But how else will he compartmentalize that event in his memory as a winning session and use it as confirmation bias that he is a winning player?

Indeed. And many jobs have been quit and 1/2NLH cash game professional careers launched by the lure of expanding that $500/hour success from one hour a day to forty hours a week.

I would never quit a good game as long as I'm playing well. If youre worried about losing 2-3 buyins on one hand then you are playing outside of your bankroll.

A winning player looks to get as much money in as possible when they're ahead as long as it's within their bankroll. If you're up good it means that you're either running good or playing good, so it only makes sense to keep playing.

A good time to quit is when you're not playing/running well anymore. Even a single mistake can be a sign that it's time to go. I always leave as soon as I've lost back one buyin from my peak, be it on one hand or five hands. Though I try to look for the signs of a downfall before it happens. At least half of the time the signs are already there and you just need to learn to recognize them.

I make small mistakes all the time, but if I've found myself completely butchering a hand even in a 30bb pot, it's usually time to go. Be hard on yourself and be critical of your play.

Don't brush anything off as just a "brain fart", because even an innocent fart can be a sign that you're about to **** yourself.

X

This post is the nuts IMO. I was just about to attempt to type a similar post when I read this one. If you're a part time player, a recreational type, then perhaps quitting after reaching a monetary goal makes sense. If you think of yourself as a reg that has a poker bankroll and attempts to make some sort of regular income from poker.. then why in the world would you leave after doubling or tripling up early on.. you were just given a weapon to use for a 10 hour session, a bigger stack that allows you to take advantage of smaller stacks and really profit for the evening. The idea that a frequent player would have a monetary goal for a session and then quit means that this player shouldn't BE a frequent player. Over your lifetime, poker is just one long session. Certainly readers of this website should understand that.

What weapon? We're not discussing tourneys, so unless you know how much money your opponents have in their wallets with which to reload, I don't see how you're going to take advantage of anyone with your big stack. In fact, when played properly, utilizing a short stack strategy can give one an advantage over the big stacks at the table.

Certainly readers of this website should understand the concept of effective stacks.

Are you actually arguing that a larger stack in a cash game is not advantageous? It never ceases to amaze me how people on the internet will argue anything. Of course there are effective strategies that can be implemented with a short stack. No one would argue that. But if there were no advantage to having a larger stack there would not be max buy in rules in card rooms. GTF out of here with your weak arguments.

Easy examples:
Guy Laliberte at HSP. You think it is to his advantage to buy in for a million instead of $100k?
Heads-up uncapped, Ivey and you. Do you buy in for 10BB or 1000BB?

More practical: 1/2 game, 8 other players. 5 are weak, 3 play (significantly) better than you. Weak players have stack sizes between $50-$100, good player $300-$500. Would you buy in for $500?

I can see that I'm attempting to have an intelligent discussion with someone who is not exactly a candidate for Mensa.

I will now bow out of the exploration and examination of the subject of this thread in the face of your superior communication skills, sir.

Having a big stack does intimidate some of your opponents, even though it shouldn't mean nearly as much to them in a cash game. But it does. Effective stacks is a term many 1-2 rec players do not understand.

Intimidation is great, but in a 1-2 game is that really going to induce folds?

The reason for max buyins in NL games is not that larger stacks do or do not confer an advantage; but rather that unlimited buyin games bust the weaker players much faster and dry up too quickly, which is contrary to the house's interest. The introduction of capped buyins was one of the keys to the NL boom; prior to that, the games were not sustainable.
IME, larger stacks do often confer a real psychological advantage against many players, even though in theory they should not confer a real advantage in cash games. It depends on the mindset and sophistication of the other players, but it is definitely there sometimes. (Yes, even at, and perhaps especially at, lower-limit games, e.g., 1/2 and2/5.)

well i tried to follow the advice in here
and instead of booking a 3000+ session i ended up grinding 20+ hours to
be in the hole for over a grand
when the variance train hits it hits hard

Are you saying you did one 20+ hour continuous session? If so, I'm not sure you quite understood the advice.

fyp

from what i gathered people said if you got a large stack you should stay on the table and keep playing your A-game

so i did just that and and played one long session which didnt end well

i look at it like this now if i double up one day i can come back tomorrow
and essentially get a freeroll for the next day ( i can only lose what i made yesterday or win) so i think thats a better option now instead of waiting to get sucked out on

The implicit assumption was that one's A game was EV+.

Sorry I didn't make that clear.

that's true, as long as the game is still favorable and you are still actually playing your A game. I just asked because there are very few people who can actually play their A game near the end of a 20 hour session.

DC2LV is correct. You are confused. Often wrong but never in doubt, as they say.

Cardrooms cap the buy in because many players share your misperception, obviously.

Historically card rooms started capping the buy-ins (introducing "baby" no limit games) to protect their revenue.

