Overall good thoughts. I think you're too hard on making mistakes, people are only human and noones going to play perfect all the time, but we should work to reduce them. You also make the mistake (or just leave it out) of assuming a mistake is making a -EV play instead of a +EV play, where often a mistake is making a less +EV play than could have been made (a lot of microstakes players will see a big difference once they work this out).


Main point of variance leading to bad play, and that bad play being lumped into "variance" is spot on though. A lot of downswings (my own included for sure) get blamed on variance when theres just plain a lot of bad poker in there as well.