Running bad, playing stupid, and the death of poker in the Pacific Northwest.
This is kinda long, but I hope it helps you as much as it helps me.

I made a reasonable profit playing poker last year. Certainly, $8k is not enough to live off of, and while $8k sounds impressive, given that it took about 1000 hours to make that $8k, it's not an impressive earn rate. Most of that cash was earned in 4-8 games, though, and 4-8 games are tough in the PNW, so I'm not upset about it. Making 1BB/hour shows that I have a lot to improve, but I don't totally suck, either.

And then I got stupid and decided to move up to 10-20 and 12-24. These are our top-limit games in the PNW, so those have the best players in the region--they're more like 40-80 games down south. What the f--- was I thinking? So in about 400 hours I've blown off $2400 (I have way fewer hours as I've found a "real" job so I have fewer chances to play).

I know most of my problem was that the games I played in were no good. Maybe I wasn't the "pigeon," but if everyone at a public table is of roughly equal skill, you're still going to lose money. And with the economy going to shit, finding a "good" game in this area is hard, even at the entry-level 3-6 limit. And sometimes, I was clearly the worst player, though I left as soon as I figured it out. I need to learn how to detect this earlier.

OK, so after flailing around a bit, I went back to the Hideaway up in Shoreline. The great thing about the Hideaway is that the players are, by and large, either weak and tight or loose and hyper-agressive--there are few, few solid players. But that's also the bad thing about the Hideaway--to make money against loose and aggressive players, you must (a) have a shitload of cash, and (b) not run bad.

But that's been the source of my trouble. I have run so horribly bad. This nonsense has been going on for 400 hours. I won't bore you with the details, but my luck is tragic. Case in point--there's a guy who came up with a method of measuring "luck"--basically you count pots with one stack and blinds paid with another stack (subtly, of course). The optimum ratio is different for everyone--mine is 0.8 pots per blind paid--at this ratio, if the game is good, I can make a decent profit. You can also use this to measure the game--if you are up at, say, 1.1 and still stuck, the game is bad and you should leave. Whereas if you're ahead but only at 0.7, the game is great, and you should stay because your luck should improve.

What has my number been for the last 100 hours? 0.4. That's right, I'm winning half as many pots as normal. Now, you can argue that winning pots isn't how you make money--you dont' need to go there, I agree 100%. But you can't make money without winning at least enough pots to pay for your blinds, right?

OK, so what? Everyone gets lucky; everyone gets unlucky. But I am a human being, and my patience is limited. I can weather bad runs for 8-20-50-even 100 hours. But 400? I think it's starting to seriously damage my play. I'm starting to lose value betting opportunities, and I tend to fold too much. I will fold marginal hands rather than play them, rather uncritically, because I'm afraid of wasting yet more money. I'm starting to check and call more than betting and raising. I give up my blinds without a fight, encouraging people to steal from me.

I'm becoming weak-tight, and it sucks. And if I play this way at the Hideaway, I'm complete toast.

How do I break out of this disastrous slump? I've already taken some steps.

1) Strictly limited playing time--no more than 8 hours in a day, no more than 16 in a week. There is only one exception--if I am absolutely crushing a game, I will stay as long as the game is good and I have no other obligations. This, of course, hasn't happened yet. But this prevents the sinking feeling of hopelessness that always strikes me around the 8th-9th hour and causes me to hit that "Threshold of Misery" that Caro likes to talk about.

2) Build the bankroll from the outside, now that I can. I paid some bills and gathered up some cash, so now I don't feel like a bad run of cards over 8 hours is going to ruin me financially. This builds risk-taking confidence, which is necessary to drain money from loose-aggressive types.

3) Stop measuring my bad luck. Now that I've established that I've been unlucky, and not playing horribly (though not as good as I should), it's time to move on.

4) Return to basics. Even though I've developed my poker "soft skills" that let me adjust hand values for different situations, I fear that I have given up a lot of cash by not being aggressive up front. In games at the Hideaway, you need to get the money in early and keep pounding as long as you're sure you're ahead, and then try to draw a bluff at the end with a check. This means that I need to go back to the strategy I learned more-or-less from Turbo Texas Hold 'em. That doesn't mean I won't add skills I've learned in the last year when appropriate, it's just that I need to make sure I got the basics right first.

5) Be fearless. Pound away when I think I might have the best of it, rather than demanding that I be absolutely sure I have the nuts.

So, now that I've basically thought out loud for an hour, what do you all think? How have you dealt with running bad? How did you keep your sanity and your skills intact so you could avoid going broke and succeed once the luck returned?