I've pretty much come to the realization that even if I'm better than the other players I can't expect to win every single session. I think winning my first 5 sessions in a row since starting poker again kind of made me feel like I was better than the stakes I'm playing and I felt like I would undoubtedly cruise to small stakes or mid stakes lol. But I guess that's not to be...

Variance has definitely hit me and the variance isn't getting much better as I move up the stakes and everyone is playing more aggressively, I pretty much just realized how often I'm gonna be shoving all in and the other guy calls and it's a coinflip or if not that then someone usually still has a 30% chance of winning, which is still 1/3 times if you think about it.

What I can't let myself do though is tilt just because of negative variance, sometimes when I play bad or get coolered or get bad beat or whatever, I'll just make it worse by making ridiculous decisions. In yesterday's session I got in a 3-way pot where everyone was pretty deep, I had 88 and hit my set on an A8x board, we all went all in on the flop, 1 guy had AJ and another AK and the guy with AJ ended up getting runner runner cards to make him a straight, he won the $80 pot, this was the biggest pot I'd ever lost and it just felt horrible at the time lol. After this I ended up just spewing because I was still focused on that one hand and I was thinking, I deserve my money back, why is everyone playing back at me. It didn't really help when I was getting great hands and somehow people just seemed to keep hitting sets or if we got it in preflop they'd crack my overpairs. Eventually I just 5bet bluff shoved over someone with KTs because I felt like he was 3betting and 4betting me light all the time and ended up against AA. After that hand I sat out down $75 and pretty mad at life! But the point is that I could have easily avoided that $40 loss if I'd just never gone on tilt.

Anyway, played again at the end of last night and ran good, got all my money back in 2 hours and that got me thinking. If I hadn't spewed like 2 buy-ins when I was playing earlier, then I would've been overall up for the day, but because I spewed, the positive variance couldn't make up for the negative variance+my horrible tilt plays.

Today I played another session and again I didn't really get any cards, but I managed to stay off tilt and ended up break even which considering how dry my cards were, I think is a pretty good result. So I've basically come to the conclusion that I can't expect to win every session, and that if I lose as little as possible when I hit negative variance, and I win as much as possible when I hit positive variance, then overall that should help me be a winning player over the longrun.

Just wanted to chime in on how I need to make sure never to tilt or at least better deal with it and avoid losing more than I need to.