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there are statistical ways to answer your question. If you want, i can calculate the % chance you've been playing losing poker over that stretch vs just being unlucky, and also the probable range your actual winrate is in. PM me your BB/100, standard deviation/100, and actual number of hands.
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There is a 68% chance that you'll be within 1SD of your expected winrate, 95.5% that you'll be within 2SD, and 99.7% that you'll be within 3SD.
1SD for a given number of hands is (SD/100)*sqrt(#hands/100). That is, if your SD/100 is 30, and you've played 10,000 hands, then (30)*sqrt(10000/100) = 30 * sqrt( 100 ) = 30 * 10 = 300. If you expect to win at 8PTBB/100h, then you expect to be at +2400 BB, and there's a 68% chance that you'll be between +2100 and +2700 BB. The 2400 is your EV, and the 300 is your standard deviation for this many hands.
You have a 16% chance of being 1SD below your expected winrate, 2.3% of being below 2SD, and 0.135% of being below 3SD. Luckily, you have these same chances of being
above your expectation by the same amounts.
Sqrt( 30,000 / 100 ) ~= 17.3, so for OP 1SD is about 519 BB. He's down about 800 BB, so that puts him at about 1.5SD below 0. If he's a good player that
should be winning at 8PTBB/100h, then he should be at +2400 BB. But he's down 3200 PTBB from that winrate. This is about 6 standard deviations. The chance of a strong winning player being behind by 800 BB after 30,000 hands is about one in never.
The chance of a moderate (4PTBB/100h) winning player being at -800BB after 30k hands is 1:13821 (3.8SD off expectation). Likewise, the chance of someone who is -800BB after 30k hands is actually a moderate winning player is 1:13821. In other words, OP is not a moderate winning player.
The chance of a marginal (2PTBB/100h) winning player being at -800BB after 30k hands is 1:288 (2.7SD off). This is fairly far out on the edge; there's maybe one poster in this forum (assuming 288 regular posters/readers) that is running this badly over the last 30k hands.
The chance of a breakeven player being at -800BB after 30k hands is about 6.2% (1.54SD off). If you play 40k hands per month, you'll have a result like this once a year. In other words, there's a 1:16 chance that
anyone (with a SD/100 of 30) will be 800BB below their expectation for 30k hands.
The
most likely explanation is that OP has some major leaks. It only takes about one bad call or bad fold every 10 table-hours to drain this much EV, which isn't much at all. When pots get big, you need good reads and smart sense.
Note: I used these
public domain normal tables to compute the probabilities here.