Downswings and burnout

FastMachine

Here's a post about the crap side of poker for a change...

I was wondering what kind of downswings other people have experienced. I burned out about 3 weeks ago, basically from playing too much without breaks. I could feel it building and a particularly bad run finally pushed me over the edge. I'm currently going through my worst downswing yet, down about 10 buyins at 5/10 as of last night - I'm down about 10K over 3 weeks. The last week I've been playing a mixture of ultra-tight (where I make nothing) interspersed with moments of maniac play (where I loose my stack). I've been tilting almost every day over fukk all where before I used to take 2 outers for a few grand in my stride.
After talking to one of the regulars he advised me to go right back to 2/4 to get my game sorted, which is what I did today. He said he was back on 2/4 himself a few weeks ago for this reason and he was sitting with a 12K stack at 10/20 so it obvioulsy worked for him. I had a good run today, god bless you 2/4, and I've got some confidence back but I'm sticking around 2/4 and 3/6 for at least month till I'm at 100%.

So what kind of swings have people experienced buyin wise? Did you drop levels at a certain point or did you stick it out and turn it round? What caused your downswing, burnout/tilt/bad luck/etc......?

a-k-47

A mixture burnout and bad luck has me gone from 1/2 - 2/4 to 0... in a matter of 5 days, i tried to regain loses at 3/6 and 5/10.. i know it sounds crazy and stupid but it happened, i think i was playing to much poker and i eventually burned out. I know i should have lowered to maybe .50/1 and 1/2 and try build it back up but i was so furious with the ****e i had put up with, i tilted my way to the high stakes at a cost, i dont think the play is much diff to 2/4, unless your not rolled for it. Account is now suspended so i can recoup, i started a thread for a new alias for when im ready for poker again. i hope to take 3-4weeks off from online poker, and when im ready ill get back to what im better at which is mtt's and stt's. Until then illbe working on BR management skills ........

are u still on tribeca fast?

Culchie

a-k-47 wrote:

Until then i'll be working on BR management skills ........

This is where it is at !

MrPillowTalk

If your changing the way you play your game fast then there is something wrong. Prolonged losing streaks are a part of the game as much as you think you can get rid of the variance, you cant.

When im running bad for a number of weeks I take a couple of weeks off and when you come back only play one table at a time.

Mr. Flibble

Two weeks ago everything had been going well. I'd had an average of $20/hr profit playing at .50/1 and was feeling good. I built my account up to $1500 - Its not really a bank roll per se, as I constantly cash out I can reload if I need to but I would never reload for that much. If I lost it I would reload for 100 and make myself restart from the .10/.20 tables.
So everything was going great and I moved up to 1/2 one saturday. I lost about $400 over 2 sessions all form bad beats which put me on major tilt. I moved down to .50/1 but am now playing terribly. Any bad beat sets me off and I just throw my stack away. I've lost another 4 buyins at this level and have decimated my record which now stands at an average of $8/hr.
I think when I'm on tilt I have started making my decisions about a hand preflop and just getting tied to a hand which is utterly stupid and I do other inane things, for instance my last hand before giving up temporarly I had AJ and the Flop was AKK and I push, I mean who does that! What do I expect to call me that I'm beating.

So I'm taking a break before putting only 200 in my account and rebuilding to where I was at a lower level when I return.

Fastmachine, I'm not talking from experience but I would imagine that bankroll and tilt managment at that level are absloutly paramount. It must be so easy to lose huge amounts of money that dropping down 2 or 3 levels for a while absloutly shouldn't be seen as an ego hit but a deft professional move. We're not robots!

FastMachine

a-k-47 wrote:

i was so furious with the ****e i had put up with, i tilted my way to the high stakes at a cost, i dont think the play is much diff to 2/4, unless your not rolled for it.

are u still on tribeca fast?

I did the same, I hit 10/20 a few times and it wasn't pretty. When I got really bad though I went to one of the lower levels and went all in every hand across 4 tables. It was actually a good laugh, I busted out on 3 tables fairly quickly but on the last table I was up well over 5 buyins, I was actually in profit overall after going all in every single hand for an hour!! I kept doing it till I lost that too though, lol.

Yeah, still on Tribeca. My new name is nonoyesno.

MrPillowTalk wrote:

If your changing the way you play your game fast then there is something wrong. Prolonged losing streaks are a part of the game as much as you think you can get rid of the variance, you cant.

