Doubts about whether this career is sustainable in the future. Their family or friends often also convey these doubts to them, causing even more discomfort in the player.

3. Confidence: The possibility of starting to doubt their own abilities. The belief is that whatever they do, they’re going to lose anyway.

As you can see, the Downswing is not just an event within the game, it also affects the player’s well-being outside the game.

After discovering about the Downswing and how it was affecting him, I asked Jack: Don’t you have any strategy to overcome the Downswing?

Jack fell silent and then replied: Well, I started to meditate.

This is another point I encounter very often with players who experience some mental discomfort. They look for short-term patches to deal with something that will happen many times in their career.

In some posts, I’ll talk about meditation. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very important activity, but it needs to have a clear intention and based on that intention you can look for the best meditation that suits your needs.

What I’m going to share next is a strategy based on basic psychological principles. I would like each one when they read it, not to take it as the only true strategy. You can use what I share as a basis, but it’s important that you work on understanding what you need and what makes you feel more comfortable.

The Problem

First, we’re going to put the problems on the table and then we’re going to use them to work on the strategy.

These are the main points that affected players during the downswing. This doesn’t mean that all happen at the same time or in all players. In some players, more will occur, and in others less, but ultimately one of these areas is always impacted.

• The Perception

A feeling that recurs a lot in players during downswings is that whatever they do, they’re going to keep losing. This perception is very common since our brain hates uncertainty and loves to predict based on past experiences. The idea that we’ve been losing for a while generates the belief that we’re going to keep losing in the future. They don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. As a result, this causes problems on two other levels, self-criticism, and mentality.

• Loss of Self-Criticism

While variance is a real variable in Poker, the mere belief that whatever we do, we’re going to keep losing triggers a feeling of lack of control. That’s when we start to blame external forces such as bad luck for our outcome and lose that wonderful ability to evaluate ourselves to discover possible areas for improvement.

• Mental Shift

A player who perceives they are on a losing streak will fuel a result-oriented mindset instead of a performance-oriented one. This leads to an increased sensitivity to the outcome of each hand. Add to this the belief that they’ll continue losing, and players begin to pay less attention to the hands they win or regard them as flukes while focusing more on the hands they lose. Additionally, the loss of a sense of control over their performance due to a more result-oriented outlook ends up impacting motivation and study.

• Motivation

At this point, we have a player who perceives a great lack of control and believes that no matter what they do, things will stay the same. Intrinsic motivation has two components: Competence and autonomy. If the person doesn’t feel in control and capable, intrinsic motivation diminishes. This ends up affecting their desire to play and improve (study), as well as potentially starting to impact the player’s personal life.

• Study

Hand in hand with motivation, study hours also drop. Why study if, no matter what you do, it’s the same?

• Coping Mechanism

This is when players’ coping mechanisms come to light. We learn how they deal with frustration and defeat. Here is where we can find adaptive or non-adaptive coping mechanisms. Among the non-adaptive, we encounter activities that generate short-term pleasure in exchange for little effort: Alcohol, drugs, internet, pornography, etc.

• Emotional Regulation

The result-oriented mindset + the belief that no matter what we do we’ll keep losing, generate more irritability and frustration. We feel incapable and that increases emotional intensity which creates difficulty in regulating emotions. Of everything I’ve mentioned so far, Jack had only evaluated this variable.

• Confidence

Low motivation, low study levels, a result-oriented mindset, the belief that luck is against them, and the perception that they will keep losing no matter what, all lead to a collapse in confidence.

So far, I’ve only covered aspects related to the game. Clearly, there’s also the emotional impact outside of the game that I mentioned earlier (Finances, career, and confidence off the tables).

Well, now that we’ve talked about the problems, it’s time to tackle the solution, right?

When we evaluated all these points with Jack, something clicked for him. He started to see more logically how his mind works, and based on that, he began to feel more motivated to make a change. When we feel competent and autonomous, intrinsic motivation begins to grow like flowers in spring. But that’s not enough, now we need a plan.

The Strategy

The first thing we need to do is restore a sense of control and confidence. For that, there are 5 fundamental steps:

Often, we believe that since we’ve been losing a lot, we need to play more or play at higher stakes to recover what’s lost. This type of belief is held by recreational players. You are not recreational players, you are professionals.

1. Reduce demand and pressure. This means reducing or eliminating games at the highest level we have. Lowering the level of the stakes we play is not negative, it doesn’t make us worse players. In fact, it helps a lot in regaining confidence and feeling capable again. Now, we’re looking for small victories in our performance that make us feel more competent and autonomous (requirements for intrinsic motivation). In fact, we can also reduce the table count to pay more attention to the tables we’re playing. We can even reduce the duration of our sessions to ensure the session quality is as high as possible. Yes, reducing stakes, table count, and session duration reduces demand and pressure, allows us to have more energy, and makes us feel more competent. Mind you, we shouldn’t lower them too much! If we lower them too much we risk becoming bored, this is one of the points where each player must evaluate what works best for them.

2. Propose performance objectives. Reducing demand and pressure is not enough if we still focus so much on the results. For that, before starting each session we must propose performance objectives: These are objectives that depend 100% on us, objectives related to gameplay and decision-making. These shouldn’t be extremely challenging, our goal now is to gain confidence and we’ll do it by feeling in control of what we do. These objectives can be worked out with your coach. Remember the premise: They should be objectives that depend 100% on you.

3. Study. During this losing streak, there’s certainly going to be plenty of mistakes in the gameplay. This may sound negative but it’s extremely positive. We improve when we find out what we can improve. Here is where the study becomes very important, finding mistakes and negative patterns in your game can help you propose the performance objectives mentioned above. Work this out with your poker coach, see what your negative gameplay patterns are, and study to improve. Good performance objectives along with good study routines, will make you feel progress, that is, you’ll stop feeling stuck. Recommendation: Don’t tackle many problems at the same time, take on 1 or 2 topics for improvement, and don’t try to improve 10 things at the same time, it’ll overwhelm you and feed the downswing even more.

4. Patience. Working on oneself and their game takes TIME. Facing your mistakes and working on them takes TIME. We must understand that in life, patience is an indispensable tool for self-improvement.

5. Take care of your pillars. Sleep and recovery, diet, physical activity, affectionate relationships, and mental health can be easily affected. Taking care of these pillars helps us feel better physically and mentally.

Lastly, Emotional Regulation: This point is a bit more complex. If you feel you always had difficulty managing your emotions, a blog is not the best place to get recommendations. Go to a psychologist, be it clinical, sports, or performance-oriented. I don’t say this so you can contact me, do it with whoever you feel comfortable with and want to, but do it. Working on your emotions takes a lot of time and should not be taken lightly.

I’m not going to tell you that once Jack worked through all these points, he resolved his life and became the player he wanted to be. Life is not a fairy tale. Working on these aspects took time and helped us find other aspects to work on in his game. What is true, now Jack understands better how he functions during bad streaks and has an action plan, which is what we were looking for.

What do you think? Thank you for sharing this space with me and remember: Take the concepts, but don’t think it’s the only way, by using these concepts you may find a strategy that works better for you and adapts much more to you. If you manage to discover that own strategy using these concepts, you’ll be Building Your Performance.

Best wishes!