Originally Posted by Juked07

I had thought I was a winning player, but lately I have been doing poorly over a fairly large sample. I'm not sure if I should attribute it to swings, or if my game just isn't where I thought it was. Perhaps I should give some more information.

My first experience with online poker was pretty strange. I kind of luckboxed from 50 bucks up to ~500, without really playing particularly well over the course of about a week. I lost a few hands, went on tilt, and dropped down to about 200 all in the course of a day. That's when I realized that there was a whole wealth of information about poker that I had little to no understanding of.

I watched a ton of videos, read a bunch of articles, pored through the hand history threads religiously, and tried to understand the game as well as I could. (I still do this). In any case, I began to play much better, and understood things like BR management. It paid off. I played at an appropriate level, had an okay winrate, and everything was well in the world. I was running about 6ptbb/100 over about 20k hands.

I stopped playing for about all of April and most of May for school/personal reasons. I began playing again about middle of May, and I have done very poorly since. I averaged -8ptbb/100 over my last 10k hands. I am not a phenomenal player by any means, but I really only play about 3 tables at a time, and I try to focus on getting reads and making the best decisions I can, so I am very unhappy/worried about this recent downswing.

What do you guys do if you have a 16 BI downswing over a largeish sample? I admit I have not improved much since April, but I don't think I've been playing worse either. What steps should I take to try to become and stay a winning player?