Cruel game

It's been a while since I updated this blog. Yesterday after another unfortunate session I noticed that my latest blog update was about a huge upswing I had during the end of 2008.
Usually I'm not that superstitious, but by posting all those beats I gave away I probably triggered some sort of doomswith.
So hopefully this post will turn it around again :-)

As you can understand I'm going through a very though stretch of hands. During those 2,5 years I played poker I always had periods of weeks (50k-70K hands) where I run bad, just as I had periods where I run superhot.
The last 3,5 months though are the worst I ever had. I'm playing around break-even now for around 200K hands, which is far more then I ever thought was possible in the games I play.

People always ask the reason behind this long stretch. Is it the financial crisis that is affecting the poker games? Has my luck run out? Are other players adjusting better to my game? Am I playing worse? Or is it just bad luck.....

It's difficult to answer those questions because it's obviously very easy to blame it all to badluck, but it's probably a mix from a lot of things.
Games are tougher then a year ago thats for sure, but especially the last 6 weeks I had tons of very good tables and lots of fish.
One problem is that there are just less (good) games running above NL600 and so you see a lot of good players moving down in stakes.
It's not that players have become so much better, it's more that there are more of them in comparison with the bad players.

Offcourse when I'm running this bad for so long, I'm not always playing my best game anymore, but I think I'm doing quite ok here, at least not tilting buy-ins away, but just some not so good calls and some missed value bets, but nothing spectacular.
Where I had a period of like 30 winning days in a row at the end of 2008, I now haven't won more then 3 days in a row for like 4 months.

Even though I played so much hands already I still underestimated how big variance can be in poker, so I'm quite happy I always had a very strict bankroll management, because I don't have to worry about going broke or having to move down in stakes.

I'm not going to post any hands or graphs, because it speaks for itselfs.

All I want to say is, don't ever underestimate how bad u can run, because it can always get worse.

See ya at the tables!