Tournament poker is a high-variance game. Getting into situations where you have to put all of your chips into the pot is inevitable if you want to win. Oftentimes, the results don’t pan out the way we feel they should when we lose coin flip after coin flip or we get it all-in pre-flop with A-K, get called by a worse hand, and lose. In short, some days we just can’t win.

In the short-term, anything can happen in poker. The best players can lose and the worst players can win. Over the long-term, however, winning play should consistently pay off. Here’s the thing, though: the short-term is often much longer than you think. Some of the best players in the world have had losing years only to hit a run that seems unreal and make it all back.

In the poker world, time does not exist, just our perception of it. Poker doesn’t know you’ve run badly all week and you’re due. Poker just does what it does it doesn’t feel or care. We, however, are human, and humans have emotions. So, it can be very hard to stay in the moment while playing when running badly and keep it from affecting our decisions. It’s imperative to always tell yourself that as badly as you have been running, you can run just the opposite at any given time.

Unfortunately, here’s the rub. As poker players, we need to be confident in our decisions while we play, but overconfidence can be just as deadly as a lack of confidence. Chalking up downswings to bad luck is the easy way out. We always have to be reflective and look back objectively at our play. This isn’t always the case, though. It’s very easy to fall into a rhythm of complacency, thinking that we are playing okay when, in reality, downswings often lead to tilt that can last until we break out of a bad run.

The thing about tilt is most of us don’t know we are on it while it is happening. We might know we are a little angry or frustrated, but still think we are playing our A-game. Luckily, we have one really good tool to help us find out the truth, the hand history.

Most poker sites have features to automatically save our hand histories. If you find yourself in the unfortunate spot of being in a downswing, take a day or two off to rest and regroup. While you’re at it, find the file on your computer that has all of your hand histories and use your favorite poker tracking software to bring up your histories from the period in question. You might have a lot of hand histories, but don’t let that stop you, as you can shorten this task by starting with your bust-out hands.

If you’re satisfied that the hands you busted from each MTT with are being played optimally, start to work backwards, looking for hands you lost a lot of chips on and hands that you won, but did not win a lot of chips. Most software has color-coding for all of the hands you play to help you see which hands you won and lost without having to look at each one individually. The Universal Replayer, which is free, uses shades of red and green to highlight all of the hands at the bottom of the replayer so you can jump to significant ones easily.

In addition to reviewing, take a look at your playing process. Are you playing sessions that are too long, causing you to be tired at the end and affecting your decisions? Are you playing too many tables? Playing high volume can be a great way to maximize profits, but it usually comes with a drop in ROI. Cutting back the number of MTTs you play allows you to take more time with each choice you are faced with.

I realized only recently that drinking large amounts of caffeine was degrading my play, making me jumpy and anxious in addition to leaving me feeling worn out at the end of sessions.

As important as it is to keep your head up and stay confident when it feels like poker is kicking you in the family jewels, it is equally important to be honest with yourself and recognize the times when you aren’t playing well in addition to running badly. Try to avoid the feeling that you need to press when things aren’t going well and take some time to reflect on your game. It may be the best thing you can do to keep a small downswing from becoming a large one.

As always, good luck at the tables.

Walter JLizardWright is a six-time PocketFives Triple Crown winner and a site instructor at PocketFives Training. If you are interested in lessons, please contact him via PocketFives PM or at JLizardTraining@gmail.com.