[Harv72b]

Your English is better than a lot of the posters here who claim it as a first language. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

I've been through the phenomenon you described many times: most recently yesterday, when I lost about 70 BBs in full ring games. You just hit those swings where the cards aren't falling for you, and your opponents notice this and start calling down with all sorts of weird crap. This, of course, leads to even more suckouts and losses. The effect is magnified by playing in short-handed games, where your opponents are often even worse (just because you raise from UTG doesn't mean the guy on the button's going to fold his J4o, and when the cards are cold, he's flopping a J every time to crack your pocket tens) and you see many more hands per hour. And yes, there is a lot of psychology to playing short-handed--these same donks that you're up against are typically only playing one table, and with only 5 opponents to keep track of, they will notice patterns in your play. Of course they also aren't using PokerTracker or looking at the hand histories, so they don't know that they keep catching 2 outers on the river to beat you....they just know that you keep betting and they keep winning the pots. This encourages them to keep challenging your hands, wheras if the cards were falling well for you and you were scooping pot after pot, you can take advantage of your aggressive and "lucky" table image to win a lot of pots that you had no business taking down.

There are two schools of thought on what to do when you run into a streak like this: some say that you should just stop playing for a while, calm yourself down if necessary, and then get back to the tables to try and get on track again. Others say that, as long as the game is good and you're not on tilt, you should keep playing no matter how badly the cards are falling. Personally I believe in the second thought here, but I've experienced enough downswings to be able to (usually) play through them without letting it affect my game. If you find yourself playing too many hands, or playing your big hands too passively because you just "know" that someone's going to suck out on you, you need to stop playing immediately no matter how good the game. You no longer have an edge on your opponents when you're tilting like that.