After winning about 770 BB's in 16K hands, I went on an 770 BB downer over my next sixty thousand hands. I'll skip the obvious, I ran extremely bad. But I also played about as bad as I ever played for a 5-10K hand stretch.
I say this every year and I'll probably continue saying it every year. Do not underestimate the variance in poker, particular in limit hold-em. However bad you think it can get, it can get much, much worse. And don't underestimate the impact it will have on your game. Every time without fail when I go through one of these extended stretches of run bad, my game completely deteriorates and I start making all kinds of errors I'd never make otherwise.
I've learned a couple things from this downswing. One is that I need to start taking breaks. I played 335 hours this month which took a severe toll on my game. At one point, I misread the board three times in the span of an hour. So starting next year, I'm committing myself to taking time off anytime I start to feel burned out.
The other thing I learned is that I can't wake up and jump into high limit games. At least ten mornings this month I woke up, immediately sat in 4 high limit games and was down 5k in less than an hour. I'm always groggy and can't think straight when I wake up. It takes a while for my mind to get going and to be in a poker frame of mind. What I was doing every day would be the equivalent of Ray Allen sleeping in the bleachers, rolling out of bed and immediately getting into a NBA basketball game with guys that had been competing for hours. He'd have no shot of competing and neither do I. Two days ago, I decided not to play anything higher than 30/60 until I'm confident I'm thinking clearly.
On the VPP front I'm up to 400K which I believe puts me right on SNE pace. I'm hoping to finish by the end of September and will need to average about 150K/Month to accomplish that.
Good luck at the tables.
