Hi all,

I just finished a session where I was up $100 and kept playing only to lose it all (aces cracked by queens on a queen-high flop).This is one of many sessions where I’ve been up and ended up losing. I’m still new to 1/2 live and was wondering if more experienced players had advice on quitting. Should a new player like me just end a session as soon as he’s up a certain amount? What if it is a good (soft) table?

My sessions tend to run between 10 and 16 hours long, which may be part of the problem. (Today’s was just 4 hours because as soon as I lost the aces versus queens hand I had to leave to pick a friend up for dinner.)

Thanks for your advice.

DT

I wouldn’t use this as reasoning for leaving when you’re up money. Getting your aces cracked by queens is just part of everyday variance. If you’re fairly new to live play I would suggest to not have 10-16 hour sessions unless you know you’re playing your A-game throughout the entire session. What you could do though, if you’re always worried about losing your stack when you’re up, is start doing some timed sessions where you leave at said time whether you’re up or down

Quitting just because your up a certain amount is bad. Quitting because you play badly when you get deep is something you have to overcome but it is a decent reason to quit a particular session. Is there some particular problem you run into when you are ahead?

10+ hours is too long for a single session without a break in there someplace. Playing long sessions is a skill itself and as a new player you should break it up with a meal and a rest in the middle somewhere.

Wrote out a big reply and my page refreshed before I got to post!
Basic idea is that - you sound somewhat focused on being up or down x amount of dollars however you should be focusing more on both table conditions and your own mindspace.
Factors such as; the table being good, are you playing your A game, are you fatigued (this could definitely be a factor whether you know it or not), are you doing stuff like checking 'yep up 80 dollars this is going well' and then losing 100 missing a draw or two like an OESD and then being down 20 and letting that affect you.
Personally I think you should think of a few conditions like this and be critical and honest to yourself. As stated above, maybe set a time limit on yourself and stop after 6hrs, see how you feel compared to your usual 10-16 which personally I feel is more than likely too long to stay at an A level of focus.

There are no sessions in poker. There is only one life-long session for each player. Sometimes you are playing your best and sometimes you are not. There is a lot of variation in that alone, and when you add the random-ness variation (some call it luck), which only begins to even out after hundreds and hundreds of hours, your wins or losses in a 2 or 4 hour session are essentially meaningless.

My sessions range from 4-13 hours personally, usually toward the longer end of the spectrum. I find that the longer I play the better I become, the more "in the zone" I get. This is just a different thing player to player.

I've had moments during run bad where I would quit when I got up 300-400 just to "take the win." Others might say this is wrong, but confidence is super important in poker. Now I'm not sure I'd need to do it much because I've won a ton & know I'm a winning player, but for newer players I think it's good to quit while ahead sometimes.

Hah. I would say it's 50/50 whether variance evens out over a lifetime. I'll take the over.

Don't sit at a poker table for 16 hours straight, so terrible for you

I think it's ok to quit while ahead if you arent accustomed to deep stack play. I've had 600BB wins before but only because I was running hot. However if I'm neither running hot nor playing well and just managed to chip my way up 150BB or so from heavy cbetting top pair and stuff I'll just leave before I run into a trap.

Thanks to all for the responses. Re: your point about variance, I've had my fair share the last few sessions. AA v. KK AI pre, K turned a set on me. 44 v. AA, flop set of 4s otf, he rivers a set of As. Top set with JJ, KQ goes AI otf open-ended and rivers a straight. Set of 8s otf rivered by 10-7 which flopped OESFD. Black AA cracked by J-9cc on Qc-10c-7c flop. There have been good times as well, but these few hands have cost me a lot! This leaves out four or five flush over flush/straight over straight hands. Maybe I overvalue sets? Can that be a leak? Lol.

+1

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Quitting Reciprocality

"Walking away is easy. The hard part is standing up." ~Tommy Angelo

I have always had very strict policies when it comes to quitting, even when I first started playing poker. Back then I had two main quitting rules that I never broke. I would always quit if I were out of money and nobody would lend me any, and I would always quit if everybody else did.

Eventually I quit all that stuff. I quit running out of money, and I quit being the last guy to quit. Nowadays I think of quitting as a skill set unto itself, with branching subsets of skills for each type of quitting situation. There's knowing how to quit at limit games, and there's knowing how to quit at no-limit. There's knowing how to quit when you have a curfew, and when you don't. There's being able to quit when you're ahead, and when you're stuck. There's quitting when you feel good, and for when that doesn't happen, you need to know how to quit when you feel bad. There are many ways to outquit your opponents.

By one way of looking at it, I have made tens of thousands of terrible quitting decisions. Times when everything was wrong. When I was tired. And tilted. And the game was bad. But I'd play on. I'm talking situations where a panel of quitting experts would unanimously decree: "You are severely injured and you are bleeding all over the table. Quit. Quit now."

But I wouldn't. I'd take the next hand. And that'd be one bad quitting decision. After that hand, I'd have the option to quit, but no, I'd take another hand — I'd make another quitting mistake. That's two quitting mistakes in four minutes. And I had just begun to not quit.

In time, my blood started to clot, and I got a little bit better at quitting, and then a little more better, and then one day I realized that every session of cash-game poker I ever play will end on a quit, so I really should continue forever to work on getting better at quitting, and a few years later I realized that if I wanted to quit well every session, then I'd have to be sharp at the very end of every session, since that's always when the quitting happens, and a few years after that I realized that no action is an island, that everyone else's sessions always end on a quit too, and that the real reason there is money to be made by quitting well is because sometimes my opponents don't. Reciprocality.

https://www.pokernews.com/strategy/t...oker-25979.htm

"You cannot win all the money in a poker room in one night but you can lose your whole bankroll." - Me

^^^ this is awesome!

