It happens to everyone. At some point in your poker playing career (even if it is just a hobby) you will run into a string of bad luck. Or, for the mathematicians and uber-logical among you, a string of negative probabilities, or a run of unfortunate circumstances. However you view it, poker is like one long run of numbers. Sometimes the numbers are up, some times they are down. No matter how you feel about it, the game really is random, but that does not mean you won?t have a string of bad fortune all right in a row.

Try flipping a coin one hundred times; probability tells us that you will get heads close to fifty percent of the time, and tales the rest of the time. The more groups of hundred you do, the closer this comes to the truth. One thing you will notice, however, is that it never stays consistently alternating, ?Heads, Tails, Heads, Tails, Heads, Tails.? The same side will fall in groups, perhaps five Heads in a row followed by two Tails and then ten Heads. The same is true of starting hands in poker; random though they may be, you may get a string of really great starting hands in a row. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true.

You may have an entire game of relatively bad cards, or it may only last a part of the game, but either way there is really only one thing you can do; tighten up. Raise your starting hand requirements for playable cards to the tightest you can and then be ready to strike when you come across them. Don?t count as much on draws as you might when your luck is running good, and don?t speculate at all until you build up your chip stack to a very comfortable lead or your luck turns for the better; and don?t worry, it eventually will.