When im running bad for a number of weeks I take a couple of weeks off and when you come back only play one table at a time.

Oh yeah, I had changed the way I played - to the point where I couldn't even remember properly what my game was in the first place. I made some terrible moves and calls that I'd never do normally. I did take a week off and came back and was still playing bad but I probably needed more time off as you say. Anyway, droping to 2/4 seems to have worked, we'll see how it goes today. This is the first day I've woke up without a headache in the past week.
You seem to be going very well lately Pillow, keep up the good work. Saw you loose with AA versus AJs runner runner flush last night at 10/20. Vul, that guy was some retard.

Mr. Flibble wrote:

Fastmachine, I'm not talking from experience but I would imagine that bankroll and tilt managment at that level are absloutly paramount. It must be so easy to lose huge amounts of money that dropping down 2 or 3 levels for a while absloutly shouldn't be seen as an ego hit but a deft professional move. We're not robots!

Yeah, there's no shame in dropping levels - it can be hard as you want to make back your losses as quickly as possible but when your game is not 100% you'll end up loosing even more if you don't drop.

El Stuntman

Mr. Flibble wrote:

Fastmachine, I'm not talking from experience but I would imagine that bankroll and tilt managment at that level are absloutly paramount. It must be so easy to lose huge amounts of money that dropping down 2 or 3 levels for a while absloutly shouldn't be seen as an ego hit but a deft professional move. We're not robots!

Nice point Mr Flibble,

I fully agree - Lafortezza made a similar point yesterday (when he wasn't busy banning people ). This to me is the most important 'skill' in poker and also the most overlooked/blatantly ignored.
Stu Ungar was broke most of the time because he didn't have this skill (and was out of his mind on coke too....but that's another story).

BR management and tilt management should be one and the same thing if you have a stop/loss limit in place. I tilted off about 10% of my bankroll on Wednesday and forced myself to walk away due this self-imposed restriction. Thankfully...otherwise I could well have blown the lot!

Lafortezza

I have yet to run bad since starting to take onlne poker slightly seriously about 7 months ago. My bankroll has slowly increased and I've never lost more than two or three buy-ins in a row. The last couple of week I've run extremely well, but I still really really fear running bad for an extended time. It's bound to happen sooner or later.

BigDragon

Different Shades of Tilt
by: Annie Duke

Recently a player approached me and asked if I had any explanation for his dismal losing streak. He’s generally a winning player at relatively high limits on the internet, but for two weeks, he said, he had done nothing but lose. I asked if he was tilting and thereby creating a higher likelihood of booking a loss – generally my first explanation for an otherwise winning player losing consistently all of a sudden. He was emphatic that he was not. He insisted that he wasn’t playing looser or more wildly; on the contrary, he vehemently asserted that since he’d started losing, he had tightened up considerably. He was adamant that he was not on tilt.

But what does tilting really mean? If you ask 100 people, 99 of them will tell you that tilting is when you get emotionally upset and start betting wildly at the table, playing almost every hand, raising like a maniac. But this is only one form of tilting. There is a far more insidious kind and that is when you play as if you are going to lose every hand.

Tilting merely means that the decisions you make at the poker table are affected by your emotional state. For most people, this means taking their anger or frustration out on their chips, and playing almost any hand that comes their way. But some players express their tilt by playing solely to minimize losses. When things are going badly, these players decide that they are obviously going to lose every hand. They get it into their head that even if they have aces they will lose. So these players will play to save bets rather than to win pots.

Why is this so bad? Well, poker is about winning pots, not saving bets. When you play to save a bet, you are often costing yourself whole pots, which is never a good decision for your bankroll or results. As an example, let’s say you have a hand like J-10o in a $10/$20 Hold’em game. You raise before the flop from the button and the big blind calls. The board comes K.10.3. and your opponent checks to you. You bet and are called. The turn is the 9. and, again, your opponent checks, you bet, and get called. Now for the river. There is $105 in the pot. The river is the A., a terrible card for your hand. Your opponent checks to the A.K.T.9.3. board. On a winning streak, you would bet here, trying to get your opponent to fold a bad king or better ten. And let’s say that 60% of the time your opponent will fold these two hands and you will win the pot with the worst hand. That means that 40% of the time you lose the $20 bet, but 60% of the time you win the $105. Most players make the correct assumption that, if the A. made your opponent’s hand here, he or she would bet to get paid off.

