So it turn out that my eyeball estimate of the graph was a little off.  As of Wednesday, I'm down 59 (FIFTY NINE!!!) buy-ins in EV (higher than the previously-reported 55) this year.  That's FIVE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED BIG BLINDS.  It turns out that for the first third of the year, I was flat ev.  And in my last 140K hands (less than 2 months), I'm 57 bis under ev.  Being the numbers guy that I am, I was curious as to what that translates to.  So I made the following estimate:

I got the number of hands I was all-in by the turn (greater than 150bbs, and removed the ties, mostly AK vs AK), getting us to 280 all-in hands.  These hands account for 77+% of my aiev difference (44bis).  Obviously this is just a ballpark estimate, since I'm getting it in vs shorties a ton, and my equity will vary widely from hand to hand.  My average equity was surprisingly almost exactly 49.9%.  This was surprising since I would have thought it would have been higher (since I would expect to get it in good vs the fish).  But maybe that's a sign that I'm running poorly overall.  When the fish keep getting AA, that's a cooler.  In 280 hands, the standard deviation of the flips is 8.37bis.  44bis below is a 2.63 standard deviation outlier. So the odds of this happening is something on the order of 0.4%.  So roughly 250 to 1.  Seems a little too low... but maybe it's because I also lost aiev on pots smaller than 150bbs.

On the one hand, when you are going through a run like this, it feels like no one in the history of poker has run this poorly.  But every year, you see some schlubs posting their graphs of run-bad, that are about as bad (or worse).  So I guess it's believable.  Whenever people claimed to have run poorly over a stretch of time, part of me kind of thought, "that graph can't be real".  But obviously it's true what they say... one day you will run worse than you ever imagined.  If you play long enough, it will eventually happen to you (even if you are Newman).

Uncharacteristically, I spewed off a few buy-ins during this stretch.  It's that illogical thinking - "surely he can't have it again?!?"  In the long run fishy thinking always loses money.  The big takeaway from this post is that bad stretches happen.  As a poker player, you have to get used to it. But it's super-important to always keep your cool.  The bad luck should end eventually, but don't make it worse by spewing.  Take some time off if you have to.