Id like the HU players with 5%+ ROI to answer this if they are able. What is some of your worst runs? How many games did they last? And im talking about the bad runs where you don't necceraly loose money, but you play several hundred games and you're ROI is usually say 7%, but now you just break even.
My screenname is RBN12 on PokerStars, and I am actually experiencing the worst run ever right now. It already lasts for at least one month, and over 500 games I think. For me, this is the worst thing that ever happened to me poker wise, and the only way I try to handle it is by trying to improve my game and find leaks. For the bad beat and set up part, you just have to accept varience, that what keeps the game running. I have to say I do seldomly tilt, but nowadays I also start to get insane sometimes.. hopes this goes away as soon as my bad runs stops..
The thing about HUSNG's is that you'll encounter bad runs a lot less than other forms of poker, at least if your skill level is sufficient and you're game selecting properly. Ideally you should be the better player in most of your matches and then it's only bad luck that has you losing, when you can get to that point then you won't really have bad runs of any real length and will bounce back pretty quickly from them. If you go through the kind of things that you guys are talking about, it's far from normal variance and you need to take a step back and try to figure out what's going wrong. Perhaps you're off your game, perhaps you need to be more selective in terms of who you play, maybe you need to drop down stakes for a little while until you get your confidence back. Perhaps the best way to deal with this stuff is after you've had a little bad run then some fish will be paying for it and limit yourself to playing the losers and then when you do get your money back consider doing that more often. Even more critical is going over your games in detail when you're on a bad streak, you need to be spending even more time away from the table, play back your recent losing matches in a replayer or look at your losing hands and look for patterns pointing out some of the things you can improve on.
all you can do is play your best depending where your ability is at the moment
Play around with the variance calculator on the site, found under "tools."There you can get a feel for the types of runs players with various winrates can experience over different samples of games.
Actually that Variance calculator helped me coup with a nasty downer, Its great bcuz after u watch how crazy that graph can go u start to detach from particular results and focus on the decision making.
Running bad doesnt mean you have to loose money - i´m 6% ROI over 4.5k games with an avg Buyin of 28. Thats over a timespan of like 6 months - during these 6 months i had about 2 weeks i ran above equity - the rest of the year, pretty much every day, i ran below equity. I´m slowly think i´m going "bonkers" the way i run, but on the other hand - those 4.5k games consists maybe of 150k hands and i had those kind of "bad" runs in cash games a couple of times - so, i dont really now what to make of it that so far. I guess i just should keep playing.