On a 180 BB downswing, is the following analysis correct?

[GrekeHaus]

I've been playing online for a while now, and have recently made the jump to the $10/20 game on Party. For my first 11,000 hands, I was absolutely killing the game at over a 3 BB/100 clip. I don't doubt that this was actually higher than my expected win rate, but since then, I've completely tanked and am on the biggest downswing of my career. As a good poker player, once the downswing started, I took a look at my play and considered the fact that I might not be playing well. However, I feel like I've been playing quite well, so I decided to look at the numbers to see if I could find anything. Just for reference, here are my $10/20 numbers from before my downswing:


BB/100: 3.21
Total Hands 11,311
VP$IP: 16.08
Went To Showdown: 31.45
Won $ At Showdown: 54.85
Win %: 7.93

Here are my numbers during the downswing:


BB/100: -2.10
Total Hands 8,645
VP$IP: 14.71
Went To Showdown: 31.22
Won $ At Showdown: 52.48
Win %: 6.78

By contrast, here are my numbers from when I was playing $3/6 (I only have a limited number of $5/10 hands in my DB):

BB/100: 2.35
Total Hands 35,410
VP$IP: 14.49
Went To Showdown: 30.17
Won $ At Showdown: 55.55
Win %: 7.63

For my analysis, I'm going to basically ignore the $10/20 numbers from before my downswing, since there aren't all that many hands and just compare with $3/6.

The one thing that really jumped out at me when looking at the numbers was how low my winning percentage has been during the downswing. I've condisered several things:

1) I could be playing too tight

I sort of threw this one out of the window right away when I looked at it. Both my VP$IP and WtSD numbers are actually higher than they were at $3/6, so I'm playing more hands and going to the river more, while winning less.

2) The Players around me are calling down more

This also doesn't make much sense, since the players at $10/20 are generally tighter. If I'm playing more hands here, I'd expect my actual win percentage to be higher, since I won't be getting sucked out on by terrible draws nearly as much. I also doubt I'm getting called down my more than one person regularly, which could also lower this number.

3) Bad Luck

I can't really think of any other reasons that my win % would be so low, so I've decided that it's quite likely that I'm just experiencing a terrible run of cards.


With this in mind, I assumed that all other things being equal, playing the same number of hands and going to showdown about the same ammount, I should win the same percentage of hands.

Thus, the difference between my actual winning percentage and my "expected" winning percentage (I'm just assuming here that my $3/6 win % is more or less accurate) is about 0.85%. Over 8,645 hands, this corresponds to about 73 hands which I nomrally would win that I've lost over this stretch. If we assume an average pot size of 5 BB (an underestimate since I hardly ever play in a game where the average pot <$100), this corresponds to about 365 BB that I would normally win during this time that I didn't win. Had I won these hands, I would have been +185 BB over this span rather than -180, which corresponds to about a 2.12 BB/100 win rate.

Even if I'm slightly off about my true win %, it seems like I would normally be a strong winning player had I won these extra hands. So, I have a few questions about this analysis.

<ul type="square">[*]Is there any other reason that I've neglected that could cause my win % to be so low over this span?[*]What other numbers are useful to look at in assessing your play over a downswing?[*]Is my logic in assuming that my win % should be higher flawed in any way? (I'm not concerned so much with my guess of 7.63% being accurate, but more of the general principle I'm using)[*]Based on the information presented here, would you say that I'm a strong winning player (2 BB/100 or so) at this level? I'm still averaging 0.91 BB/100 over almost 20,000 total hands now.[/list]