But when on a huge losing streak, some players will be much more likely to check here. Their thinking has now become completely negative. “Wow,” they think, “that was a terrible card. Why can’t I ever get a blank on the river? Why does it have to be the worst card in the deck? Obviously I just got beat, so I better check here and at least save my $20.”

But in trying to save $20, that player is costing himself a whole pot. Poker is not about making bet-saving decisions so much as it is about making decisions that pick up whole pots. In balancing the two, pot decisions always win. Of course, I am simplifying here, but the basic idea should be clear.

Another example of how playing to save bets can cost you whole pots is to do with the concept of hand protection. Protecting your hand is one of the key concepts in poker. When you hold a hand that’s vulnerable to the turn or river card, it’s extremely important to raise and protect your hand. Raising knocks out opponents who might otherwise draw out on you and, even if they call, gives them a much worse mathematical price to draw.

Let’s say you have a hand like A.Q. and the board is Q.6.5.. An opponent bets into you and there are two players left to act behind you. The correct play here is to raise and try to knock out straight draws or underpairs and make those hands pay more to draw out on you. For example, let’s say an opponent behind you has a 9-8o. If you raise, this hand will fold almost 100% of the time. If the hand does call, he is now paying twice the price to hit his gutshot. The same with a hand like AKo. Even a hand that will almost surely call, such as a flush draw, is mathematically punished by the raise. Raising to increase the likelihood of locking a pot up with a hand that is vulnerable is generally a much better strategy than slowplaying.

When some players are on a losing streak, they will often stop raising in situations like this. Their thinking goes: “Well, I have top pair, but I just know a king or a heart or some other awful card is going to hit on the turn and someone is going to suck out on me; so I am going to just call and wait to see what hits on the turn or the river to screw me.” The irony is that by just calling to try to save money you have just created a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you drastically increase the likelihood of being sucked out on. Now when your opponent hits that gutshot seven to complete his straight, you can’t really complain about the bad beat; since you, in essence, created the bad beat by giving him a mathematically favorable call instead of raising him out of the pot. Anytime you make your opponents pay more to draw, the better for you.

When I asked my friend who insisted he wasn’t tilting if any of this applied to him, he realized that this was exactly what he was doing. He had stopped protecting his hands. He had stopped making those pot-winning bets on the river with marginal hands. He had stopped pushing his mathematical edge. He was playing as if he were going to lose every pot, so he was playing each pot to minimize his loss on the hand rather than to maximize his earn.

I just heard that he has been back to his winning ways again, having just come off a two-week $40k winning streak. I’m glad that I might have played a small part in his return to form by pointing out the non-obvious way he was tilting. The maniacal form of tilting is so easy to spot and then control. The insidious, playing-like-you-are-going-to-lose variety is so much more difficult to stop. Your friends could watch you all night and not even see it, so it is much harder to fix. Make sure to consider this more subtle explanation of your losing streak whenever you’re running bad. Tilting comes in many flavors. Make sure you consider them all.

Samba

Go play live..

I have come to the conclusion that there is only so long that I can take those 1/2 outers and as much as you think you are taking it on the chin, you are just bottling it up.

You need some outlet for all those 2 outers.... do you do regular sports etc?


I was in the exact same boat as yourself Fast Machine with regards online play about 4-5 weeks ago.


So i said enough was enough and I decided to go play live, I made around 3.5k in about 7 nights of 1/2 PL Holdem.

It brought about a new lease of life to the game, it had been sometime that I had not actually been enjoying playing and I thouroughly enjoyed all my live play win or lose.

Now the problem with live play is going in to town at 10 .pm, getting to bed around 7, after a week of that you will have bags under your eyes!

Play seems very slow in live, as it is...

So after my realisation that I simply was not enjoying the game I went back to online play.

Over the past 2 weeks i have netted around 12k between some nice tourney cashes and Great going on the PLO tables...

Over the past 3 nights, i've burnt around 3k to some sick outdraws at the PLO table, Samba, meet quads, quads, meet Samba.


So once again I find myself a bit distraught with online play and I think i might go back to live play for a while.

I've been thinking week Live, Week online etc....

