Non-rec players can do the same thing.

To some extent. But if you're making your living off playing poker you *need* to get volume in. So unless your market sufficiently large to always have a "good" game to (try to) hop into you're going to get stuck grinding hours in worse games.

Yeah the answer to that is yes but not really

I disagree. You can play at times and places where the games are usually good but as a rec player you can decide to only play when you WANT to play. As a full time player there's gonna be times (and lots of them imo) when you don't really want to play, but you need to get volume. And trust me, it's hard to play your A game when you really don't want to be there.

Hmm, idk what you guys are talking about but I consider making $$$ a huge incentive to go play, I don't need a family to create that incentive, my financial stability and future is enough incentive.

I can't remember the last time I've went out with friends on a Friday night. I still get invited all the time, but it's like "well, it's 'costing' me ~500-1000 on average plus however much I spend...." and it's incredibly hard to justify forgoing that opportunity cost.

Context is important though. If you aren't a very strong player then the impact of running terrible is going to be greatly magnified and can apparently even result in losing 19 out of 20 sessions.

troll on playa

Been checking out Bravo lately for Vegas rooms. Seems like you can get in a $2-5 game pretty easy lat 6:00 AM especially on the weekends. Not sure about selection at $5-10 and above. When I was playing a lot I would regularly get up very early on the weekends and play. Tables had stuck players trying to get even very often. Frequently tables were a little short. As long as the room cuts you a brake on the rake when table is short not a bad way to go. Play at 6:00 AM and quit in the early afternoon after getting the hours in then have the rest of the day to do whatever.

I used to do this on Sunday mornings at my regular card room. +++++EV, no doubt.

I'm a nit so I care about these things

do you guys put high hand $winnings in your records?

Yeah, I put small promos in, on the "I paid the promo drop, and counted that as part of my expenses, so the rebate should count." I've never hit a BBJ, but I probably wouldn't put that in, just as it would skew the results so much as to be meaningless.

I do in a category separate from regular hourly.

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I like your thinking. Although, the optimal time is even earlier in the day. In general the best time to show up to a busy 24hr poker room is sometime after midnight, perhaps after 2am depending on the location and day of the week. If you do that then you will spend many more hours in the conditions that you described playing with players that are stuck, tired, and potentially drunk.

As someone who has played way too many overnight sessions and used to do it as a standard approach, i will say that the early morning hours come with a big caveat.

People by 5am are usually so tired, so out of it, that it slows the game down significantly. There are people nodding off, there are people nursing 60bb stacks, its just weird. The game has *usually* died at this point, though yes everyone is still on tilt and everyone is playing poorly.

The golden hours of poker are 11pm-2am imo.

That said, its really, really bad for your health. Look up articles on people who work the night shift. Its not worth it. At all.

+1

Im sure all you 20 somethings think you're bulletproof just like I did in my 20s, but look around the poker room. There are 40 year old guys that look 62 and there are 62 year old guys that look 45. Which do you want to be?

It's definitely a double edged sword as many times you will have players just trying to nut peddle to get back to even. One of the reasons I like showing up to a casino in the early AM is the convenience. I generally get a parking spot right in the front, walk in and am immediately seated, sometimes with a choice of multiple tables. The thing is if you wait until 6am there is no guarantee you will get a seat. The better the game, the less likely there will be a seat available too. So you could be waiting 2 to 4 hours for a new table to open which will be filled with a bunch of OMCs while the original table has gigantic chip stacks and massive multiway pots every hand.

I can't really comment on the health implications but from a lifestyle perspective playing late at night definitely sucks.

I'm 39 but everyone thinks i'm like 25. I don't think playing weird hours has affected that one bit. Anyways a couple weeks ago I played with a guy that looked over 90 (perhaps he was in his 80s) and he had been playing 3 days straight lol. On the one hand, that can't be healthy whatsoever. On the other hand, he seemed to be having a lot of fun.

Everyone's biological clock is different. People have different hours of night when they fall asleep naturally. Most people fall asleep between 11pm-1am, but a good chunk has a natural sleep time much later than that.

