[2HighIsTheNutz]

Welcome to the club, Ant8472. Your story is eerily similar to mine.. I'd even say identical! I even had the same dip before the free-fall which I passed off as bad luck as you did. One thing I did was to step back and take a break to try and mitigate the danger of "playing scared", which can make things worse. Didn't help at all during the free-fall and, like you and others, the worse part was that the money was going in with a dominate hand (70%+) virtually every time. And it's the big stack that does it to you, like you say in Point #4. Many pros advocate getting a little tighter, not looser, when you have the big stack (which is certainly how I play it) and try and pick off players when you have them beat and they're pot-committed. But on FTP the big stacks loosen up to insane levels (VPIP >50%!!!) and just destroy smaller stacks at unreal percentages. In real life, the big stack would turn into a virtual ATM playing like this, but not on FTP. There's the table bully style which is effective as well if you can play it properly, but it requires the discipline to fold when someone is way ahead (which is typically easy to figure out from a short stack). On FTP, the bullies lack this discipline, but manage to catch their miracle card nonetheless.

Many of us have talked about increasing elimination rate as being good for the site's bottom line, but the defenders always fall back to the "why chance rigging it when you can make tons of money not rigging it"? Well, 1) that makes sense if everyone in the world thinks logically and isn't greedy, which we know isn't true, and 2) apparently FTP will not release their RNG for scrunity by a 3rd party (citing trade secrets or some such) as other online sites have done. I've already described how rigging could be done while being undetectable to simple statistical analysis (e.g. merely tabulating the rate of certain cards being dealt is insufficient).

Here's a great web page ([url]http://www.pokerdonkey.com/what-breed-of-poker-donkey-are-you-up-against[/url]) that I read from time to time just to laugh during these frustrating times. All the usual suspects from FTP are listed, but I'd have to say the "Todariverus Donkey" and "Lowpairisamonsterus Donkey" are the ones that infest FTP. LOL. Enjoy. (P.S. None of the advice for dealing with them is going to help on FTP of course.)