MrPillowTalk

BigDragon wrote:

Different Shades of Tilt
by: Annie Duke

Recently a player approached me and asked if I had any explanation for his dismal losing streak. He’s generally a winning player at relatively high limits on the internet, but for two weeks, he said, he had done nothing but lose. I asked if he was tilting and thereby creating a higher likelihood of booking a loss – generally my first explanation for an otherwise winning player losing consistently all of a sudden. He was emphatic that he was not. He insisted that he wasn’t playing looser or more wildly; on the contrary, he vehemently asserted that since he’d started losing, he had tightened up considerably. He was adamant that he was not on tilt.

But what does tilting really mean? If you ask 100 people, 99 of them will tell you that tilting is when you get emotionally upset and start betting wildly at the table, playing almost every hand, raising like a maniac. But this is only one form of tilting. There is a far more insidious kind and that is when you play as if you are going to lose every hand.

Tilting merely means that the decisions you make at the poker table are affected by your emotional state. For most people, this means taking their anger or frustration out on their chips, and playing almost any hand that comes their way. But some players express their tilt by playing solely to minimize losses. When things are going badly, these players decide that they are obviously going to lose every hand. They get it into their head that even if they have aces they will lose. So these players will play to save bets rather than to win pots.

Why is this so bad? Well, poker is about winning pots, not saving bets. When you play to save a bet, you are often costing yourself whole pots, which is never a good decision for your bankroll or results. As an example, let’s say you have a hand like J-10o in a $10/$20 Hold’em game. You raise before the flop from the button and the big blind calls. The board comes K.10.3. and your opponent checks to you. You bet and are called. The turn is the 9. and, again, your opponent checks, you bet, and get called. Now for the river. There is $105 in the pot. The river is the A., a terrible card for your hand. Your opponent checks to the A.K.T.9.3. board. On a winning streak, you would bet here, trying to get your opponent to fold a bad king or better ten. And let’s say that 60% of the time your opponent will fold these two hands and you will win the pot with the worst hand. That means that 40% of the time you lose the $20 bet, but 60% of the time you win the $105. Most players make the correct assumption that, if the A. made your opponent’s hand here, he or she would bet to get paid off.

But when on a huge losing streak, some players will be much more likely to check here. Their thinking has now become completely negative. “Wow,” they think, “that was a terrible card. Why can’t I ever get a blank on the river? Why does it have to be the worst card in the deck? Obviously I just got beat, so I better check here and at least save my $20.”

But in trying to save $20, that player is costing himself a whole pot. Poker is not about making bet-saving decisions so much as it is about making decisions that pick up whole pots. In balancing the two, pot decisions always win. Of course, I am simplifying here, but the basic idea should be clear.

Another example of how playing to save bets can cost you whole pots is to do with the concept of hand protection. Protecting your hand is one of the key concepts in poker. When you hold a hand that’s vulnerable to the turn or river card, it’s extremely important to raise and protect your hand. Raising knocks out opponents who might otherwise draw out on you and, even if they call, gives them a much worse mathematical price to draw.

Let’s say you have a hand like A.Q. and the board is Q.6.5.. An opponent bets into you and there are two players left to act behind you. The correct play here is to raise and try to knock out straight draws or underpairs and make those hands pay more to draw out on you. For example, let’s say an opponent behind you has a 9-8o. If you raise, this hand will fold almost 100% of the time. If the hand does call, he is now paying twice the price to hit his gutshot. The same with a hand like AKo. Even a hand that will almost surely call, such as a flush draw, is mathematically punished by the raise. Raising to increase the likelihood of locking a pot up with a hand that is vulnerable is generally a much better strategy than slowplaying.

When some players are on a losing streak, they will often stop raising in situations like this. Their thinking goes: “Well, I have top pair, but I just know a king or a heart or some other awful card is going to hit on the turn and someone is going to suck out on me; so I am going to just call and wait to see what hits on the turn or the river to screw me.” The irony is that by just calling to try to save money you have just created a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you drastically increase the likelihood of being sucked out on. Now when your opponent hits that gutshot seven to complete his straight, you can’t really complain about the bad beat; since you, in essence, created the bad beat by giving him a mathematically favorable call instead of raising him out of the pot. Anytime you make your opponents pay more to draw, the better for you.

When I asked my friend who insisted he wasn’t tilting if any of this applied to him, he realized that this was exactly what he was doing. He had stopped protecting his hands. He had stopped making those pot-winning bets on the river with marginal hands. He had stopped pushing his mathematical edge. He was playing as if he were going to lose every pot, so he was playing each pot to minimize his loss on the hand rather than to maximize his earn.

