Why do you guys play such short sessions? Am I the only degen who can't imagine playing less than 10 hour sessions. What's the point of playing 3-4 hours? Stacks never get deep, you don't get a chance to stack the deep fish who luckboxed his way into 400BBs and make the real money.

90% of my sessions are 10-18 hours

How many sessions have you played?

i do 3-4 hours because i work full-time and go after work. i need to sleep once in a while.

add another -$200, +$121 and -$281 this week. hopefully, things turn around tonight.

the good news is, i would be up another $418 if we were dealing in sklansky bucks.

I played a 9hr session two nights ago, but the table was great. At the end, I was clearly fatigued.

Much rather play two 4hr sessions than one 8hr on any given day. Of course, if there's some deep fish, I'll hang around if I'm also deep.

A 10+hr session makes it hard to play optimal the next day. I'm very aware of mental fatigue accumulating; got to watch out for tilt-creep.

im in the middle of some runbad of biblical proportions. finished the month +365 despite one +5k session (which turned out to be my only winning session out of 10 sessions this month)

My worst streak is 7 losing sessions. You playing ok? Nothing wrong with taking a break if it's niggling you. Treat it like a sports injury.

^ I don't like this word "niggling"

Preferred synonym? Or at least explain why you don't like the word. I'm hoping your response will shed some light on diskoteque's "streak".

I just play until I win an amount I am happy with. I have super poker A.D.D. and get bored easily and when I get bored I don't play as well. Also, I think it's best for my mindset to maintain a good work/life balance and since I have a 75mile commute to the casino, it can be quite a grind to play long sessions.

Tonight I played 3.5hrs and made around $600 at 2/5. It's nothing to brag about but I was happy with it and the tables looked to be getting more difficult and I was a bit tired so I left. I do play long sessions when I am down (grind to break even) but that just about the only time. The major negative I could see with this strategy is that I could encounter some variance and potentially have a losing month. I had a bad run this month but have turned it around and am happy with this month's numbers overall. Last month I avg'ed $100/hr at 2/5 (and a bit of 1/2) over 85hrs which is clearly a sick run of cards (especially since I don't even buy in full stack). If I had played twice as long per session do I think my results would be twice as good? No. I'm sure I could have increased my earnings but my monthly total for 2/5 was better than I could have dreamed of when I chose poker in the first place.

i honestly think i'm playing fine. i'm certain that i've run horribly in virtually every big pot since the streak started. something like $4000 of the $5000 was probably lost flopped set over set, preflop KK vs AA, etc. stuff like that. my rungood always seems to come vs the shortstacks.

just really sucks. i'm probably going to take a break until july just so i can salvage a winning month and start the new month on a positive note.

I took a two-week break at the beginning of June for similar reasons. Since returning, I've played 32hrs for a profit of $4310, with only 2 small losses, so feels like I made a good decision. A bit of positive variance doesn't hurt, either

A good thing I like to do is when I'm running bad I write down every hand I win/lose that's over 100bb or you can set whatever threshold you want.

Then I can go back later and calculate my equity in all of those hands and figure out what my EV was to some extent for the day. It's really helped me get back on track because I can see that even when I make mistakes I usually have SOME equity, and I can see that sessions where I get killed sometimes I'm actually +EV by a lot.

Case in point - I made a terrible, terrible overplay with a draw and lost ~160bb at 2/5. It turned out that I actually had 32% equity, so the stupid play actually only cost me about $45bb or whatever $230 is. It really made me feel better, and I felt dumb that 2 bad $100 calls I did later in the session actually cost me as much as that ridiculous error.

I read The Mental Game of Poker cover to cover several times, and I highly recommend it to everyone b/c it really helps.

One of the best concepts is that you can never play your A game 100%. Everyone has an A, B, and C game by definition. You can only play your top 20% game 20% of the time by definition. The difference between me and Phil Ivey is Phil Ivey's worst possible Z game would destroy my best possible A++++ game.

So instead of getting mad at myself when I play my B or C game, I try to improve my C game so I do less stupid things and follow more of the concepts that I'm trying to learn.

But if you're playing your C game and you realize you can't fix it at the table, and it's a BAAAD C game like your C- game, there's nothing wrong with just cutting the session short and leaving. I try to nit it up and power through it if I can though, because you can learn a lot when you recognize the mistakes you make when you're not on.

