Title is self explanatory. Other than just playing hundreds (thousands?) of hours to get the experience, how can I tell if I am playing badly or just getting unlucky?

I am a casual rec player who wants to get better (and likes the concept of having a hobby that could theoretically have a net positive cash flow, unlike most hobbies). I just has my worst session (in a ridiculously low sample size) since I started playing live this year. I know some of the mistakes I made, and I will try to correct them, but I have a hard time discerning if the performance at the most recent game was primarily due to those mistakes or just not getting cards?

And yes, I have seen guys like TheTrooper (vlogger in LVL) who are clearly overall winning players have huge downswings, so clearly luck can have a huge impact in short term wins, but I don't have the established history of success to clearly state that it is based on luck.

Would you make the same decisions again given the same information you had at the time you made them?

That's the main difference. Of course, bad players would say they would make the same decisions even if they were wrong to begin with, so you need at least enough experience to be able to recognize bad play. There's no way around it.

document some of your big hands and post them in llsnl

if you are playing them wrong you will find out very quickly

You should just assume it's play bad until you get some more experience

You should assume you're playing bad even when you're winning. There is always room to improve

You should have an idea of odds and stuff, and you should adjust your play based on your opponents. Playbad is making the wrong adjustments to opponents or putting the money in with bad odds. Runbad is when you had the odds in your favor or the maniac gets lucky.

First things first: you're in the wrong forum.

Second: Go to the Holdem forum that best fits the game/stakes that you play and post up some key hands to be analyzed. Try to remember ALL your hands from 1 session(remember your position, what your cards were, how much you bet...everything). And, hopefully you'll receive solid/informative feedback.

Are you getting the proper odds when you draw for certain hands? (Do you understand what that entails?) Are your bet sizes consistent? Do you miss bets? Are you playing too loose and from the wrong positions? We need to see hand histories(but not in B&M). I'd be able to tell if your game was off, WAY off, or if you were actually just running bad. But, if you need to ask? Then you're probably doing a lot of things here and there quite wrong. Or, not as ideal as it could be.

^^^This

As a newbie, you are making multiple mistakes, often in the same hand. People often focus when their stack is at stake without looking at the smaller hands that are killing them. Just some of the silent killers that many players don't notice include:

1. Completing the SB pf. The rational is "it's just a buck."
2. Limping in with an implied odds hand when the goal is to either hit big or fold. "It's just a couple of bucks and if I hit, I'll win big."
3. Bet sizing such that only a better hand can call. "Such a cooler, I 4bet my KK and every time when they call, they have AA."
4. Peel a card on the flop. "I can't fold TP to a raise on the flop. I'll see if he bets on the turn, then fold."

Everyone who has responded so far has given good advice. What is your main game? Is it NLHE?

The only way to know whether you're playing well versus running bad is gathering and analyzing data.

You say your making mistakes! Well of course you are. Those of us that have been playing for years are still making mistakes. Often the winning player is the one who makes the fewest mistakes. Experience is going to help. Post some hands in 2+2 and let the people here do their thing. Read books and if you can join a discussion group. Above all be patient and honest with yourself. You may lose a hand because of bad luck, but that still doesn't mean you didn't make some mistakes. Welcome to poker. It can be a wild ride. Hope you learn to love the game like I do.

I know some of my mistakes. I know that when I am card dead I loosen up more than I should. Last session I found myself being out of position a lot with things like AQo, then cbetting a missed flop and check folding missed turns.

I also didn't act correctly on reads that I made and failed to appropriately engage in second level thinking. 1/2 Example from last session: OMC limps earlyish and calls my 12 dollar bet from the CO. Flop AKT. OMC check calls. Turn A. OMC leads out. What do we think he has? In this hand pretty much anything we think he could have beat what I was actually holding at the time, but I still got fixated on my hand and overplayed it for a big loss.

I do recognize some of my mistakes that I am making.

You had what, queens? KQ?

Yeah KQ. You can already imagine what faulty logic was going through my head, I'm sure.

This should have been posted in the LLSNL forum. I posted it here by accident, sorry. I can't move it.

Unforch, there is no other way. You're just gonna have to get in there and play. There is no better teacher than experience, but you can cut lots of time off that learning curve by focusing on the game whether you're in a pot, or sitting on the sidelines. The latter is the best time since you have no interest in the pot being played.

