Lose your buy-in poll

[DarkKnight]

I buy in for 25. If I slip below 12 or so I'll take that as an opportunity to reevaluate the table. If it's still good I'll rebuy for an additional 25 at this time.

My gut feeling is that people will try to push you around more and respect your strength less if you are at the table with less than 10BB.

As for the first part of the question, in my last 20K hands (new database), I've had 5 session of 349 that I've ended up down over 25 BB. I'm sure I was down more than that on some of the others and came back to above water.