[Kurtiii]

Very good post. I recently had the same experience: dropping about 10 buyins in 4k hands when i just moved up from 50$NL to 100$NL. Of course i got sucked out on alot, but i also payed off every single set with AA,KK when it was very obvious that i was beat. After the first 5-6 buyins i was realy singing the blues, not beeing honest with myself about the 34989 mistakes i made.

The things that kept me alive where :

1.) View every hand individualy, and §)$( stop thinking result orientated. Allways question if i could have lost less without giving up value. If i aplied pot controll correctely against the right type of player, or if i was just afraid etc.
2.) Work on my confidence; if i had a read i went with it and played accordingly. Once again; stoped thinking result oriented. Sure enough that led to some bad raises and calls BUT i actually learned alot from those. Things i wouldn´t have learned if i would have given in to the fear. And once semibluffs and thin calls showed a profit it realy boosted my confidence. Not because i was full of my great plays, but because i knew that i improved my game.
3.) Take breaks, look in the mirror, shorten my sessions. I´m not tilt resistant, so after an hour of loosing i realy need a break to cool down and analyse my play.
Recognize when you are in danger of tilting; for example i made a 170$ call preflop with Kings, lost to aces (obviously :P) and didn´t feel a bit anger or frustration, but knowing myself i still closed the tables and got up for a break. Turned out that i was realy tilting 5 minutes after that and it took me some time to cool down, but it would off cost me alot of money if i kept on playing.
4.) Talk about how you feel and your plays with friends or fellow pokergeeks. This helped me alot to identify WHY i made a certain play. Some of wich i made wheren´t based on reads or math, just pure, and often wrong, "feeling". Obviously one needs instincs to make some plays, and you need to trust them sometimes. But its a thin line between instincts and talking yourself into a call. Since psychology is so important in poker it helps to talk about it with others. They often provide an objective view or things becomes more clear once you try to explain them.

After i started doing all this i slowly stoped thinking about the money and started to consistently think about my game and sure enough: the money took care of itself and i made it back plus more.
Not sure if this contains helpfull advice, since the one thing i learned during this swing was : I realy have a lot of work to do to consider myself a good player. Though i wanted to share it, just in case :P

Oh and one last thing that i kept in my mind was a quote from an european player on the EPT: "what seperates the good players from the bad players is: if they are having a bad time, they survive it".
So .. don´t let swings affect your game, use them to learn.