[Harv72b]

You've been playing far longer than I have, and you put in nearly as many hands in January as I have over 5 months, so I don't know that I'm really qualified to even attempt to answer your question.

However, that hasn't stopped me yet. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

One thing that occurs to me is that the sharp decline in your win rate could be attributable in part to the increased number of hands that you're playing. I know that I work about 45-50 hours/week, so when you combine that with the other essentials in life, I can generally only fit in about 2 hours/day of playing time. On my days off, when I try to stick it out for longer sessions, I find that my mind starts to wander and my play suffers as a result...I just don't have the mental discipline necessary (yet) to play long sessions. You could just be overloading your brain, although I'm sure it will catch up if you keep playing this many hands.

I know that my January featured a couple of fairly large downswings, one of around 125 BBs and another in the 70-80 range. I also had a couple of huge upswings and wound up posting very good numbers for this month, although primarily at 3/6; on 2/4 I was actually under 1 BB/100. Again, though, this was a much smaller sample of ~8500 hands.

I guess my proudest accomplishment for the month of January is that I never once got frustrated over the downswings, or started to doubt my play. I have finally learned to accept the variance, and to trust that for a solid poker player, what goes down must come up. [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]