Normal swings?

[betgo]

I mostly play tournaments online. I also play some live, mostly cash games, since I haven't had good results in live tournaments. I do well enough to play fulltime, but am not hugely successful.

I am pretty risk adverse, and I don't like big swings. I was a chess player and understand strategy, but I never bought a lottery ticket or played in a casino before I started playing poker.

I started multitabling small cash games and then SNGs. Usually, I made a small amount of money every day, but I would be pretty upset if I had a losing day.

I found I do better in tournaments, but the swings are bigger. I often multitable tournaments starting about the same time, which reduces variance and allows me to play weaker competition. Sometimes, I think I do better single tabling, particularly the fairly high buyin tournaments with big fields and a lot of satellite winners.

After I had an $8500 cash last May, I started single tabling and taking notes and so on. I did well with that at first, but I started losing, so I went back to what I felt I did best at: turbos, rebuys, and supersatellites, generally multitabling.

Anyway, I find the pattern is I have some huge wins, but a lot of my days are losing.

Last Saturday, I won a tournament for $1800, a supersatellite on Stars for $400 that I got W$s, an entry into a $1000 supersatellite on Stars, and $200 in small prizes. So I netted up $2K on the day in cash plus the $1K satellite entry.

Since then I have totalled about a $500 loss. Today, I broke even with cash on Paradise this afternoon, but won a $200 satellite entry. This evening, I multitabled a bunch of small tournaments on Stars, didn't cash and lost $300.

I guess this is pretty much par for the course. I don't want to seem to complain, but maybe financial swings are worth discussing as well as how to play hands.

I have a friend who play NLHE cash games and tournaments live and online, both at reasonably high stakes. Since all of this is high variance, he sometimes make $10K or more in a week, but also has some weeks with substantial losses. He makes a decent living, but I don't have the confidence or personality to take such swings.

I wonder what other people's experiences are with swings playing tournaments.