As for knowing whether it's runbad or playbad, there's the Sklansky Rule:

Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents' cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played if you could see all their cards, they lose.

Some mistakes are unavoidable. You have a pair of kings, and open-raise only to get repopped by someone behind you with aces and then stack off: that would be a mistake. You would fold kings for the BB if you knew someone behind you had aces.

You also need to consider the magnitude of the mistake. If the player who felted you with pocket aces had a history of rammin' and jammin' with just about anything, well, he just happened to get lucky.

OTOH, what if it was a known nit who you haven't ever seen 3! with anything? What if OMC's last 3! was back three months ago, and that time he showed down aces? Then your mistake was a big one, and avoidable. You have been paying attention, haven't you? This is why I don't mind running card dead. Yeah, it's no fun throwing in one trashy hand after another, orbit after orbit. You need to look upon it as a blessing in disguise: it's an opportunity to observe, analyse, and get a line on their play for when you finally pick up a real hand.

You also need to consider if the player's style changes over time. Just because you saw your vill come way over the top and felt a player with pocket queens when he flopped a Full to his ( 9-8-off ) an hour ago doesn't mean he's doing it again when it's you who have the pocket queens. Maybe he shifted gears deliberately after creating a first impression of utterly lag-tard play. Maybe he's just a clueless luck box who's amassed a helluva stack and is now determined to keep it, and has nitted up. This time, throw those queens away when he puts you to a stake decision: he has aces or kings this time, and your hand is no good. These are considerations you need to pay attention to while you're playing, and always paying attention and not letting your game slip into cruise control mode. (Yeah, it's harder than it sounds.)

You're running bad when you're getting the money in while ahead, and they're sucking out after they call. You're playing bad when it's you who's getting it in and discovering you never stood a chance, or you're winning by luck boxing it with improbable river hits.

Were you steaming? This is a problem that requires constant attention, and it's something that some real pro's haven't mastered. I was there the night Puggy Pearson got himself banned from the poker room at the Bellagio. I have never seen such hideous 7-Stud play, not even in those tiny $1.00 -- $3.00 7-Stud games. Another one is Phil Hellmuth -- he can't take a beat either. And, no, it isn't just an act for entertainment value on Poker After Dark or High Stakes Poker. He plays like that even when there isn't a camera anywhere within a radius of a mile. They would have done much better if they could keep their tilt under control.

Runbad also does things to your head, and that's slow motion tilt. Going into a game with the thought: "They're gonna get me again", is a sure fire disaster and a self fulfilling prophecy. During runbad, you need to nit up your game. Your table image is shot, the other players think you're "unlucky", and you won't be able to push them around like you used to. Steal less, play much fewer speculative hands, and play more Premiums. Don't let your game drift off course. If some yutz binks a Full and shoots down your flopped straight again, oh well... Remind yourself you got the money in good. If you're felted, then that's not a disaster. If you called off your entire stack even though you strongly suspected you were beat, that's the disaster.

Vera Variance is Lady Luck's nastier, uglier sister. Runbad happens, and it can last a helluvalot longer than you'd think possible. I've just come off a stretch of bad road that lasted almost two years. Yeah, I saw it all: Big Slicks that whiffed over and over, again and again, and had to be thrown away after ugly flops, nut hands that got cracked by one and two outters, taking my vill to the felt with pocket aces v. his pocket kings and then lose when a runner, runner flush draw comes in, juicy draws that rolled over and died, card dead for entire sessions. You just have to play through it and wait until Vera decides you're no fun to pick on and goes to find someone else to torment.

I think if you're asking this question you're almost certainly not a winning player. Also, even if you study enough to get to that point, you will start off as a small winner in the long run. When your winrate is low, your swings will be much bigger, and it could take a bigger sample size to discover that you're a winner.

If you understand the game well enough, you should be able to have at least some idea when you watch your opponents. If they are clearly worse than you and constantly making mistakes that you wouldn't make, that's a great sign. If you feel like you're constantly around the 5th best player at the table, then I'd expect you to be a loser.

I think you should at least be way better than your opponents when it comes to PF play. If you can't even get that right, then how are you going to do well postflop if you're an inexperienced player?

Being OOP with AQo is actually fine if you're the PF raiser. And so is cbetting (sometimes) and check/folding the turn. I wonder if you're just being results oriented.