[TNixon]

MasterLJ:

I've been on a pretty similar evil nasty bad run for the past 2 weeks, to the point that my confidence is at an all-time low. Even when I just barely started playing I had more confidence that I could win than I do right now.

I've dropped from a bankroll of $3000, playing $100s and the occasional $220, to a new low of $140 last night. I've bounced back from 150-200 a couple times to 6 or 700, but every time I think things are starting to turn around, I get a long series of nasty beats and coolers, followed by a few tiltish bad plays. (I think I'm getting better at recognizing when I'm being a complete retard and quitting for the night though)

I'm still up overall (having cashed out about $2k from an original starting bankroll of $100), and I don't pay my bills with poker, so at least I've got that going for me, and I'm sure my play is quite a bit worse overall than yours, but a lot of the spots I'm finding myself losing a lot of chips are *very* much like the list of hands you just posted, where people are likely to call out some bad plays, but where there aren't any totally donkish moves or calls.

Unfortunately, my confidence is so rock-bottom low that I'm not actually convinced that I'm still playing well. Any suggestions on how to figure that out?

For the next 2 weeks, I'm going to try to make it a habit of reviewing every hand history in detail after a session, even if it means I only have time for 5 or 6 games a day (I'm playing SNGs, not cash), and I'm also going to very aggressively review sessions from the past 2 weeks (which is a monumental task all on it's own, because this downswing has literally been about 600 games long), to try to figure out how much has been bad play, and how much has been running bad. I honestly feel like it's been at least 75% running bad (and that a big chunk of the bad play has been tilt/frustration when I'm running *so* bad), but maybe I'm wrong.

Thanks for posting that big list of hands though. So much of that looked so disgustingly familiar (and there are so many, over and over and over, which is exactly what I feel like right now) that you've given me some small amount of hope that maybe it really is possible to just run *that* badly, and that maybe things will turn around.