[Percula]

I drop the number of tables I am playing. If you dont multi-table... well...

One of the things I do when I start on a downer, is to get up take a walk, fix some food, whatever, just stop playing for an hour or so.

Come back refreshed and CONSINTRATE like a mother humper on a single table. Watch closely each and every hand, work on your hand reading skills, meta game skills, look for betting paterns, patterns in players in general.

I generally am doing all of the above at a more or less automatic mode, curse control mode under normal circumstances, but when I start dropping buy-ins, I know something is up and it is time to wake up and go back to the fundimentals.

Then there are down swings where you are just getting the [censored] kicked out of you by the cards and donks. Nothing you can really do here, they are just bad beats and you have to deal with it. Rather you can look back on a bad beat or two and be happy with your play or not will tell you if you need to work on something or it was really just the way the cards fell that day.

If you are dropping buy-ins on a consistant basis, time to examine your game and your head. Are you playing scared? Are you getting pissed and blowing it? Are you just blowing it? Are the other players picking up on this and killing you for it? I love to pick on people that are "running bad", I got a guy to lay down KK preflop this weekend because he was running bad and I push his buttons.