"We Germans aren't all sunshine and smiles you know." -German guy on the Simpsons.
Well neither are poker players.  Particularly when we're losing our shirts.  I have said it before that these posts are valueless if all I ever do is report my wins.  I've been on a terrible losing streak.  I've seen my 20k hand win rate chopped in half by my last 3000 hands.  It's been brutal.  My flushes don't seem to be holding up, my sets always run into trouble and I don't even want to talk about my pairs.  This is why they call it gambling.  Had this bad streak hit me in my first weeks back I would have lost my entire deposit.  I've dropped about 10-15 buy ins, which is pretty damn extreme.  I'm still plus ev, but instead of winning 10bb/100 I'm down to just over 4bb/100.  That's a good win rate at any limit, and my losses are just the reckoning of the hot run I had initially.  And that's me rationalizing.  Where are the rest of the losses coming from?  The site I've been playing at has a pretty limited pool of players.  I play 6 tables or more at a time, and often I'll have 5 or 6 of the same people at every table.  My HUD tells me in a lot of cases that I have a 3k hand history on these players.  Consequently, any of them that might be using HUD will have a similar history on me.  They know that I'm only raising hands like Broadway pairs AK and AQ most of the time.  They know that I"m only calling raises with pairs and AK or better.   So when I'm showing strength, they know to get the hell out of the way.  This has meant that it's getting more and more difficult to get paid off, and that my opposition is playing a higher quality hand when coming into a pot with me.  In a live game I'd be mixing up my play, but that's just not feasible online.  Online your best bet is to play it straight.  So today I took another beating at the tables and decided that I needed to change sites.  Checking over my play, I'm not making a lot of mistakes.  But I'm failing to get paid off when I get a hand.  I switched over to pokerstars (no bonus though so it's a $2/hr pay cut) and instantly I started making money.  It was great because it illustrated that my theory was right.  I have been playing well, just having a tough time finding action.  Now that I'm new to the tables, I'm cleaning up again.  I think I'm going to stick with Stars now.  No bonus is better than no action, plus there is a lot more room to move up through the limits as my bankroll grows.  Thanks for listening.