Its been about a week since I had the worst live session of my small stakes poker adventures. I was playing 1/2 SL (2-100 Spread limit) HE at a casino close to my house in CO. I had been playing a decent amount this month, and began the month with an $1800 upswing. I felt fairly unbeatable as I had been playing at the same room all week and had no losing sessions.

This day was just like the rest. I drove up to the casino (40 min) early, and sat down with the day grinders and older tourists. The table I chose was the one with the most gray hairs and one particularly drunk gentleman who shuttled off 2 buy-ins of $200 within the first round or two that I was seated. He took a short break, and reseated with $400.

I decided it would be a great table, as I could target the drunk chip dumper, and it would be fairly easy to tell when the older nittier crowd felt like playing hands. The seat directly to the drunk guys left opened up, and I quickly grabbed it. The situation improved when I realized that this guy was not covering his cards when he peeked, and I was often able to see his holdings. I do not promote cheating, but this situation is ideal for any poker player, especially since this guys range includes the entire deck. I guess my first question would be to ask if it was wrong of me to glance when given the chance? Would it be his fault/responsibility since it is his money?

The story is fairly straight forward, I will save you the bad beat stories and just give the basics. I normally have a stop loss of $600 in 1/2 as it is usually difficult to dig yourself out of a loss of 3 big buy-ins (especially at 100 max). There were a few giant pots where this guy got lucky. I was 4 outed for a $300+ pot, and 5-outed for a $450 pot. Anyway, I reached a point where I was down the amount of my stop loss, and took a break. I thought about all the factors.

What do I do at this point?

I ended up breaking my stop loss, getting in for another $400, and dumping it to the drunken gentleman in a pot where I genuinely felt out-played (mostly because I viewed him as such a terrible player). This made me leave quickly, but I have been wondering ever since if I made good decisions. I would like to reiterate that this guy was drunk, flashing cards, and very willing to put chips in passively and with questionable holdings (called a preflop 4-bet with 10-3, then called down with bottom pair).

What just happened to me? I view myself as a fairly good player as I have been able to consistently win for the past 3 years. Am I missing something?

Yes, it's called discipline.

If you decide to play with a stop loss, then nothing trumps the stop loss.

It's black and white. There is no gray area. End of story.

This is not really a proper post for poker theory. And possibly it doesn't have a good place to post it on 2+2. Beginner's Questions maybe.