[TNixon]

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From previous posts Im under the impression that you are still struggling to escape the lower limits.

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I dunno, do you consider $50 and $100 SNGs "lower limits"? Right now, I feel like the main thing keeping me from advancing is variance. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

At the beginning of last month, I was playing $100s with the occasional $220, and hit a *really* bad run, obliterating my bankroll almost completely.

The bad run I experienced (I dropped $3k over a period of about 2 weeks) had a base in bad luck (as in extraordinarily horrifically bad, running worse than I thought was possible), but it *completely* destroyed my confidence level. It felt like I was running insanely bad, but anybody around here will tell you that huge drops are almost always playing bad as opposed to running bad and it would have to be so bad as to be highly unlikely, so I really didn't know what was going on. I didn't know if I was playing so much worse than when I made that $3k in the first place (which was originally built from a $100 bankroll, and was actually quite a bit more than 3k, since I've cashed out a number of times), or if the original upswing was just insanely good luck, and the losing streak was the true reality, or what.

I've seen a lot of people on this forum talk about runs so bad that they seriously consider quitting poker entirely. This was my time.

In hindsight, it seems fairly likely that over 5500 games, there's going to be at least *one* extraordinarily, disgustingly bad run, but of course, hindsight is 20/20.

Then I spent a few days doing nothing but going over hand histories, and realized that although there were definitely some things I needed to fix, a big portion of that downswing really was running bad. Cooler after cooler after beat after beat. It was seriously sick to watch, even the second time through.

When I started playing again, I started playing short sessions followed by long review sessions, going over every hand of every match. I wasn't quite done with the running bad at that point, but at least at that point it slowed down, and I wasn't adding tilt money into the equation. More importantly, I was able to verify that I hadn't opened some massive hole that wasn't there before that I was just throwing money into, and that my game, although certainly far from perfect, was at least consistent.

Had I been aggressively reviewing after a session through that downswing, I would have fixed the things that needed to be fixed much sooner (which certainly would have made some amount of difference), but I would have realized that yes, I really was running *that* bad, and done my best to shrug it off, rather than letting it affect my game.

About a week and a half ago, I was down to $80. Since then, I've advanced through the levels pretty quickly with a 60-65% winrate, with about $1300-$1400 profit, over that week and a half. Unfortunately, my bankroll isn't really at $1300, because I decided to give HUCASH a go the other night, and got destroyed to the tune of about $650. Oops. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Anyway, the short version of all of this is that I'm not wanting to review because I think I'm stuck and don't know why, or because I'm not advancing through the levels, but because I want to make sure I keep improving, and to keep my confidence up.

Now that I've got my confidence back, I want to do everything I can to make sure that the next bad run doesn't destroy it again.

That's the reason I've been trying to get better about reviewing games or hands after a session.

I'm just trying to figure out how to get the best bang for the buck from it, and was wondering what other people did, how they picked what to review.