The Camel, a well known professional gambler and old school husng winner, once shared with myself and others a rough patch of his own that he had.  He broke even for 2k games in husngs.  I don't think he ever played above the 1ks in that period, so they were likely mostly $230-550 games, which isn't too much higher than you play yourself.

Now Camel is a very good player.  He may not be the best husng player, but he surely is an extremely profitable player that all but a handful would and should avoid.

There's a lot of variance in this game, especially as you move up and edges are smaller.  The 5% or so rake really helps ensure that variance will always sucks for us in turbo speed games.  You just have to deal with it and plan ahead so that you don't rely on a month or two of profits at any given time.

I want to say that I recall speaking with you, or you speaking with another coach previously.  You play a lot of volume, correct?

High volume players are going to experience longer than usual break even stretches almost always.  Why?  Because despite us thinking the contrary, it seems that nobody can play such long stretches and high volume over and over at the tip top of their game.  Primo is probably going to be a better person to answer this for you, I've seen him break even for months (not counting rb, he'll make rb money in those stretches) then have a massive 20k+ month.  That's just the nature of a high volume, high variance player.

And I wouldn't say that any "strategy" is the correct one.  I've seen plenty of high volume players that I would rather emulate than a low volume, steady profit one, and vice versa.  It's all about what you are comfortable doing, what makes financial and positive expectation sense and what success you expect to have with your strategy.

For now, I'd work on improving a few things, that should give you some added confidence and hopefully get you out of this breakeven stretch sooner than later.  But it's often going to just be variance, and if you can handle it well mentally you'll get out of it sooner.  If you let it hurt your mindset, you'll breakeven, or worse, for a much longer period.

Woah, 1500 games really sucks badly - and for you, that must be a very long time, you're still playing regular speeds, right ?

I'm just about to hit the 500 mark - but that's just a week of play for me nowadays (IchoTolot on Carbon / Merge Network) because these games are so incredibly fast, I play like 25+ games per hour and already cleared February's $250 MGR on the $20's-$30's.

This really scares me a bit - variance must be a lot higher for me, and I'm not even sure whether I can beat these games at all, so I could easily be facing some 5000+ games.

But the high volume thing that Ryan mentioned is really something I need to think about, maybe playing 100 games per session isn't such a good idea.

Regarding turbo speed games, since I started playing on Carbon about a week ago, it feels a bit like variance now affects me a lot less mentally than it did before - a suckout is now just one out of twenty or more games in that hour, so I get over it quickly and move on.  But the idea of playing some huge fish for half an hour just to lose with Set of Aces vs Runner Runner Flush really scares horrifies me.

Jack

Hi,

As said, mindset is very important. It's the case in all forms of poker, but in HU it's extremely important, because it's all about adapting and feeling the pulse of the game.. there's no way you can "autopilot" like you can in some other forms of poker (well, you should never autopilot, but it's less harmful in full ring).

In SNG's, I think it's easier to avoid being results oriented than in cash games, and to focus on volume, because variance is still much smaller (for example, in PLO, a 10 buy ins swing in one hour is very common, and 50 buy ins downswing happen sooner or later to most of the players, even the best ones).

When you're on a huge breakeven period, chances are that you're not only unlucky, but also on tilt (and it can be, even when subtle, devastating for your ROI). 

I'd recommend reading poker mindset, and especially what they say about result orientedness. Another good thing would be, when your results are bad and you feel you could be on tilt, to stop for a while and watch some videos of your favorites intructors... it helps a lot ! 

I hope this can help ! 

gl ;)

edit : the fact that you talk about frustration makes me 95% sure there's tilt involved and it already hurts your game (believe an ex-PLO player who lost a ton with that ;))

I can definately sympathise with your situation dude. I like what chry said before and have to agree 100%. I could be considered to play a similar style to Primo (even though m def not as good) and I also endure some pretty insane periods dude to my multi-tabling and high-variance style. My longest was 2500 games on FTP and was awfully rough. I was reviewing a lot and am not really prone to tilt. If i learnt anything though, it is that tilt has man forms and even though i wasn't tilting in the traditional form, my lack of confidence as a result of the breakeven stretch effectively prevented me playing my A-game. The key is to just hang in there and grind, and review your game on a daily basis. You don't become a losing or breakeven player overnight after winning over such a sample size so keep your head up, grind the volume and i assure you it will turn!

GL sir!