More of the Same

So the semester is just ended and I've had a little more free time to put into some hands so for the last 10 days of the month I was able to log about 12k hands, some at cake but most at FT. Not a very big sample but I was winning at about 7 ptbb/100 over the 11k hands up about 1300 and couldn't be playing better, my true A-game. I was using no game selection and just playing whoever and pounding them, the regs included. So i was playing a session tonight which was going well, up about 200 when this guy sat at one of my tables:

At 100NL specifically he was down $5,700 over 16k hands putting him at -18.7 bb/100. Right away I could see he was bad making terrible bluffs and playing 80/65 and 3bet was at 45. Right away I went up on him 200. We continued to play and he caught some nice cards to get back to about even. He then hit quads in a 4bet pot vs my KK and got set over set in a 3bet pot with a FD board. Then he hit a random 2pr in a 3bet pot where I had KQ for top pair and very good kicker on a FD board. At this point I was only down about 200 in the session overall which isnt bad considering how the cards were falling, and I closed all my other tables but this guy was so bad I couldn't justify leaving the table, so we played. I played worse and worse and he played better and better and continued to run like god and ended up putting me down 1k on the night. I probably wont play tomorrow so here is my monthly graph now:



I played so bad vs him but to his credit he played pretty well. Over 1k hands his fold to 3bet was 4%, his fold to 4bet was 7%. He was 3betting 35% and folding to flop cbets under 10%. I normally like playing players like this but I was card dead throughout the entire match and then I fell into a bad place and just allowed him to push me around. I took a few ill-timed stands which then made me not want to take any more stands but that's exaclty what I needed to do.

Basically I didn't stop when I should have. Once I was down 500 to him I knew it was because I was playing bad but I said to myself, "this guy is so bad, even my c-game is better than his A-game." but I guess I was wrong. This is a trend I always repeat. I play well and grind steadily upwards for a while, in this case it was only 12k hands. Then I'll play someone who I perceive as bad, get a few bad beats against them, then spew off multiple buy-ins to them justifying it the entire time by telling myself, "I'd be losing money by walking away from this big of a fish". I have these melt downs, the other time was vs bautrotrimm who actually turned out to be a very solid regular.

If I could just avoid these reaccuring melt downs Id be so solid. My overall bb/100 has been about break even over my 130k hand sample. However, I think for about 90% of this my winrate was something like 2-5 bb/100. For the other 10% of the time my winrate is -25bb/100. I go on these tilt swings which just nullifies all of my good play before hand. It's hard to have a stop-loss for myself but maybe I should. I think losing more than 6 buy ins in one session is abnormal and probably means I'm playing badly. Even if I lost 6 BI's all by way of coolers it still has an effect on my play from there on out for the rest of the session. I have a tilt problem.