typical swing in limit?

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I would like to know what the consensus is for swing in relatively low-limit hold 'em.I started playing online about 4 months ago with a $100 bankroll. I built this up to about $1600, playing, progressively as my roll improved, 1/2, 2/4, 3/6 and even a little 5/10 at the very peak. There were swings during this period of up to $250 each way, fortunately up before down. I'd say I'd played 12k hands over this time, the last half of them at predominantly 3/6, but I wasn't tracking my performance at the time like I do now. My roll had beenrelatively stable at the $1.5k level for about two weeks when everything went to hell. Over the next month (3,300 hands) I could hardly win anything. At first it was extremely bad luck (more bad beats than you could shake a stick at), and was followed by the deadly combination of extremely bad luck and tentative play due to that bad luck. I dropped about $1k over this time period. I had already pulled some money out of my account to do some holiday shopping, so I was down to about $150 to play with, playing 2/4 (continued losing) and cheap NL sit-n-gos (which I did well enough in the short run to balance out the 2/4 losses, but personally find dull if I play more than 1 a day -- and as a result get real careless real fast).Well, fortunately things turned around with a bang. I started actually winning at 2/4 (a couple hundred), and when I took a chance and shifted back to 3/6, I went absolutely bonkers, and have in the last seven days (800 hands) cleared close to $1200. It goes without saying that I hope this will continue forever, but it also goes without saying that that would be impossible.Now, I realize that the luck in this cycle was at first exceptionally bad followed by exceptionally good. I just want to know if swings of this level of violence are typical in these games. Is there a consensus on what sorts of swing one can expect? That downturn was absolutely brutal on me, and I'd hate to think that I'd have to deal with that too often (though the upswings are rather nice, too).-Thanks(Basic features about my play if you're interested: I see about %27 of flops, raising preflop about 1/3 of those, see showdowns about 10% of total hands, winning about half of those. PokerOffice classifies my play as tight-aggressive preflop and passive post-flop, which I mostly agree with, and am trying to increase my aggression post-flop without becoming a maniac. I actually think one of my biggest weaknesses is I don't fold quite quickly enough post-flop in several situations, and am reluctant to raise in others when I should. I could also stand to be a hair more aggressive and selective pre-flop, I think, but on the whole I consider my pre-flop game to be quite good. Overall, I consider myself to be a relatively solid, if unspectacular player, as evidenced by the fact that I'm beating both opponents and the rake overall with a pretty decent sample size, but not by much when adjusted for how many hands I have played in total. )

[MrConceit 0]

Sadly crazy swings is very normal in poker. Low limit or otherwise. In higher limits you tend to get the swings more from the LAGs and in low limits you get it from the passive callers who hit ridiculously improbable draws. Yours was a bit extreme though. But if you helped out the downswing by tilting or playing timidly because of the swing that could have helped contribute.Losing 100 BB in 1 horrible long session or a few sessions in a row isn't that improbable. Losing 200 is starting to be ridiculous, but still not IMPOSSIBLE. You lost like 175 or something? My NORMAL swings in like 15/30 are about 1200 bucks, so 40 BB. More than 50 and I start to get irritated, but I'm hardly shocked. My worst swing ever was about -120 BB during a single session (playing 3-4 tables of course though), though by the end of the session I was down ONLY about 53 BB.I have lots of friends who play 2/4 and 3/6 and swings are still there in large measure. But if you are playing a lot the swings will even themselves out and your win rate will show through (assuming you're a winning player ).Many many people, if you ask them, will tell you they never have big swings at all, and damn you must be a bad player. Most of them are fibbing. Large standard deviation is the norm in poker. If it wasn't we wouldn't have the fish coming back every day because they'd never win.Oh, and all of this underscores ALWAYS having the proper bankroll. In truth I want to have and maintain about 400 BB because of the combo of multi-tabling and the prevelant LAGs in 15/30. 300 is sufficient usually, but I'm not very fond of the old norm of telling people 200. But again, if people are willing to move down (in limits) when they hit 150 then 200 should be sufficient. I'm only at about 300 BB atm, and I feel uncomfortable.