Anatomy of a poker death spiral

As a rule, I post on the same night I play. Of course, there are always exceptions! As I write this, I have a backlog of two sessions to record -- last Friday's and last Saturday's.

Friday's session was a textbook example of a poker death spiral. As it turns out, I didn't win a single hand. However, I wasn't making bonehead plays, either, so I played a lot of hands before hitting the felt.

Here's the anatomy of a typical poker death spiral, as I've experienced them:

stage 1: you lose the first third of your stack. This typically doesn't take very long. You don't catch any big hands, so you do a lot of folding. You nibble on marginal hands to see the flop if it isn't too expensive. This stage is usually a straight drop down. You don't feel any sense of urgency or panic yet.

stage 2: you lose the next half of your stack. The way this stage plays out can vary somewhat. Often, a big chunk of this loss will be on one hand, where you finally got a really good hand after dozens of mediocre ones, but happen to lose out to a better one. This middle stage lasts the longest of the three, and usually your stack will go up and down many times. You don't start to feel any urgency until you realize you're down to the last sixth of your stack. At that point, you adopt a fatalistic attitude; you know the odds are excellent that you're going down in flames.

stage 3: you lose the last one sixth of your stack. In this stage, you're typically severely short-stacked, and have no option but to play any marginally decent hand. You're guaranteed to be forced to go all-in without enough information for making that decision. Sometimes you'll get a Lazarus-like resurrection which will take your stack back up to half its original size, or almost half; the smart play to make at this time is to end the session. I haven't been able to make that smart play a single time!

There are two very common player behaviors during poker death spirals:

1. you'll be extra cautious sometime in stage 2, and will miss out on a big pot; this will influence your later play in this stage, causing you to play too riskily

2. you'll be so starved for good cards that when you finally get some, you'll tend to overvalue them; you can lose a lot of chips that way

I exhibited both of these behaviors on Friday.

delta: -$2,000
balance: $285,858