{"id":1185534,"date":"2019-10-04T01:03:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-04T01:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.pokercoaching.com\/?p=1185534"},"modified":"2025-12-29T14:44:02","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T14:44:02","slug":"the-reason-why-you-are-running-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pokercoaching.com\/blog\/the-reason-why-you-are-running-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reason Why You are Running Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cMy biggest problem lately is how bad I\u2019ve\nbeen running.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not running bad. You\u2019re playing bad,\u201d I say, as I peel through their statistics<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you can imagine, this conversation\ndoesn\u2019t always go swimmingly. Yet, it happens quite often when I\u2019m coaching. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

People will come to me hoping they can get\nsome new plays to jolt their game. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They tell me they\u2019re running bad. I then\nlook under the hood and find they\u2019re making some key mistakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are those mistakes? The most common ones I see are these three:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only 3-betting Premium Hands<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Many guys come into the game hungry and looking for action when learning how to play poker<\/a>. They see opponents who are opening too much, and they 3-bet them with all manner of goofy suited connectors, big cards, and small pairs. The loose opener then flats out of position, misses, and check\/folds to a continuation bet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You see a lot of younger guys play this\nway. They play hard. They play recklessly, but they play to win. They get some\nresults off of this style. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, many guys then abandon this\nstyle. They get hired by a stable which doesn\u2019t agree with their typical game.\nThey get lectured by their friends for playing recklessly. They have a bad run,\nwhere their opponents keep picking up hands. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For whatever reason, you\u2019ll see a lot of\ngood aggressive players start flatting with everything but Queens, Kings, and\nAces when they\u2019re having a momentarily bad run. This just exacerbates and\nprolongs the run bad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem with flatting all of your playable hands is that then you have to play all your pots multiway since the big blind never folds now when getting such a great price. In multiway pots, someone is going to hit something, and they\u2019re generally not going to fold. It\u2019s much harder to bluff. You\u2019re forced to make a hand to win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whenever you need to hit a hand to win, that\u2019s called gambling. You can do the same thing in Blackjack and Pai Gow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What separates professionals from\nrecreational players is the pots won when no one sees anything. No cards are\nneeded to pull that off. Flatting preflop constantly removes your ability to\ncapitalize like a professional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, it\u2019s bad for you when you have premiums too. If you never 3-bet, it is going to be hard to get action when you finally do 3-bet your Aces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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