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All poker players eventually go through a tough period where they string together many losing sessions or can’t seem to 🍐 make the money in a succession of tournaments. Even the best players in the game have had significant downswings in 🍐 their careers. One of the questions that the CLC coaches get most is “How do you deal with and recover 🍐 from downswings?”. We asked 2 of the most successful MTT players on the planet, CLC’s Chance Kornuth and Alex Foxen 🍐 about their personal experiences with downswings. Let’s dive into their responses! Justin Lynch: What Was The Worst Downswing Of Your 🍐 Career? Alex Foxen: I’d say the worst downswing of my career probably came in 2024. I definitely overextended a bit 🍐 from a bankroll perspective, probably playing overconfident and not critical enough of my own game and that is the perfect 🍐 recipe to create a big downswing. I don’t have an exact number but probably a couple million lost in that 🍐 one. Chance Kornuth: I have taken the shots and went up to a million and then down toR$100-$200k before I 🍐 stayed over a million when games were softer and I thought I should have taken a lot more but now 🍐 that I’m a family man, I don’t do that anymore (laughs). Justin Lynch: What is your go to activity to 🍐 reset during a downswing? Alex Foxen: Absolutely working out and doing something physical. Getting your mind out of whatever state 🍐 it is in. Anything that creates that meditative singular focus that a workout or maybe doing something with your hands 🍐 does. Something that can get you out of your head and into your body, that gets you into the present 🍐 moment as much as possible. I think physical movement is really really good for that. Chance Kornuth: I like working 🍐 out and spending time with my friends and family, watching movies and playing games. Doing anything nonpoker to get 100% 🍐 of your focus onto other things. Justin Lynch: How Do You Measure if you’re running bad vs not playing your 🍐 best? Alex Foxen: I don’t think that there is a perfect way to measure these two things. That’s why it 🍐 is really important to be constantly critical and the best way to avoid a downswing is to always act like 🍐 you are in a downswing, always put work into your game, always question everything you do even when it works. 🍐 Ask the questions “Could I have made more on that line?”, “Could I have possibly bet bigger here?”, “What if 🍐 he had this hand?”, “How would I approach it if the turn was this?”. All these different varying questions to 🍐 ask yourself to keep yourself in a state of growth instead of stagnation. For me and I also feel it 🍐 is true for most people, downswings always come after a period of stagnation and then the downswing almost always end 🍐 after a period of effort into change. I know so many people who decided to work with a mental game 🍐 coach or decided to seek coaching for the fundamental side of their poker game or start working with a solver. 🍐 So many of these people get instant results and I think there is an energetic aspect of that, putting your 🍐 effort into productive things allows you to be at your best in the game and to be more open minded 🍐 which leads you with more room for growth. If you just think what you are doing is right and you’re 🍐 not questioning it constantly then when something comes across that someone else does or that is an option to do 🍐 something it will be harder for you to accept it or consider it as an option for you just because 🍐 of the nature of it and the state that your brain is in at the time. Chance Kornuth: I think 🍐 that’s actually something that people mess up as far as running bad vs not playing your best. Focusing on the 🍐 things that you can control as opposed to things you can’t is imperative Justin Lynch: During a downswing do you 🍐 put in more study vs more volume- what’s the mix there? Alex Foxen: For me it’s mostly playing, I am 🍐 doing a little bit of both all the time. So I think that studying is valuable, however without regular play 🍐 it’s pretty worthless. There is too much to think about in poker, you need some things to be automatic, so 🍐 if you just study when you get to play none of those things are going to be automatic, if you 🍐 just play you are not as likely to question your decision making and improve on what you are doing and 🍐 your process in the game. That side is pretty heavy in favor of playing over study, but you can’t optimize 🍐 one without the other. Chance Kornuth: I would say definitely put in a little more study, it is definitely easiest 🍐 for us to want to study more when we haven’t been losing, however for me it’s like preparing for a 🍐 stop. I study for the WSOP or before I do certain things and if I notice that I was inadequate 🍐 on a certain board texture and I didnt know what to do, I tell Foxen,”Let’s go through the spot and 🍐 do a webinar on it.” Justin Lynch: What do you consider a downswing at this point in your career? Alex 🍐 Foxen: Honestly, I don’t have any kind of metric for it. I don’t think about that in that way at 🍐 all. I consider a downswing when I look at how much cash I have and I am surprised with how 🍐 low it is. I am not super meticulous with managing my bankroll, I have an idea where it is and 🍐 I take risks accordingly but I am not necessarily looking at my results and saying “Oh wow, I am on 🍐 a 23 buyin downswing”. The moral of what I am saying is downswings are only in your head, they are 🍐 a construct they don’t exist. Yeah we go up and down in the chart but if you zoom out no 🍐 downswing is actually real on a players graph, they just go up and down. There is only the present moment, 🍐 that is the only thing that exists in whatever kind of esoteric principle. If the present moment only exists there 🍐 is no such thing as a downswing and there is no such thing as feeling bad about it. So if 🍐 you stay in this present focused ideology of constant improvement and constant growth, then yeah downswings will happen but then 🍐 you wont notice them because all you are doing is trying to improve your current self and trying to improve 🍐 your current bankroll not worrying about what it was yesterday. Chance Kornuth: I consider a downswing more of a monetary 🍐 percentage. For example If I lost 60k today that’s more how I measure it. I never really thought about it 🍐 in terms of not cashing X amount of tournaments or losing X amount of buy-ins.
