I have severe issues with self confidence and how to handle the game. I have been absent from active playing couple of years playing however once in a while. No finally I did find time to play again.

Two months nonstop poker

Within last two months I have now played 420 hours of poker.

I thought that with intensive two months I could make a bankroll big enough to live from and to play profitably. I neglected pretty much everything from health, sleep, girlfriend and the social life while giving it a try. Results are ok in Sklansky bucks and big blinds but shit in USD.

I have tried to take aggressive shots to higher in order to escape the rakehell from lower limits.

When I look how I do in blinds according different levels, I just cannot see much difference. I table select in every limit where I play and refuse to play against regs. I just cannot see how I can beat the rake in regs only tables.

Meanwhile in dollars it looks much worse. All hours for nothing. When I take in account bad luck at live games and some NL-games the result is negative. Used parts of my bankroll for livegames and living. During the lowest point I only had few hundreds left in my bankroll and was in a table with huge whale and practically gambled with my onsite bankroll. Moneywise that was ok, as my bankroll for poker was then less than one month living expenses. However it was not original plan and that is the issue. I find it almost impossible to play with long term determination for stakes where winnings doesn't really mean anything.

Now my bankroll is now enough for PLO $10 and PLO $25 with shots to PLO $50. Obviously expected hourly rate in usd from PLO 10 or 25 isn't enough anymore to pay the living expenses.

How I feel now

I have started to feel absolutely shitty. Especially after loosingseveral coinflips in the row I feel feelings of hate and anger and I feel that my mind goes into some zombie-state. I feel all the symptoms of gambling addiction too. Anxiousness before playing, thinking games afterwards, seeing dreams from poker etc... I want to tear my shirt into pieces and hit the screen.

I find it too brutal that when I have beaten the opponents for 240 buyins within two months, the result in usd is negative. Theoretically I know that this belongs to the game and results could be even worse. At this state my mind could not handle another such a bad streak. I just cannot.

How I see my game

Mostly my game has been solid. Some steamy loose calls against obvious value bets and some very bad calls against 4-bets, but big mistakes are still more rare. However after some stupid 200bb mistakes I ended up into emotional tilt. I still am able to develop my game and have been trying to learn from these big mistakes not to repeat them.

Lately I have beeing studying how to win more in non-showdown and how to avoid preflop situations which lead to NSD losses while being close to EV-neutral. I can already see changes in my graphs.

What next

I feel that I must choose from 3 options:

-Quit poker completely and go back to the work which I hate and which pays like shit. I work in customer service where I have learned to hate the attitude of complaining customers. That hardly pays my living expenses and I need to live partly from my girlfriends salary.
-Find somebody who stakes my bankroll back up (I have only one pokerplaying friend, so not easy)
-Find a way how to strengthen my mind and how to rebuild the bankroll somehow outside the poker.
(Difficult as I cannot pay my fair share of living costs from my current salary from shit job)

Own thoughts about reasons

I find myself now in really emotionally unstable state. I have unbelievably high motivation to prove that I can be succesfull pokerplayer again. However I also feel all the issued of gambling problem which are making it more difficult to be the one. I have strong wish to be perceived by others as kind of ideal myself what I would like to be. That is smart, mathematically very savvy and emotionally balanced, succesful poker player and investor. That desire is so high, that bad luck somehow seems to destroy it.

I know that in real life nobody cares about anobody elses bad luck or even good luck. Unless you make close to 7 figures profit per year people just don't care. However I see somehow that my value as a person is defined somehow by the success I had, which is determined by variance.

I have listened all the mental game videos from Leszek Badurowicz but I cannot help being results orientated and bad run started to affect my mind too negatively.

Why quitting is so hard

I still somehow believe that given a good bankroll I could make 100k$ or more per year. It is so difficult to give up that dream while doing a work you don't like and get just a fraction of that.

So I don't really know how to proceed, but somehow I try to improve my mental game, improve my pokerskills further and find a way to give another try one day. Any suggestions and suggest stories from similar situations are appreciated!