[dankhank]

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Anyway, while we are on the topic of leaks, I'd like to admit I am no where near a perfect player and always considered myself to be average or a little above average. On the same token, I would say the leaks I do have aren't enough to result in this ridiculously long combination of downswings and break-even play.

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i don't know where to start because many thoughts were racing through my head as i read your post. but when i came across that quote early on in your words, i knew it was what i would reference in my reply.

i've recently come out of my own long downswing so believe me when i say i know how you feel. it is a frustrating process to take a bad beat, recover, accept it, get back to playing good poker, make a few more correct decisions, and then get bad beat again and watch your precious poker account balance drop in size. and to have this happen hour after hour, day after day, then week after week - and to have it reflected in thousands of dollars of actual loss - is psychologically damaging. so in other words, i get the pain part.

but there are some things you should know. and the main thing is, if you think you're only an above average player, then i don't know why you expect to be winning at high levels, for large amounts of money. a small percentage of people win money in the long run, and those people are either a) lucky or b) very good to great players. that is the only way to do it.

if you have been running bad for nine months and 100k hands then there should've been a large part of your post that explained all the ways the downswing has improved your game. when i turned pro six months ago i thought i was already a great player, while simultaneously admitting i had a bunch of leaks, mainly around discipline and overestimating my postflop abilities. my own downswing forced me to buckle down and literally eliminate leaks (and faulty thinking) that had existed for a long time as part of my game - and as a part of who i am. sure, i still have leaks and screwups (like say, doing a wild bluff in NL that has little chance of working), but now instead of saying to myself "oh there you go again" i actually look at the causes of why the leak popped up and try to prevent it, rather than tacitly accepting its presence.

the last paragraph is sort of irrelevant to you because you have your own flaws in thinking and execution that are holding you back. but there are obviously flaws, because 100k is too long to be on a downswing and still be a winner. you have to be constantly looking at your poker game with some serious rigor if you want to improve. it sounds like you're trying to do that through other people's advice, but i think this is something you have to do on your own to really internalize it. and all i mean is, while you're playing, after you're playing, and before you play, think about poker and yourself in majorly honest and complex ways and figure this dang puzzle out.

early in your post you said that you struggled at poker for about six months but that since you hate to lose, you figured out how to become a winner. my approach was fundamentally different. it's not that i hate to lose or love to win - i love to learn. i really think that if you're going to fade all the bad luck and tough opponents that poker lines up against you, then you have got to be a seriuously sick player who doesn't screw up much. and that means a) you have to know the right move for thousands of situations and b) you have to have the discipline, confidence, and calmness to make the right move over and over. acquiring that takes a lot. it's not enough to say "i'm going to learn how to win." instead you have to learn the game.

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My BR is getting to the point where it is crippled and in all honesty, I am simply not willing to drop another limit. I am at a point where I am comfortable just busting out, simply because I am frustrated and it will give me an excuse to stop spending countless hours playing online poker.

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i watch the webcase "live at the bike" that's referenced on this site sometimes. for a bunch of months in their big NL game there was this guy gore who always sat with a big stack and usually was a big winner. some viewers probably thought he was the best player at the table. well, over the months i definitely saw this guy make some big blunders and misreads, and over time i came to see he wasn't all that great. good, but not great. well i was listening to a webcast last night while playing, and one of the announcers talked about why gore hadn't been on the show lately. apparently gore ran bad for awhile and decided to take some time off of poker.

so, that's how he dealt with a downswing. let me tell you how i dealt with my recent downswing: i played more poker than normal. i played through that mother f'er. it was so totally obvious to me that i was losing money not because of my own play, but because of variance. and so my biggest motivation on a daily basis was to ride out the variance by pounding out more well-played hands.

all through a downswing you will have lapses in confidence about whether you're a winning player, and whether your current strategy is a winning one. the bottom line i think is that someone like gore couldn't look back on every aspect of his strategy and see that it was winning, so therefore he couldn't generate the neccesary confidence to continue. right now you still want to continue, but you are seriously wavering.

if you really are a winning player and if your strategy really is right, then you will have the confidence, the motivation, and the skills, to eventually right the ship. your 100k hand downswing will turn into a 140k breakeven stretch. and if you continue with poker it will eventually become a 140k blip on an otherwise upward moving graph. but if you are anything other than a true winning player (one of the few), then this downswing will be the exact opposite of a blip: it will be the year that effectively ends your poker career. it will be a stretch of bad luck that you weren't a good enough player to overcome.