Playing your A-game

I haven't been playing my A-game in my challenge lately. I think i dropped about 3 buyins which could have been avoided. Playing these low stakes can be very frustrating as you get sucked out a lot and you lose hands because your opponents play badly. However, this should never affect how you play and you should always try and play your A-game. Being able to do so, is one of the key attributes of a good poker player.
Normally i'm not easily affected by bad beats and periods of cold cards (which cost me a lot of effort) but somehow i haven't been playing very well the last 2 days.

At these low stakes people tend to play very loose passive. Calling you down with a lot of hands, which means to be able to win you need to make hands. But when you get cold cards like i did, it becomes very difficult to win some decent money against these opponents even though i consider myself a far superior player. Your main edge at these lvls is your hand selection and post-flop play, but once you get outflopped all the time and you can't get any action on the few hands you do hit, you can get frustrated and that's what happened to me. BUT, you should NEVER allow that and my punishment is that i have to play this lvl a bit longer.

Some tips on playing your A-game:

-don't play when you're tired
-don't play when you're drunk ( obviously :P )
-don't play with scared money
-don't play when you are tilted
-don't play when you feel you're playing badly, which can be hard to admit sometimes
-don't play for making money or to maintain a certain winrate. Just play the best poker you possibly can and see what money or winrate it brings after.

Wish me luck and the best of luck to all of you.