Where no limit games died out in the 80'es/90'es because casual/bad players lost their available funds too fast to be able to continue playing, the capped games offered "consumer protection" - sustaining the games by only allowing casual players to lose one buy-in at a time.

This confused poster is actually right, but for the wrong reasons.

A strong player benefits tremendously from playing a deep stack, as it allows him/her to

a) outplay casual players with less experience or skills in deep stack play, when these already doubled/tripled up due to dumb luck, and

b) to multiply the profit from his/her skill advantage under the same set of circumstances.

Good points on both counts and my lack of nuance is attributable to trying to reply quickly to such a misinformed, adamant post. Here's my sense of how capped buyins developed.

The smart cardrooms, when they saw that the NLHE tide was unstoppable, severely capped the buyins as a compromise to protect the losing players. You still see this in Southern California, I believe.

The uninformed casinos saw that poker was getting to be a big deal, so dozens of them opened poker rooms. Their clientele want to play NLHE, so they spread that. Much of their clientele would like to buy in for 100-200 big blinds, but much of their clientele believes that anyone starting with a deeper stack has an advantage. So they cap the buy-in to attract those folks, with no real clue why they're doing it.

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Once I was playing $1-2 NLHE at the Gold Strike in Tunica, and this bad player was running pretty good. Every time he won a pot, he'd say, "Now I'm the chip leader!" Or someone else would win: "Oh oh, I'm not the chip leader any more."

Punch line:



===

To the other point: Yes, deeper stacks provide an advantage to the best player[s] at the table, but not an inherent advantage. Rather, it provides a greater scope / deeper volume -- in other words, their opponents can make $1000 mistakes instead of $75 mistakes.

Even then, I think 2+2 people tend to overrate their own ability. In particular, I think 90% of the NLHE forums would buy in deep regardless of the other stack sizes or skill level of the table. But in fact, for deep buy-ins to be good, you need at least one of:

• Skill advantage on the deep stacks. It does little good if the two deep stacks at the table are the two players equal/superior in skill to you. And of course, good players will tend to become deeper stacked more often than weak players. Obviously everyone on 2+2 is the best player at the table, any table, but for mere mortals, this is an important consideration.
• Position on the deep stacks. Almost no one talks about this, ever. It's hard to be profitable playing out of position. If the four players to your right are sitting on $50 and the four to your left have $500, why on earth would you want to buy in for $500? Do you really expect to be so much better than your left-hand opponents that you can profitably play all that money OOP, but rarely IP?

Well i followed the advice played my A-game waited and picked my spots
got coolered pretty hard i think when you are sitting on a big stack on the same table eventually people get fed up and want to felt you
for example i have someone push me preflop with A6 while i have AK
of course i call cause i know i got him out kicked (put him on ace rag)
he ends up catching a 6 on the river

and i guess people in here arent degen enough
if i buy into a game for 100$ and within an hour manage to have 1000 in front of me wouldnt it be better to just get up
and come back another day? the tables arent going anywhere
you can enjoy 500 of that and still have 5x your original buyin
so you can play another day while not gambling due to the very small chance you get sucked out on

People posting ITT make sweeping statements calling the premise "silly", as though we can all just make ourselves robots, totally impervious to results. (You might get more empathy in the Psychology forum.)

Back in the real world, there's a lot of research suggesting that most people feel more negative about losses than they feel positive about equally-large wins. I will assume that you're able to deal with some losses, so that playing poker isn't a crushing risk, but that losses hurt more for you than equivalent wins. It's perfectly OK to say, "I have a +900 for the day which makes me feel happy. Giving it back is going to make me unhappy. I'd rather leave." Just realize that it would help your EV to overcome this tendency and stay in good games.

A good compromise might be to set mine (or play some other conservative, marginally +EV strategy) for a few orbits with a stop-loss of say $400. That way, unless you run terribly bad for a single hand, you can still quit $400 winner and call it a good day. At least that way you're building up your risk tolerance.
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That said, you really seem to be overcome by results-oriented thinking. If you got it all in with AK v. A6 and lost, so what? Your narrative here suggests that you feel the need for some explanation of how you did something wrong.

This too is psychological, and understandable, but much more unhealthy than quitting games $900 winner. If you can't learn to process this disappointment on a cognitive level, you're going to start doing things like "raising so big they can't call," because you're terrified AA will lose again to 77.

One could argue here that the second you get the thought that you had better get up before you lose it back, you've stopped playing your A game and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Discuss.

I don't think we know enough about how "A", "B", "C", etc. games work to know to put themin discrete categories. They could be more like a normally distributed random variable -- when everything is going well and the stars align, my poker ability is three standard deviations above my own personal mean performance. Who knows? I'm just speculating. (But I wish there were a way to measure this.)

At any rate, I disagree that you shouldn't stay unless you're playing your A game. If your D game has an edge over the table corresponding to an hourly rate that compensates you for everything you're giving up to not play poker, then you should stay and play your D game.