I just heard that he has been back to his winning ways again, having just come off a two-week $40k winning streak. I’m glad that I might have played a small part in his return to form by pointing out the non-obvious way he was tilting. The maniacal form of tilting is so easy to spot and then control. The insidious, playing-like-you-are-going-to-lose variety is so much more difficult to stop. Your friends could watch you all night and not even see it, so it is much harder to fix. Make sure to consider this more subtle explanation of your losing streak whenever you’re running bad. Tilting comes in many flavors. Make sure you consider them all.

excellent find Dave, agree completely with just about everything there.

MrPillowTalk

FastMachine wrote:

You seem to be going very well lately Pillow, keep up the good work. Saw you loose with AA versus AJs runner runner flush last night at 10/20. Vul, that guy was some retard.


Yeah, there's no shame in dropping levels - it can be hard as you want to make back your losses as quickly as possible but when your game is not 100% you'll end up loosing even more if you don't drop.

Could you believe he called 900 with Ace high no draw? I followed him around table to table all night eventually got it back, stick him on your buddy list.

Its very important to come to terms with downswings, I found it to be the hardest part of poker, if you can find a way to manage it ( and moving down is as good a way as any ) then it really reflects in your profitability.

Everyone forgets that losing one buyin in a session where you probably could have lost four is the same as winning three buyins. When you approach it this way it is easier to stay upbeat in a downswing.

Flipper

I went through the same thing over the last few weeks. I had been winning overall on a few sites and having some great results live but recently, the wins/losses became so erratic that i finally felt i couldn't handle the swings.

I agree with you 100% on stepping back to 2/4 fastmachine. My game of choice has been 5/10 omaha but for the last few days, i stepped back to 2 and 3 tabling 1/2 and 2/4 on Pokerstars. It's been going really well and at those stakes, i still managed to make about 2.5K in 3 days.

Like i said, this is the first time I felt the pressure to perform all the time and the swings were really getting me down. Because of this, I have decided to take a break from the game completely for about a month or so. A nice live win in Cork last night in the €100 omaha game (€5,500) means that I can relax now. I did the very same back in december and when i came back, I played the poker of my life (City West and Birmingham). It takes dicipline but I know first hand the rewards of such a career break. With such important events coming up for me (IPT final, Poker Million and WSOP), I feel I'd be crazy not to do it.

I'll be writing an article on my decision and posting it on my blog for anyone that's interested and will be updating on how things are going.

Kieran

roryc

Jesus Dave where did you find that little gem... im gonna print that out and stick it onto my screen...

5starpool

It was in cardplayer or bluff europe. One of those mags I read recently anyways.

Bandana boy

dave brilliant article

Fast
i have gone through tilt and donking phases all my poker life (about 5 years)
I go from my own game which tends to get results into a couple of bad beats and then go on this ultra aggresive and ultra passive see-saw
recently i thought i had this under control and have had a couple of profitable months when boom I bust a 3k BR on 1-2 in 2 weekends

I could not seem to win a hand and was convinced it was bad beat after bad beat and despite owning PT and checking back over the nights in question i came away even more convinced.
A pal of mine offered to have a look at my PT database and see if he could see a fault
boy did he
yes there was a bad beat in each session but there was serious donking moves as well.
And when a player made a bad call i was convinced every move they made was awful and started making those same bad calls against them
(eg a player calls pot flop and turn with gutshot hits and then i start making gutshot call to "get him back")

it was only when this was rubbed in my face via several e-mails cut and pastes and a few phone calls that i had to admit my bad play.

Yes it was painfull trying to explain some seriously stupid moves but 2 weeks to think about it has done the world of good

I think i am back from it a better player than before

Hectorjelly

lafortezza wrote:

but I still really really fear running bad for an extended time. It's bound to happen sooner or later.

me too

Hectorjelly

I have a feeling ive been very lucky so far, since playing cash games I havent had a downswing of any magnitude. My worst runs over the last few months have been basically breaking even for a few days. I think ive learnt to deal with bad beats/bad runs a lot better than than before - at that table against the maniac I lost 5 1k+ pots within about 40 mins, each time as a considerable favourite. But I stayed at the table and continued to play well, I ended winning it all back and more.

Its hackneyed advise at this stage, but I think that if the less confidence you are playing with the tighter you should play. The tighter you play the less decions you need to make, and the more you are guaranteed a profit from other peopes subtantial preflop mistakes. Against good players this wont work, so game selection becomes even more important. When im playing well I feel I have an edge over anyone who sits down (which is almost certainly foolish but there you go). When running bad I sometimes wonder do I know anything about the game.

