Every once in a while in any poker player’s life there will be times when it seems like you cannot win one pot for your life. Everytime you have bullets they seem to get cracked by some donkey playing 7-2 offsuit because they don’t know any better. You move all in late in the game short stacked with A-10 and get called by A-9 and you are thinking alright double up time!!!! Then the flop comes and you hit your 10 making the odds almost 100% in your favor and then they some how go runner runner to hit their straight, the only one they can hit that doesn’t give you something better. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!?!? WTF?!?!?!? The best part is you get to watch your bankroll that you worked hard to build start to disinegrate before your eyes and it seems that there really is nothing that you can do about it. You rack your brain going through your moves hand by hand attempting to find the flaw in your game and see nothing, but since this is a skill game I am not going to blame this on “bad luck”. We did not blame it on good luck when we made our bankroll, we are certainly not going blame bad luck for losing it. There must be some flaw in our game that we are not seeing, a tell we have developed, faulty logic, calculating odds based on feeling instead of actual facts and science, something must be wrong. Maybe we just get so used to winning we feel there is no other option which is a good mind set to have going in to a game or tourney but not if it makes us lazy outside the tables or makes us stop paying attention during the game. So what do we do? Generally we beat ourselves up and think about how much we suck at this game and how we have no business playing this game to begin with. However we did build our roll successfully so there must be something we do right we just need to get back to that. In my opinion the best thing to do at a time like this is read for starters, if you are not already. Pick up anything poker and just read, get back to learning all the time, always getting better. Then I usually drop to a lower limit game, so that as I stuggle to figure things out my bankroll does not deplete quite as quickly.