Controlling Losses

[mixmastermattyk]

I originally posted this in Small Stakes Short-Handed as that's pretty much exclusively what I play and was told I'd find good responses here. I'm sure there are probably a thousand posts on this topic already, so sorry if there are.

Anyway, I need help with the mental side of my game, namely controlling my losses. My losing days always seem to be much, much greater than my winning days. I'm a winning player but whenever I lose, I tend to lose big. I'm not sure whether this is me being over-confident in my abilities to beat my opponents or whether it is something else altogether. I don't steam and if I do it really doesn't last long so it's not a raging monkey tilt issue. I'm not sure whether I ignore the other factors that are at play during any given session and this maybe the cause. SH Hold'em is about as swingy as any form of poker gets and I think often write off initial losses as variance and chase them, but end up down even more and often feel like I'm being run over by average players at the end of a session. I stop playing if I can consciously recognise I'm not playing my A game (perhaps I'm just not very good at objectively rating my own play) or if the table is crap and full of TAGs but my problem seems to be where I end up down fairly big at tables which look too good to leave.

What advice can you offer in regards to controlling losses? Is it a good idea to have set loss limits and adhere strictly to those even if a table appears to be +EV?

All advice/help is very much appreciated.