I've been a pro for the last 5 years. Most of which were online 100NL-600NL. But like many I had to transition to live and I'm now on roughly a $15k downswing while playing mostly 2/5 with a couple sessions of 5/10 the last two months. I'm used to big swings online but that's playing 4-6 tables. I've had nothing but second best the last two months. Flush over flush. Sets over sets. Bad beat after bad beat. I feel like I've been playing well and obviously everyone has big downswings but I'm interested how people deal with the live swings at these stakes and other peoples biggest swings.

i think live-poker is played so much deeper and with bigger raises preflop most of the time, that you should not compare these swings with online equally.
it might equal a 7 buy-in downswing at 10/20 online.
at least where i used to play live, the stacks were usually 200-500bb deep at midnight or an hour later.

i handle swings with different actions in my real-life.
if i lose a lot i prefer to eat good steaks and fish, drink single malt scotch (mainly ardbeg and laphroaig) and go to party to forget about the downswing and just feel better mentally. but all in moderat manner.
whisky and steak, yes, hookers and blow, no.
2-3 days later i go back to the grind.

i am not at all a fan of playing a third day in a row when i lost the 2 days before.

when i win, i get more nitty in real life. i feel good anyway and dont have to celebrate it like a noob or throw away money for amusement. i go the gym 3 days a week (instead of 2) and try to get 8 hours of solid sleep.
i still eat healthy in general, but on upswings i like to eat unhealthy stuff more often, since gym and long hours at tha pokerz need energy and im a slim-jim.

i know this is the opposite of what seems to be right, but it is a perfect balance for me.
i trick my neurotransmitterz-producerz and converterz (poorly translated) by giving them input of great food and alcohol, maybe a party, when they are thirsty after a dry run at tha pokerz.
i always feel pretty good operating like this, only problem is, that its difficult if you have a relationship, because you either seem paranoid/nitty or desperate/wasted when you dont lie about your day and proceed with the poker/life balance thing.

I find that even when I'm not running well I still am able to not lose too much or win small simply by bluffing well in just the right spots. In fact, I approach the game of poker as fundamentally a bluffing contest, not a card game. I don't sit down and think: I hope I run well. I sit down and immediately focus on the players and the situations that will yield good bluffing opportunities. If I happen to run well also, it's a bonus and I get to cash out multi-racks. But routinely it means that my results usually show a win regardless of the cards. Yes, if I get coolered big 4 or 5 times I'll take a hit. But even there the hit is not going to be that dramatic if I did my job and bluffed well.

I'll go so far as to say that if you are losing over a period that extends into weeks rather than days, you are not bluffing well. Which also means you are not working hard enough at making the reads and profiling the players such that these bluffs actually work.

Small example: I was in a game on Thursday that featured a maniac sitting to my left. He raised every pot, and was aggressive into the turn, but he also played decently late in hands and could get away from bad situations. Since he was pre-flop raising so much, he became the pivot point. Light calling from the other players developed as a reaction. So everybodys ranges were opened up significantly. I decided that a good play would be to limp any two cards, let him raise, and take the flop with 3-4 players. Since he was the pivot, the flop would usually be checked, and I would get a crack at the pot before he could c-bet since I was on his right. This is almost exactly the scenario that developed over and over again. To make it extra fun, I decided to play my hand blind, since the strategy does not require cards. I would make a pot sized flop bet and the maniac routinely laid down the hand (he viewed me as tight, which I was, since I was folding a lot in anticipation of his frequent raising). And since the ranges were opened up, the other players didn't have much and folded to my apparently strong move.

I did this about once an hour and got away with it 5 times. It did not work once when someone woke up with a real hand, but the profit from this play was fantastic.

The important thing here is not my strategy, but that you have to figure out how to design a bluffing strategy for your given table and dynamics. If you do that well, you will not be crying about downswings, because you will not have them. Bluffing well does not depend on luck, it depends on your talent and ability to work hard observing and designing.

Try it. Your downswing will end this week.

oh live players, I envy your total ignorance of variance.

OP: I'm in the middle of a 22 BI downswing now, I feel your pain. Last 8 live sessions have been losing sessions, anything from 1 to 5 BI, depending on the night.

In fact, the last sessions i went 9 entire hours straight and didn't get anything better than a flopped trips once. Everything else was TPGK or worse.

I don't have any answers, other than considering quitting poker altogether. I've only been able to play because my bankroll was built from wins from last year. Now that my entire bankroll is gone, i'm now using my "own" money, and I don't make enough money in my real life job to sustain .25/.50 poker. So, I may just quit altogether if I can't win.

GL tho, hope you make it out alive.

Variance, schmariance. If you know how to play well in live games, runs of bad cards will not prevent you from logging wins. They might slow you down a bit, but they will not stop you. Online it may be a different story, but live games give you so many potential edges besides "the cards" and "the math". Of course you have to be good enough to discover and exploit those opportunities. Not everyone has the talent or work ethic to do that.

oh online players, i envy your total ignorance of live-poker skills and your unilateral thinking.

+1

Good call. Save the hookers and blow for the upswings.

OP- the worst thing you can do is to go to the table every day thinking about the huge downswing you are on and how far off you are from the peak of your bankroll. Reset your mind before each session, and hopefully the downswing will end soon. Best of luck to you!