July - My poker month from hell

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My month started at 85k hands on the graph and I guess you can see why I'm making this post. Never, in my few years of playing have I ever experienced a month like this and I'm wondering if it's something that I should be worried about (well, I'm already worried and pretty pissed about it, but I don't know whether to discount it as variance or my playing taking a turn for the worse). Note that I have not made any drastic changes to my PF or post-flop play in the past month.

In June, I had the best month of my career, going 2.7BB/100 over 13,000 hands of 2-4. July begins and although it starts off slowly, I still have faith that I can pull off my monthly goal of $1000 to pay most of my bills (no, I'm not dependent on this money). Half-way through the month I find myself at a deficit and tell myself that I can still pull through and would be happy with even half of my goal. Well, we're at the last day of the month and I'm finding myself down 240BB over 14,000 hands.

This is just shocking to me because I've never had a downward trend in my graph over 10,000 hands. I also feel like I'm improving my game incrementally every day by reading and posting here.

Although it may be suggested that I have tilted through the month, I do not believe this is the case. My VP$IP for the past three months has been 16%; however, this month, it has fallen two full percentage points, which is a pretty drastic increase (i.e. I have not grown LAGgy). I attribute this to cold-cards (is this possible over a run of 10,000 hands?), not getting much from my winners, and losing a majority of my coin flips.

A comparison of the two months:

Total Hands: 12,400 (June) 14,000 (July)
VP$IP: 15.95 (June) 13.88 (July)
Won $ WSF%: 30.24 (June) 27.35 (July)
BB/100: 2.65 (June) -1.63 (July)
Went to SD: 26.41 (June) 25.59 (July)
Won $ at SD: 58.91 (June) 55.57 (July)
PF Raise: 8.45 (June) 7.63 (July)

What a way to end the first 100k hands of my career... I will likely take the first week off of August to read SSH again and just to cool down.

For those of you who have logged thousands of hands a month over a period of a year, have you experienced a month(s) such as this in your career and should I be worried? I continue telling myself that every new hand is an independent event that holds absolutely no memory of the last hand or the last 10,000 hands and given this fact, I continue to be on the wrong end of the stick (just because I've been losing a lot lately does not mean that it is time for my graph to magically turn upwards in my next session).

Thanks in advance for any input. At least I got a big promotion at work this past week, which will definitely make up for those lost BB. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]