Oh man.
Back story: been playing poker for about 8 months. Started at .5/1, made it on up through to 2/4. Made a couple of grand.
Started losing discipline--trying to play other poker variants I didn't know how to play. Bankroll started dwindling, so I decided to rededicate myself.
Still had enough for 2/4 6max, so I went to absolute and was beating that over a few thousand hands. Hit a nasty downswing, realized I might not be good enough for absolute's 2/4 6max. Went down to party's 1/2 6max. Players were much worse than at absolute, but I still couldn't win.
At this point I'm 100% sure it's variance. But my mind is so messed up I try a few things. I move to full ring and limit my sessions to a fixed number of hands. This works well. I'm still running a little bad at the beginning but it doesn't matter any more bc of the fixed sessions. Moreover I start judging my sessions on whether I made good decisions as opposed to whether I won money.
Eventually the variance evens out and over 10k hands I'm beating this game at 2.4bb/100 (4-5 tabling no less) and starting to wonder why I'm wasting my time at 1/2. (Look, I know 10k isn't even remotely enough to gauge a winrate, but they say you know if you're beating a game after 10k...)
So I try to take a stab at 2/4 tonight and the wheels just fall off. The players are terrible. You could win money at this game just by playing the right hands preflop. But I've never had so many things go wrong at once and I don't know how to handle it. I need suggestions. I guess I have to move back down to 1/2, but is there anything else I can do?
I also realize that this is a ridiculously small sample size. But my mind is so messed up right now. I need some suggestions for getting it back on straight. Take a break? Is it that simple?
Ah well, here's the evidence:
Okay, so I don't know how to post an image. But basically I sorted pokertracker by biggest losing hands and the results are: KQo, KK, KQs, T9s, AQs, 99, AKs, A9s, TT, A9o, AKo, KJo, AJo, ATo. [censored], it's only 75bb. But in 600 hands! That's what it is. It's all this crap in that few hands. How do I deal with that?