What Goes Up.....

...I think everyone knows the end of that saying. When I made my initial deposit at the beginning of the year I had a tad over $1,300 at Sportsbook. I almost immediately ran that up to $1,900+ due to an amazing week that has already been chronicled in my previous posts.

Then came this week, where every draw missed, and every big hand ran into a bigger hand. Every night seemed to be a $100-$200 loss. At one point last night alone I was down $260 in the middle of my session, although I made a slight comeback and ended "only" down $130. When I finished last night I popped up a graph of my results this year and found that (exclusive of bonus) at one point during last night's session I had actually given back every bit of my profit for this year and was down about $40 through play on the year. The run-up at the end of the session has me slightly in the green, but that is quite a change from this time last week. To paraphrase something from one of my "brag" posts - I just dropped 3 buy-ins at $3/$6 - WTF?

I am continually amazed at the amount of variance at limit poker. It isn't like I haven't had this kind of variance before - far from it: this downswing is "only" about 100 BB, far less than my biggest swing and not even worth mentioning in the long run. There is actually an interesting post on 2+2 right now from someone with 700K+ hands. They have a 550 BB downswing, along with a concurrent 300 BB downswing not graphed (on Cake, amazingly enough) for a total of a 850 BB downswing. Yet, in the grand scheme of the graph, it looks like not that big a deal. Really amazing / humbling.

Quite frankly, I don't know that I have the stomach for that, which means I may need to re-examine not only the levels I play, but the reason I play in the first place.

Or, I could just hope that I get boomswitched this weekend and go back to thinking that I know what I am doing.....