playing within your limits

[jadducci]

I have been playing SNG's for a couple months, and was relatively sucessful at the 22's and 33's at PP and unforunately I didn't have the foresight to realize that I might hit a slump at sometime and so I kept spending my winnings leaving only a couple hundred as my BR. Anyways, I decided to buy a new lcd from dell to eventually get up to 8 tabling, and so that really cut into my BR but I figured it was a good investment.

The real issue problems mounted when right after ordering the lcd I ran into some bad cards (probably bad play) but that compounded with my need to keep playing to a)cover my expenses, esp. after dropping 500 on a monitor and b)keep playing because i did just spend 500 on a goddamn monitor and I will be damned before I do that and just quit.

Long story semi-short I ran into the worst spell in my life and dropped about 25 buy-ins. While I know that isn't earth shattering, or event that uncommon. I now realize that playing at a level where you can feel comfortable, while maybe not comfortable, but at least not near panicking when variance catches up with you is very +EV. I wish I would have learned that sooner but I feel that its a very important thing to consider and many newer players including myself do not necessarily pay enough attention to it.