I don't think it does either (if that's what you meant).

For a lower limit and/or newer player, I think reducing variance should be a goal. Sure, you might have positive variance, but either kind can play with your mind.

If quitting up makes you happy, and being up and then losing it makes you unhappy, that's a pretty good reason to quit when ahead.

There are also bankroll considerations, if you have bankroll considerations. i.e. if this is not small, easily replenished money for you. The bigger a % of your bankroll you have on the table, the better the game needs to be for you to stay.

And it's not like a good 1/2 game is a once in a lifetime opportunity. There are some outstanding cases. I've played with a rich guy who wouldn't check his cards till the river on most hands, and a drunk guy who would truthfully announce his holdings preflop. Barring stuff like that, there will be another good game very soon.

Yes, you should ALWAYS quit when you're ahead.

No, you should quit BECAUSE you're ahead.

Quitting when you're ahead means you're winning. Quitting because you're ahead means you're playing scared.

Yes, it is a very underrated skill. Possibly the best skill. As TA so eloquently put it above.

As a rec player, I simply play to my allotted time, for the most part. And I'd mostly suggest simply doing that.

However, if you're looking for reasons to leave:

- when you're feeling tired and/or might not be on your game
- the game isn't very good
- you're now deepstacked and you are sitting at a deepstacked table and you're not necessarily comfortable deepstacked in this lineup (or with deepstack in general); I'd typically try to table change to a shorter stacked / easier table if I wanted to extend my session in this case

GcluelessquittingnoobG

Reading all this, I'm sort of glad that in my country poker hours only run between 8 and 2.45 PM in the casinos. So my sessions are nearly always 6hrs and 45m long.

On occasion I play cashgames during a tournament series or in the only casino in the country where play starts at 1.30 on the weekend. On those days I always have trouble quitting. Somehow I feel urged to take advantage of the extra time I'm given, but still, after 7 or 8 hours I should probably quit no matter what, since by then I'm mostly more tired than I want to be.

In my opinion its a clear mental leak/mental issue to quit simply because youre being up in that particular game. Any good steady long term winning player should focus on their long term winrate pr hour, not let shortterm day to day variance dictate when youre quitting a game or not.

Legit reasons to quit a game like your uncomfortable playing deep against 2 good players to your left, youre feeling tired and recognizing that youre not on your A-game anymore- or that you dont feel like there is good value in the game anymore is another ballpark, and should not be mistaken with the mental leak of quitting just because youre winning money.

Well, effective stacks relative to your BR should absolutely be a factor. I don't know if you can translate the Kelly criterion directly to poker. If you can, I am too dumb to do it. But the general idea still applies. If your BR just went from $4,000 to $4,600 and you have $800 in play, there's a lot of reason to lock it up.

As far as this being a leak, it really depends on your situation. There are too many factors to list. Like, what are you going to do after you stop playing? Maybe you're going to do some freelance work, or study poker.

If you are uncomfortable playing deep and/or stressed out by giving back winnings, maybe you should book the win two out of three times, then continue playing the third time.

I agree that, in a vacuum, playing deeper and with a winning image should improve your hourly if you are good playing deep, don't have winner's tilt and are just as, or more, focused at this stage. But that is just one of many possible circumstances.

The, "it's all just one long session" maxim is a big oversimplification.

Youre mixing apples and oranges. Quitting the game in your bankroll example is exactly that: a bankroll issue. Youre quitting because you have too big percentage of your bankroll in play on the table. That is not the mental issue i was talking about in my last post.

Many players quit when they are up just too make themself feel good at that particular day and get a winning session in the books. That is a mental issue. If you quit because youre scared of losing your winnings back in any hand or get sucked out on (baring youre playing close to your A-game) it is a mental issue. If you cant play your A-game because youre scared of losing your winnings, that is another mental issue. These things have to be dealt with separetely of course, because it limits how you will perform as a pokerplayer- and it often can/will cap your winrate longterm.

And regarding the playing deep issue: if you never play deep, how are you gonna be a better deepstackplayer? At some point you simply got to start getting experience (even if youre uncomfortable), its the only way of developing your skills with deeper stacks.

^^ well said.

Reasons for me to quit a game:

-the game got significantly worse or -EV to play in
-there is a better game that i can go to
-I am tired/hungry/unmotivated/otherwise disposed
-I am on tilt
-the casino closes

To be fair, i sometimes keep playing even if some (or all) of the first 4 reasons happen .

Well there is plenty of good advice from all already.

From what I learned being up or down should not be a reason to consider quitting if you are well rolled for the game. If you are serious about poker you should not think in terms of sessions, instead you should consider poker your job which pays an hourly rate and is up to you to figure out how many hours you need to work per day or per week or per month.

Its a mistake which can hurt to think that you could have walked away before lets say you where dealt Aces and lost to Queens. This mindset is without noticing tilting you and you could be playing your B game for the rest of the session.

If the game is good and you are running good and you are playing your A game, then do not walk away just because you are up never.

I remember this stage of my bankroll. $4k pretty much lowers risk of ruin to 5% for a $15 pr hr 1/2NL long-term winner & in that session, where I now have a roll of $4.6K and only $200 in play, I'd probably lock it up & take my wife to dinner or study the game, but I live close to casino.

IMO, I don't think a player should play deep-stack poker until his bankroll is big enough that he can just shrug off the loss if he gets felted. I only play my A game when I'm thinking of the chips as nothing but tools. I have a lot of respect for those who grind for a living.