Yeah, I learnt how to do this, after reading the Mental Game too. Learning how to move from C back to B makes you more tilt resilient in the long run. It's great when you feel that you're not worried too much by the prospect of a bad streak or bad session and just focus on one hand at a time. Just admitting that you made a mistake---and we all do make them at times---is often enough to get you back on track.

My average session is 4 hrs. Stacks never get deep? I guess you don't play at parx. I tend to keep my sessions around 4 hrs because I'm aware that my game begins to deteriorate around that time. One bad decision can negate 100 good ones. I've had nights where I still feel sharp and I've played longer, but that's not the norm.

More hours = more money.

Unless you have a bad b or c game then you should be treating poker like a job and put in 8 hour sessions at least with breaks of course.

I would rather play the last half of my session on my b game with a %50 win rate than not play at all. You should be pushing yourself to play long sessions because it also gives you time to figure out players.

I'm not convinced you can concentrate fully for 8 hours---it's tough going and the mental fatigue can be taxing.

Also, where I play, you can't break for more than 10 minutes. If you do, they remove your stack from the table.

Even if you're making money from your B or C game, you're not making nearly as much as from your A game, unless the table is super fishy. Sometimes you're just better to go home, do some hand analysis, and rest up.

4.5 hours is the best time to play for, for me. From my stats I have a much higher win rate at this time then longer times.

You can never play your A game 100% of the time. By definition it's the top 33% of your play, so 2/3 of the time you're not playing it.

If 5 hours is the longest you can play without playing bad, that's another story. However, you could also work on your mental strength, take breaks, etc to prolong yoru sessions.

Your B-game is your average game by definition. If you're not comfortable playing your B-game you need to either move down in limits or improve yourself, because 66% of the time you're losing money.

This is not true at all, you really think sports stars only play there A game 33% of the time, such an arbitrary number you have chosen. If you play for a maximum of 3-4 hours every day with a 15min break in b/w, with adequate nutrition, sleep, mental health, there is no reason why you should not be able to play your A game for 80%+ days.

However, if you are playing for an average of 8 hours plus, then your statements in my personal experience is correct. I.e half the time you will not be playing at your A game.

It depends on what you want to call your "A" game. I prefer the Jared Tendler/Mental Game of Poker definition which is basically your top 1/3 is your A game and your bottom 1/3 is your C game.

The problem with saying "just play your A game 100% of the time" is that it's not going to happen, and if you have that attitude there's no reason to ever work on improving your C game.

It's like saying the way to improve your mistakes at poker is just to not make any mistakes period and if we're rested enough we won't.

All you're doing is unnecessarily cutting your sessions short to an arbitrary 3-4 hours instead of improving your C game and improving your concentration/tilt control so you can do longer sessions IMO.

This makes no sense. Assuming Jared's reference of top 1/3 is correct, it is still based off an arbitrary number.

For example, 1/3 of 9 hours is 3 hours, so if you maintain an average of 3-hour session, according to the information quoted, you are playing 100% A-game. Naturally if that arbitrary number is 5 hours, then your ability to maintain A game will likely deteriorate after 1 hour 40 minutes or so.

I might have to go back and read the mental game again, but gathered from what you posted, you are still better off trying to maintain A game at shorter sessions than somehow improve your C game.

I think it really depends on the level of ability of each player for your statement to take hold.

Break-even/barely winning player at 1bb/hr could benefit much more by simply improving his win rate to 2 - 3bb than to play more hours, and in fact, he could actually play less hours and make more money.

On the opposite spectrum, 10bb/hr winner do need to improve B and C game with longer sessions in order to make more money.

You can't play your top 33% of the game 66% of the time. It's not possible. That's the point.

One of the reasons people fail to improve is that they assume that instead of working on their game and correcting the failings of their C and B games, they should just "not make mistakes."

If you can just play your "A" game 100% of the time there is literally no reason to ever improve your C game or really ever improve at all, because you can crush any game by simply playing 3 hour sessions and not playing bad.

I would also argue that it's not possible for any player, not even the best in the world, to play their absolute best possible game for the first 2 hours of every session they've ever played since they started playing poker.