My poker path... what now? (long)

[AlfilRey]

I´ve been playing poker for 2 years or so now. I started off like most, enduring a few weeks at the playmoney tables before finally taking the plunge and hitting the $0.02/0.04 tables on stars. The first year involved playing mostly small stakes, a lot of $0.10/$0.25 and $0.25/0.50, not playing that much and with hardly massive success. Still, it´s not that hard to move up these levels and after the first year of semi-regular play, I had about $7-8k to my name and was playing $2/4 regularly, taking the odd shot at bigger games.

Still, that was not a lot to show for a year of poker, so about 11 months ago I decided to take things a bit more seriously than I had until then, and started taking down my results and setting myself some challenges (either in terms of money to make, hands to play, hours to put in...it varied).

Luckily for me, this coincided with a patch of good variance, and combining this with taking up PLO and finding that a much easier game to beat than the rest, I ended up making 60k between live and online in the space of a couple of months. Suddenly, I had a significant bankroll.

This was followed by a severe change of luck and, though once again I was inconsistent regarding how much I actually played, I found myself roughly breaking even for the next 6 months.

This frustrating period came to an end when I travelled to a live poker festival with €3500 and came back with €20,000 5 days later. Suddenly, I had a roll of around €70,000 (around $100k)(the reason i didnt have more is because I had taken out of my roll during the year to pay for random things).

Now came a stretch where due to other issues (exams mainly) I stopped playing for a couple of months. Then, at the very start of the summer, with the exams over, I started playing again. I deposited about $10,000 spread over a couple of sites and I immediately started to win at 5/10. Quickly I started playing at 10/20 and even took shots at 25/50. Over the space of a couple of weeks I had more than doubled my roll, to about $220,000.

However, I then lost about $65,000 of that in 2 days of 25/50 headsup. I was exercising some pretty poor bankroll management as you can see, but I guess I got overconfident. Either way, I was left pretty pissed off at myself for having lost so much in such a short space of time, so I vowed to quit for a long time.

I didn´t play a hand of poker over the next 2.5 months, and this brings me onto mid-September, when I came back eager to put in a few solid results.

However, since then, I have done nothing but lose. I started back up at 10/20, and have since dropped down to $5/10, then to $2.50/5 and even trying to multitable $1/2. I can do nothing but lose buyins. 80% of my play was in one site in particular and 20% in the other. I ran equally bad in both sites, only of course in one over a sample size 4 tiems greater than in the other. For some reason those hands are corrupted and I don´t know how to fix that, but I downloaded the PokerEV software for the 10% hands site and was running 20k below equity over 2,500 hands or so in all-ins alone.

During this horrible 3-week period, I´ve managed to lose about $35,000. I never thought it would be possible to run this bad. This post isn´t intentioned as a "pity me, I am so unlucky" post though. The reason for this post is a more constructive one. Basically, I need the advice of other people who have played fairly High Stakes, and have perhaps experienced these kind of vicious swings with serious, potentially life-changing money at stake and how they have reacted.

At the moment, my roll is at about $110,000, half of what it was at its peak. This is still my profit for this year, but I am very worried that I will simply continue to lose and lose. As you can see, I have been pretty erratic in my play and my bankroll has increased, not consistently, but rather during brief periods of a mix between running good, focusing and a bit of gamble...

Dropping so much of my bankroll (from my peak) has me questioning whether poker will ever be a steady source of income or if I´ll ever know what my true winrate is.

Put simply, I am just looking to make the best decisions regarding what to do with my money and how to make money in the future.

I am in college right now and am willing to consider a bunch of different possibilities. I could just use the money I have right now to get me through college and into a decent job. I could try to play through the downswing, taking the risk of a greater hammering to my bankroll. I could drop down stakes massively, and only play poker to pay for my day-to-day expenses to not have to tap into the $100k+ over the next few years. I could also maybe look at investing, perhaps in the stock market, though I know nothing about this right now. To anybody who knows about this, would it be worth my time to spend a lot of hours researching it, or is it better to stick to poker?

I´m only 20 right now, so I don´t feel like it´s too late to quit anything that isn´t worth my while, but the sooner I work out what my best options are, the better.

Hopefully some mid-stakes / high-stakes players have been in similar spots in the past and have come out of them by making good decisions and learning from any mistakes along the way. I´d appreciate any opinions.

edit: I felt this would be the best forum to post this in, but if mods disagree then I apologise and pls move it to where you see fit.