Just flopped 3 different sets. Got all 3 in on the flop. Lost all 3 hands for almost 4 bi. Last one a fish went runner/ gut shot runner for a straight. Time to call it a day before I break something....

Calling it a day (for the session) when you feel your attention wandering to FB or 2+2.

Or when tilted - Know what tilts you and take a break as soon as it occurs.

Also a stoploss method (say 2.5BI take a small break, 4BI quit for a lot longer, maybe the day) maybe useful if loosing a BI or two to coolers really gets on your t*ts...

Ultimately you want to make it so you rarely need to quit, but immediately do when it does happen.

Quitting is better than not if you tilt when you lose 2.5 or 4bis, but that can really hurt your profitability as a player too.

at around 3:50pm

This deserves more love.

ABOUT TREE FIDDY

I think even more important than quitting is taking breaks after you take a beat. Take a break and relax and try to get your mindset right. If you just quit you will never address the core issue, and for someone like me that plays full time, I need to put in a minimum number of hours of playtime (otherwise variance will kill you). I do put a stop limit of $1500 (2/5 NL) and if I lose that much then I'm done. One time I lost that much in an hr and a half, but it's fairly rare that I do lose that much and it's normally mostly related to playing bad. A few times I have been down to my last $100 and have grinded it back over $1000.

That being said, sometimes I'm playing bad and I'm still winning. If that's the case, I will be thankful that I'm up and I will leave. As an example, I've left after just 1 hr being up $300. $300 doesn't sound like much for 2/5, but that's $30/hr over a 10hr day which isn't too shabby. Another reason I will leave that quickly is if my edge on the tables isn't that great (or I don't like where I'm positioned on the table). If I'm just playing bad and I count my lucky stars that I made a profit for the day and will go home for a lot of relaxation so that I can come back renewed and focused the next day.

Anything you can do to maintain a healthy mindset will pay dividends in your poker game.

lol so you've never lost a 200-300bb stack then lost some hands before and after that?

Never give up, go full tilt.

TDS offers some very good advice there especially walking away after a bad beat rather than ending the session. Well worth a second read.

Not sure if this was directed at me, but my point was simply that I only bring $1500 to the casino, so it is impossible for me to lose more than that. Sure, I could buy in for $500 and build my stack to $2k then lose it all and rebuy (albeit, I'll be honest, if I'm up 3 buy-ins I've probably already put those profits in my pocket as a way to reduce variance). However, if I'm in the game for $1500, and lose my last $, then I'm done.

I'll back up TDS here as I use that exact approach myself and it works very well. I generally have 2 BI's with me, if I lose those I am done for the day. It has led to a historical record with very low variance.

I think a hidden reason a stop loss is a good idea is that we often over-rate our own ability in a game. If we drop 2 BI's we may think the game is great and we have just been sucked out on while missing the fact that yes there is a whale on the table but the 3 guys to our left are strong players who are also targeting us. We miss this hard to detect but vital piece of information as we think there is no way someone can be targeting us - they surely must also just be targeting the whale. So we don't lose big pots to them, we just bleed a stream of small pots, again hard to detect as our focus is elsewhere. A stop loss gets us out of this bad situation without having to rely on our conscious mind detecting we are the sucker (quite often a hard thing to accept and we will tell ourselves anything to avoid the hard truth - it is much easier to pick up when performing a post-mortem on the session when we have less emotional attachment).

On the other hand, I personally don't have a cap on how long I play when winning. If the game is good I will keep playing until I can feel my decisions starting to slip. That takes, I would dare say, thousands of hours at the tables to detect accurately. Starting out one would be better served by playing for a fixed period, once comfortable extend by 1 hour. Rinse and repeat until you can do a solid 8 - 12 hour session with only slight degradation in performance (which will happen, even the very top players can be seen on TV sometimes making a total mess of a play after a very long session).

I'm not a huge proponent of a rigid stop loss, especially a small one. That said Ivey does it so...

The games I play sometimes get really deep though so 3bis is tiny for me but not for a game you play much nittier in.