Long story, general questions (LONG !)

[Kurtiii]

Hope someone bothers to read and post his thoughts. I´m a "solid" winning player for over a year now over about 300-400k hands, hoping for some advice from players with a similar personality/poker background and the style of poker that comes with it. I play a mostly TAG game between 18/14 and 22/14 at NL100-200 at the moment. Probably a bit on the nit side postflop, since i am not the most self confident person on earth and somewhat risk aware.

Here´s the background :
I started playing poker with 5$ at the micro stakes limit tables, and moved up the limits without ever reading a book or knowing about equity, ev or specific strategys. Kinda developed my game from a simple starting hand chart and common sence. Wich, after a couple of rough downswings due to overaggresive play, started to work pretty nicely.
After hearing about 23094239 times that i should pick up SSHE and MLHE and whatnot, i eventualy read those and it realy [censored] up my game. I overadjusted, tried to play robotic and "mathematicaly correct", wich was obvoiusly not going to work since i hardly did pot odds, and didn´t even know how to calculate my equity in a hand back then. I hung around though and managed to get play somewhat profitably up to 3/6$ limit shorthanded. This was where i noticed that i would often "know" my opponents exact 2 holecards, thus, once i got the confidence to go with my read, making some realy tough laydowns and calls. But those A high calls against missed draws and 2nd-nut-folds, when up against the nuts, where my only source of profit in those games - other than that i didn´t play very good, mostly to weak, not pushing my marginal edges and loosing those important extra slansky BBs all over the place, exept preflop of course [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img].

It only seemed logical that i should switch to NL, since my ability to make those sick calls and folds would net me alot more profit there. And it wouldnt hurt so much if i loose 1-2BB here and there, as i did hurt in limit poker. And it worked out just as i expected. Not only did i get some nice "******DONKEY" in the chatbox when i called off 50BB with AQhigh and beat a T high, but my winrate jumped up significantly. It also was a huge boost of motivation to read on this forum that there are indeed some highstakes pro´s who never read books but still suceed at poker. So i ignored the books on NL poker and just read the forums a ton and looked at my tough hands in Pokertracker. I never actually calculated my EV in a certain hand after the session and had no "fundamental strategy" for certain situations. I just had to look at each and every hand i played individualy and judging, sometimes guessing, what the best play would be. The more hands i raked in, the less guesing of course.

The Problem :

About 5 month ago i put/gotten myself in a situation (Not gona tell the whole story since this post is allready long enough) where i was unter huge pressure to make a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time, without a plan B to fall back on. It went well at first, but as time passed by, the pressure started to drain out my confidence, since every lost pot wasn´t "just chips" anymore. And as you sure guessed, i hit a horrible downswing just when i needed it most. Had to move down a buyin and had to play a ton of hands where i didn´t play my A-game and as a result started secound guessing nearly every play i made. Up to a point where i sat at the tables and felt like i had no [censored] clue of what i was doing. To make it worse, alot of the regulars started to pick up on it and literaly run over me. So now i was running bad, playing bad, and had a target on my head. This was going on for about a month and a half and almost made me quit the game.
Now im out of that and made the money back plus a bit more, but my game still isn´t the same as it was before that happened. And no ... this wasn´t my first big downswing, and just the 2nd largest. Just those circumstances made it "special". The results however where similar in/after each swing. Just happened to be this one that made me finaly realize and admit it to myself.
As someone who didn´t realy "learn" poker by getting into the math and reading books like most of you did, it was very very hard to keep my confidence. Who knows if i didn´t just get a lucky run and generaly just suck at poker ? How am i gona plug my leaks now, after 1 year of "wrong poker", if it happens to be my huge leaks that caused the downwsing ? Those thoughts where creeping in my head constantly, and I kinda kept telling myself that 300-400k hands are a big enough sample size and that im realy unlucky blablabla ... i had to tell myself something to make it through the rough time, and i missed the most important part of a bad run of cards, wich is the oportunity to find mistakes and fix them. I just played and played until i started to hit a run of cards and ruined my game in the process. The thing i realized was: Once i was under real pressure and hit a larger than average downswing, my feeble "poker fundamentals" just didn´t hold up. There was nothing for me to get confidence from, exept the fact that i didn´t cash in a cent up today and cashout out a fair amount of $.

The Question:

I´m surely not looking to get myself in this sort of trap again, but there probably will be another looong run of dead cards where i will start 2nd guessing my plays, and i would be stupid not to prepare myself for that. SO ... How do others, who learned poker in a similar way, deal with pressure, tilt and running bad ? It´s surely not impossible, but harder when you can´t fall back on statistics and numbers that document that your play is winning money in the long run. And how did you find leaks/wrong thinking patterns that you "learned" early when you started playing poker ? There was a posting from ZeeJustin called "the luck of learning" where he stated that people who learned poker by just playing it, not by studying math and books may have a harder time to identify leaks. Some get "lucky" while learning, hence making the right mistakes at the right times or getting the "correct short term results". Like loosing money on a bad call, and winning money with a good protection raise. And others may get lucky on a bad call, winning the pot but getting in a bad habbit of felting every overpair for example, thus unlucky in a long term sence. And some finaly have big leaks (mostly hand selection i gues) but their hand reading skills kind of even it out. I´m sure i have bad habbits, and probably not enough hand reading skill to even it out, even though i can fold AA sometimes [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]. How did you search and fix those leaks ?
Does it realy come down to starting at the basics and relearning all the things consciously that you picked up by playing so far ?

There probably isn´t a clear cut answer, and i don´t expect one. With different styles and personalities come different problems when running bad or trying to fix leaks. I´d just be happy to hear some thoughts on this or read some stories from players that learned poker the same way.

[kyzerjose]

Read this.

[nawhead]

That post by Ed Miller should be in a sticky somewhere. It's certainly going in my war room collection.