It can be environmental too. Your body produces melatonin and seratonin and a couple of other things based on light exposure and that influences your biological clock. So if you're running a weird schedule you need to manage that and make sure that you've got an actual *dark* place to sleep and whatnot.


My experience with late games is that once the booze stops flowing, you've got about and hour and a half of decent conditions before it's better to just go home. All the casinos around here have last call somewhere in the 1:30a range and by 3a or so the game dries up noticeably.

We have 'charity poker rooms' in MI, where the room closes at 2am and the last hand is somewhere between 1:30 and 1:45. The last hour or so before that is the craziest part of the night as people go into pure gamble mode to get un-stuck, sometimes straddling $100 or shipping blind. It's insane.


Obviously places with 24/7 alcohol have a different dynamic too.

The game dynamics change for sure as you might there might not be any splashy drunks but fact is at 3am the vast majority of players are tired and are at best playing their C game and are making terrible decisions left and right. This might not be as apparent to someone that has been grinding all night but I assure you this is the case. Of course, if you are someone that works a 9 to 5 job then more than likely you will be one of the players not playing their A game.

I won't argue that people suck playing that late. They completely are. I'm up those kinds of hours on a daily basis so it doesn't bother me.

When it gets too late the pace of the game slows down, the drunken spew stops, and I see re-buying stop. People lose a hand and just leave the table without getting replaced. So while there's a lot of too-tight mistakes, and a lot of "I'm tired and missed that there was even a flush out there" mistakes, those players lose and leave the game pretty quickly.

Maybe that's different in other rooms, but in the ones I play in the game collapses from having about 8+ tables of $1/2 at 1am to 3 tables somewhere between 3 and 4am.

yeah idk it depends on situation obviously, but in my experience (and i dont play super late nights often at all) the play becomes quite slow and nitty. even though people are stuck, it seems like a lot of them are just waiting around trying to cooler someone. kind of depressing and sad tbh

Yes I frequently play a Sunday AM session starting around 2:30/3 & it is full of people chasing, drunk or both. Great game conditions.

I keep seeing this pic come up on live low stakes. No offense, but your fifth (or sixth whatever) degree polynomial fit is bad in so many ways.

What does a linear fit or power fit plus intercept (exponential plus intercept applies) look like? R^2 is useless here FYI (it's always gonna be super low unless you fit in a quantifiable measure of run good (gl with that)). What you care about are standard errors of the estimated parameters.

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1. What does it mean that you keep seeing this chart on live low stakes. I just posted this on this thread.

2. I never claimed I am a stats guru. Excel gave me 3 options for a trendline and I used polynomial because it tells a story that makes sense given my first hand experience. To be frank, I don't even know what a polynomial trendline is.

3. What I said and I believe is that while the story this chart says is that as you hit the 9-10 hr mark your winrate decreases (FYI that's what a linear trendline shows), a. I am not sure whether it's fatigue or self-selection because you re stuck. and b. there aren't enough data points to even be sure that this story is accurate. I gather you would need a far larger sample to be reasonably sure about it, so you should take whetever you see on the no 1 picture with a huge grain of salt.

4. R squared is pretty low regardless of what type of chart I use; this was the highest score out of all the charts I used. As you say, it's probably not relevant.

Hey calm down, just being critical as I think this is interesting and can be improved. Consider a linear fit looks like:

$/hr = a*t + b

If you multiply by t, you get:

$/session = a*t^2 + b*t (or better yet fit sessions to this formula)

Taking derivative you can find the session length optimizing your session earnings, which satisfies:

0 = 2*a*t + b
or
t = -b / 2 /a (a should be negative)



Certainly, there are issues associated to variance but a large enough sample should address it. If you record how well you run on a numeric scale, you should be able to reduce noise in your sampling. Could also record how well you think you played which gives you an extra set of info. Can think of some very interesting applications for this info. Just need to be careful with measuring error of these two.


And for whatever reason, when the post shows up it's had this pic the last 30 times...no clue why.

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