Hey guys. I've recently started taking poker a bit more seriously (taking a gap year from uni to see what I can make of it), and I've noticed now that its more of a serious thing and less just for fun I'm noticing way more mental game leaks. The first one I want to deal with is how my mood in the game seems to follow my results. I think this is natural to a point (who doesn't love being up 20BI?) but its quite drastic to the point I can almost determine if I'm to have a losing or winning session depending on how the first flip I got involved in went. Obviously this isn't sustainable and variance over time will crush me if I don't deal with this, so I want to look at ways to combat it. My first thought was to switch off running it twice, and almost subject myself to the variance, a sort of like exposure therapy. Is this wise or will it just make the situation worse, should I infact be looking to reduce my variance? I play PLO with quite an aggressive style compared to the players around me (usually my red line is higher than my blue) so my variance as a default is quite high.

My other thought was that running it twice is a bit unreliable, in the sense that I don't get to 100% know we're going to run it twice, but I do get to say 100% we're going to run it once. This subjects me less to the flipping cards over, seeing I'm 35% with my wrap+pair and thinking "oh god please run it twice" and having that disappointment as it doesn't and the board runs out bad for me. The fact I always know what is going to happen in terms of running it and can feel as though I have control over that may help the mental aspect of it, I dunno.

Just some food for thought, not something I've ever really considered. When I first made my stars account before I even knew what PLO was i just clicked run it twice because it didn't affect results in the long run and I'd seen them do it on poker after dark and it looked cool, never considered it again since :) Cheers guys