AK Mr Blonde,

I feel what you’re saying.  I agree that breaks can be a great refresher, but it seems to me that a break isn’t going to help you very much.  It sounds like you need to put in some work on your mental game.  I don’t mean this to sound harsh.  For one thing, I don’t know any player who doesn’t need to work on some area of their mental game.  But for you, it sounds like you’ve got some mental game leaks that are, like you said, costing you stacks at the table, and will continue to do so until you’ve fixed those leaks.  It can be hard work, too hard for some, to correct issues with your mindset, but let me tell you, it’s worth it!  So many of us separate the mental game and our strategy work when we should be looking at them as one in the same.  You might as well throw strategy out the window if you’ve got mental game leaks that are costing you more than your sound strategy can make up for.  Strategy and mental game go hand in hand and should both be focused on consistently.  My suggestion for you is to find a good mental game coach to help put you on a path of success.  I’ve been working with a mental game coach (in addition to a strategy coach) and I can’t even begin to tell you how much it’s improved not only my game, but my life general.  The coach keeps me accountable, inspired, and looking honestly at where I need to improve.  Yes it can be expensive.  But so can dumping stack after stack.  And like the previous poster said, just recognizing that you have these leaks is a huge first step.  Now be the player who does the hard work of fixing them, whatever that might mean for you. 

Yeah, I have been through this over and over again.

What I find is when your playing well and variance is on your side you feel indestructible and invariably you start to change your game. It is subtle but it does change, the longer the good variance the more it will change. 3betting more, opening wider, blffing more etc.

Your mind will relate this to playing well, then variance will reverse and you will continue playing the slightly adjusted way compounding it. Bad play plus bad variance. Basically the reverse of what it was before and suddenly your roll plummets.  

However like a phoenix from the embers, you start to study your game again realise what your doing wrong, learn some new stuff. Sometimes stay in a slump for a long time, maybe take some time off. Eventually you start playing well again and forget about making money and concentrate on making good decisions. You stop losing money maybe even start making a small amount or lose money vary slowly. 

Then one day the variance is back in your favour and your off again. This seems to be how poker is a constant cycle.

Even once your realise this you can find that even when you play your best you can loose for a long time especially in MTTs.

The funny thing is I keep telling myself these things yet I am still not analysing my own game properly. As I type this I think this is what I am going to do.

Check the EV of each of my sessions each time I play from now on. Not look at my bank roll but look at my total decisions. Was it plus EV or -EV and some up some how the total and try and improve this each time and ignore the bankroll.

In answer to your question, I think you were on a patch of good variance. Even if you kept playing as well it is not likely you would continue to final table as much all the time. I am suggesting to you what I am suggesting to myself, concentrate on each decision in isolation and ignore if you are winning or loosing. Take pride/joy in each decision and ignore what happens after the decision from a point of getting unlucky or lucky but don’t ignore process of the decision i.e. check later if it was correct using some form of analysis. EV calcs, posting here etc.