Hi

Im a professional pokerplayer and I have problems dealing with money swings. Im a huge bankroll nit. In my biggest downswing I lost only 5% of my bankroll.

20k swings are very normal at the stakes I play (10/20 live plo) but I just can't stop thinking that it's almost 1 year life expenses for me. So if I lose 10k I start playing lower stakes and grind it back. Then I continue playing my main game again. And even if I win 100k after that and then lose 10k I drop stakes again and grind that 10k back.

The problem is that Im losing ev everytime Im playing lower stakes even thought I would have very healthy bankroll to continue playing my main game. I just can't stand the idea of losing 20k, 30k, 40k or 50k. Even thought I could afford it.

Any advice ?

Not a professional poker player here so take this post with a bag of salt as an outsider's perspective.

Sounds like you're facing the typical spot where you're supposed to move down and you don't.
I'm not factoring your possible bankroll nittiness or finances in, that's a decision you made.
But if you're not comfortable losing a certain amount, you'll likely play worse since you're scared to lose or overcompensate trying to regain losses.
Not always the case but if it wasn't, you probably wouldn't be posting this.
At the very least moving down (even if only to grind a certain amount back) should make any losses more bearable.
Also you're playing PLO so I'm guessing big swings are quite common.

Basic bankroll management would suggest you set a threshold you're willing to go below before moving down, and a point where you try to move back up.
Bankroll management isn't just to keep you playing on a stake you can handle, it's mainly, as the name suggest, to manage your bankroll (factoring in luck).

Keep doing exactly what you are doing. You say you are losing ev but if losing more than 10K tilts you when you don't move down, then you will lose way more ev from tilting. You're doing it right.

My serious and prolonged downswings always include tilt, it's never just run bad. Really, I don't run bad, I only play bad.

There's some good questions you can ask yourself here:

1) What's the likely long-term view future of the games you play in? From experience, all live poker scenes all have a finite time scale.

2) What are your long term career/poker goals?

And align your mindset to the answers to these questions and not to what other players might be doing.

Sounds like you have a pretty healthy / normal view of money that most pro poker players do not!

I'm definitely no pro. I have "normal" views of money as a well-paid employee making almost 6 figures a year in a salaried job plus a sizeable investment portfolio saved up from the last decade of work that is now generating $20 - 30K per year, so I basically have an infinite bankroll for my regular 1/3 and 2/5 game (which I'm confident I'm marginally winning at, but definitely not a high bb/hr), and still losing a few BI's - an amount that represents 0.something% of my net worth and has absolutely zero effect on my life - tilts me to the extreme and I'll often need to take a break from poker and dwell on how many hours in my regular job I'd have to work to recoup that loss.

I think that's actually healthy to have a "real world" connection to money; heck, I'm already the "crazy gambler" to everyone I know as I'm capable of putting a whole paycheck on the felt, and yet I'm absurdly conservative compared to a pro player. Easy for me to maintain that connection to money because my money does come from the real world, but hard for pro poker players who have no "real world income" and that's how many pro players win $1 million and go dead broke the next year.

You might be on the very safe side with your bankroll, but I think it's fine to stay there; don't work towards riskier behaviour. It might be +EV on paper to not move down in stakes and to stomach greater swings, but -EV psychologically.