I think at stakes of 5 10 and higher online downswings become much more likely for the good player, as you playing for relatively larger sums therby increasing the tilt factor, and the edge you enjoy over the avg player is so much lower than at 2/4 and below

fuzzbox

Hey Fast. Running bad / playing bad is the toughest thing to deal with.

I never had any significant downswing since I started beating the game regularly at .10/.25 buy ins, and all the way up to 3/6.
However, when I moved to 5/10 things seemed to change a little. I got murdered the first time I tried, and then dropped back down, determined to get back to the roll necessary to try again.
I managed it, and then I went on an absolute heater, and thought that poker was the easiest game in the universe. I would only have to log on for 10 minutes, and somebody would be shipping 1k my way. How easy is this !!

I think this over confidence led to my first downswing ... oh yeah - first .. meaning there has been more than one. I figured that my super poker genius could simply destroy everybody, and my cards/position were virtually irrelevant. I began opening my raising standards and betting multiple streets when having virtually no chance to win. I thought this was "outplaying" my opposition. Funnily enough, it was not very successful.

So I stopped and tightened up, and my results improved again.

Somewhere around this time, I started to play some PLO again. I jumped right in at the 400 level. This was a the time that party had some 400 games, but no 600/1000 games, so the jump was 400 ... or 2000. I smashed the 400 games for about a week or two, and well surely I was easily good enough to play the 2000 game.

It turns out that I was, and I wasnt. I jumped up to the 2000 game one night, and began to play ... at every table I was at, I managed to acquire a big stack at one point in the evening (of course I played 3). I had over 6k on 2 tables, and over 4k on another. However, I was viciously overplaying AAxx. And it came back to haunt me, as I dropped all of the money I had won and ended up down about 12k for the evening. It wasnt all bad play, but a lot of it was bad deep-stack play.

It was an expensive lesson, but a lesson nonetheless.
Since that time, I recovered my roll again, and was playing well again, and took another shot at the 10/20 PLO game. This time I hit a big upswing, and the world was rosy.

However, during this time, I cant seem to beat the 5/10 NL game. I dont know why - I get my money in good and lose, I hit expensive 2nd best hands that cost me a lot, and I accurately assess my opponents hand, and try to bluff them off it (which is probably my most expensive trait).
So I dropped down to 3/6 and played there to see if I was just playing bad - and I beat the game for 10PTBB/100. This is incredible to me. How can I smash the 3/6 game, but do very poorly in the 5/10 game

But I am destroying the 10/20 and 5/10 PLO games.

I think that the level you play at has a lot to do with the number of downswings that you will face. When you constantly face tough decisions, then downswings are inevitable. If you play very well at the 200 level, the number of tough decisions you face is pretty negligible, so it should be much harder to run/play bad. Sure there will be times when you go through a downswing because you lose a few 50/50, or 60/40 shots in a row, but you can make up for these at this level very easily.

So now that I have bored you all, almost to tears, the moral of the story is :-

10k is not that much in 3 weeks, in the grand scheme of things. Take a break, play a different game, drop down the levels, regain your confidence, and then you will start to win again. Then move back up, rinse and repeat.

Poker is hard .... honest it is.

FastMachine

Yeah, loosing 10K in 3 weeks isn't really that big a deal, I think it was more the thoughts of "Oh god, I've turned into a loser and I'm going to give away all my cash" that got to me the most. Although, I had enough sense to know that you don't just turn from a winner to a loser overnight and it was obvious that it was the burnout that was killing me.
Anyway, things are going great at 2/4, it was always my favourite level, so I expect to make the money back in the next two weeks and we'll see from there. I've been honing a much more aggressive style here as the pots are so small compared to 5/10, it feels like there's no pressure and you can't loose too much. I've often considered playing a more aggressive game but I usually moved up a level rather than experiment so I never got to try it until now. This downswing could turnout to be a blessing in disguise if I can make this style work on the higher levels. It'll be interesting to see.

As you say fuzz, as long as you take a break and drop levels, everything should work out fine. The hard part is taking the sensible approach when you're in not in a good state or mind and dropping levels rather than going up, but once you've seen it working it's the only option. Don't leave it till you've lost a substantial chunk of you br, do it as soon as you know you've lost the edge.