Still Losing; How to Improve?

Played again today and lost $600. I've lost $2,200 over the past 8,000 hands, cutting my profit for the month down to roughly $900. Same old story - everyone's calling me down, everyone's playing back at me, I'm bricking all my draws in big pots but can't manage to build a decent sized pot for the hands where I hit, blah blah blah blah bla

I still feel like I'm mostly playing well and making good decisions, but I feel ridiculous dismissing an 11-buyin downswing over 8,000 hands as just variance. Whatever it is, it's psychologically pretty painful and I hope it turns around soon. God, I hate thinking about how hard I'm going to have to grind to win back those 11 buyins and how long it's going to take before I'm out of the hole. My total lifetime profit from 1/2 has dropped to around $400, and I'm getting perilously close to my -$600 stoploss for the stake. I've never had to move down before, and being a mere 5 buyins away from having to do so sucks a lot.

During times like this, I frequently wish I had a coach or at least a membership to CardRunners so I could try to glean some insight from proven winning players at these levels. I'm getting to the point in my poker career where a CardRunners account might conceivably be able to pay for itself - it's $400 a year and I can start to imagine the things I learn saving me at least 2 buyins over the course of a year playing 1/2. But it's not quite clear to me that I wouldn't be able to learn the same things just by reading articles and forum posts and chatting, and I'm also afraid that it would end up being like a gym membership where I've paid for it as a resource but, out of sloth, I never actually utilize it. So I'm not going to pull the trigger yet.

Another interesting and kind of funny thing preventing me from dropping four hundo on a CR membership is that I've already lost so much at the tables that $400 would represent a nontrivial hit to my bankroll. Of course, when I'm winning, I don't want to spend money on a CR membership either because I feel like I don't need it - I'm winning on my own right? Heh.

Every now and then you hear about some sick baller who joined CR as struggling small stakes players and is now making six figs crushing the games, but I'm always skeptical as to how big of a factor CR really was in the growth of players like that. I strongly suspect that anyone who is capable of making six figs playing poker would have gone on to enjoy great success even without CR.

If a CR membership is borderline-worth-it, then there's no way getting actual human coaching can possibly be worth it. Anyone good enough to give me worthwhile advice for 1/2 is good enough to beat 1/2 and is therefore good enough to charge an hourly rate way above what I can afford. I can't imagine that over the course of an hour of coaching, anyone would be able to give me enough advice to justify paying him $300 or whatever exorbitant price those guys charge to sweat you. Over the course of that hour we would be lucky to see one interesting spot and whatever advice he would give me about it would probably be worth something like 0.0000047 BB/100 in the long run and I just don't see it being worth it.

I'm definitely not satisfied with the rate at which I'm improving as a player, and obviously I'm extremely dissastisfied with my results over the past few weeks, but for now, at least in the short term, I think I'm going to stick with just reading books, reading the free CardRunners blogs, and trying to get input about difficult spots from forums and chat.