[Costanza]

When I first tried moving up from the $5.50's to the $11's at Stars I hit a big dry spell -- out of the money in something like 10 in a row. I went back to the $5.50's, rebuilt my bankroll and tried again. I went OOTM another 4 in a row, then finally placed 3rd, then won 3 straight and it was smooth sailing after that.

I hit a similar rough patch when I first switched over to Party, but I think that was more due to getting used to the blind structure.

Now it's time to move from the $11's to the $22's, and the same thing happened, except this time it was worse. I was better prepared bankroll-wise this time, but the 15 OOTM streak still stung.

So I regrouped, played some more $11's and took another shot. 4 more OOTM, then a 3rd, now I've won 3 of the last 4 I played. And you guys would have been proud of the bubble suckouts I caught to win the last one!

There's a question in here somewhere...

I realize these are small samples to look at and it could all be variance. Some of it surely is because in this last stretch I managed to run into some monsters when pushing trash late, bigger monsters when pushing monsters late and my biggest monsters had Achilles' heels.

Still, I think the fact that my 2 longest OOTM streaks occurred when moving up a level has to mean something. And I figured this has probably happened to someone else in this forum.

I have the day off on Wednesday and am planning on reviewing some of the tournaments I lost. The first thing I'm going to do is run some of my tournies through Eastbay's SnG PowerTools and look for some missed bubble opportunities. I figured this would be the most likely place I'm losing ground, because I think my problem was playing scared.

I was wondering if someone else had found themselves in this situation, reviewed their tournaments, and found a pattern of mistakes that I should be looking for.