I see no reason to quit and pull money off based on % of bankroll when you're up. If you were rolled to start the session, losing everything that you have in front of you when you're up won't change that fact. You'll still be rolled to play the game.

Now if you find that you're changing your play style when you get up big, or you're only deep against players that are better than you (fish all have $200-300, sharks have $800, you have $800), then there are game condition arguments to be made for leaving the game.

But if the table is still favorable, winning $400 is not enough reason to leave. (Or whatever number.)

Anyone???

What hourly? Play to find out.

maybe like $15 if youre really good

idk

I've just started playing live seriously (used to play online as my only source of income during college) and was actually just thinking about this exact question.

Even if you only observe your profits at random time points, you can still estimate the variance of your hourly profit based on these data using a formula I came up with. This is useful if you want to build confidence interval estimates on your hourly rate that take into account sample size considerations. You'd still need a reasonable sample size for the confidence intervals to be valid though. I don't know of an app that does this, but I'll probably just do it "manually."

Also, looking at profits every several hours in a sense inflates variance because you're looking at sums of hourly profits instead of the hourly profits themselves. I suppose if you're graphing the data and interpolating between data points, then yeah, you're hiding some variance in that case.

nobody cares?
cool

There is a camp that believes fervently that you don't leave a game no matter what as long as you are on your A-game...

but as someone who has had to grow a roll from scratch several times, my answer is more pragmatic.

There is only so much risk we should be willing to take with our rolls. I mean, the whole point is to grow our rolls and we can't grow our rolls if we aren't able to leave tables when we are up.

To that end, my advice is that when you are at $4k, the most "profit" you should be willing to risk is 20%, so when you hit $800-ish, it's time to just pack it up and leave.

It really comes down to objectives. When my bankroll is $4k, my objective is to BUILD MY ROLL. To that end, there is only so much risk I should be willing to take. Or put another way, lets say there is a table full of mega-donks at the 25/50nl table. These players are the worst players EVER, they love to overcall and gamboool. Minimum buy-in to the game is $4k. Should we take our entire $4k bankroll over to that game?

No. No we shouldn't. Because we can not afford the consequences of busting our entire roll (google "Utility of Money")

If I were to flip the argument around and look at it from a different point of view, A good question to ask would be: "What are the consequences of cashing out when 10% or 20% of our bankroll is on the table?" Is it really so bad to do so?

Below are two tables which show a 10% BRM and 20% BRM winstop respectively

Sessions.... 10% winstop... 20% winstop

......0 ...............4000...............4000
......1 ...............4400............... 4800
......2 ...............4840............... 5760
......3 ...............5324............... 6912
......4............... 5856 ............... 8294
......5 ...............6442............... 9953
......6 ...............7086............... 11944
......7 ...............7795............... 14333
......8 ...............8574............... 17199
......9 ...............9432............... 20639
......10...............10375............... 24767

So as you can see, there are worst things in the world than increasing our bankroll in 10% and 20% chunks. Obviously there will be some losing sessions in there as well... but the point really is about risk vs reward and how much risk can/should we tolerate in building our rolls.

This kinda reminds me of the tortiose vs the hare. Slow and steady wins the race. Poker is one long session, so we can take a deep breath, relax, and cash out. The game will be there tomorrow.

Another aspect is the mental aspect of cashing out repeatedly. The piece of mind that comes from making money and cashing out goes a long ways towards keeping us on our A-game for the next session. The reverse of this is having a $4k roll, being at a super juicy table, getting up to $1.2k and then getting coolered or a bad beat. The fact that we made $2k in Sklansky bucks but have no real money to show for it isn't going to help our mental state. We will be obsessing about that "suck out" all the way to our next session. Gee, wonder how good we will play with that ball of tilt inside our chest???

Anyways, when I am in "build my bankroll" mode then I adhere to the 10% - 20% rule of thumb, I will cash out once 10% of my bankroll is reached, but if I'm at a super juicy table I will double that to 20%.

Once I have a healthy bankroll, then I can loosen my BRM or even take shots at bigger games or tolerate more risk and play with even 30% of my bankroll on the table if I'm at a ridiculously juicy table that can make my entire monthly nut in one night... But until I'm well rolled, I will adhere faithfully to my 10% - 20% rule of thumb depending on the table dynamics.

Finally hit my goal of $50k in one year. Started keeping track of every-day results on 11/16/12 and made it to $50k as of 10/7/13, almost all of it at 1/2. Some stats and graph:

Total sessions - 256
Total profit - $50,368
Biggest win - $2,156 ($1/2)
Biggest loss - $1,855 (combo of $1/3 and 5/10)
Longest win streak - 25
Longest losing streak - 4
Total winning sessions - 190
Total losing sessions - 66
Win percentage - 74.2%
Average win - $196.75
1 session of 5/10, 21 sessions of 2/5, 234 sessions of 1/2

Total profit:

Congrats man that's awesome. What was max buy in for the 1/2 game? How many hours was this over? 50k to me is a really big number to hit with mainly 1/2 games (the game I play is 200 max BI) so that is really impressive.

Thanks, I'm pretty happy to have hit my goal with a month to spare. I'm pretty sure I posted my $50k goal somewhere in this thread or one of the "what's your goal for 2013" threads. Max buy-in at Red Rock is $300 which is where I play most of the time. I don't keep track of hours but my average session is around 5-6 hours. Can't really play longer than that without getting off my game and going into semi-spew mode.

Impressive work ethic! I've heard good things about the quality of games at Red Rock. Congrats.

Sick results! One glaring statistic missing though: Hours Played.

Especially impressive since isn't Red Rock often an OMC-fest?

Another excellent dgi post. I finally am realizing that to grow any sort of a roll I need to do it one buy-in at a time. Sure, I would LOVE to be the crusher with $1000+ stack at 1/2, but that guy's been playing a lot longer, has a solid bankroll, and is LAGing it up. I can't do that yet. Double up, cash out, be motivated for the "next" session.

If you're avg session is 5.5 hours, then 50k profit is $35 an hour. Wtf

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I've only recently moved up to 2/5 from 1/2 and it's depressing that my 2/5 hourly is less than some people's 1/2 hourly. I've only played 200 hours, so I know it probably is 90% variance.

Still though, just thinking of 1/2 (and 2/5!) games that juicy makes me jealous.

Alternatively, I could just suck at poker and you could be a wizard. That might also be a reason.

Thanks. I also work full time during the day, but I work from home, so it's not really work I guess. The RR games are pretty good at night.

Thanks. I don't keep track of hours, doesn't really matter to me. I just figure my average session is 4-6 hours (closer to 5-6 though) so somewhere between $33-39/hr

Daytime yes it is, I would never play in the afternoon there. The games at night are pretty good, plenty of action and fishy players to go around. There are a few solid regs, but it's still $1/2...

Sounds about right

Appreciate this post dgi, explained it pretty well. Thanks.

I remember one time I was growing my roll. My bankroll was $6k and I was playing 2/5nl.

I bought into the game $400 and very first hand I got something ridiculous like AA/KK vs 3 opponents, flopped top set and got it all-in on the flop and got 2 callers.

BOOM, I won $900-ish dollars.

Within two orbits it occurs to me this table is super juicy, villains are the worst aggros ever. Later, I limp in a multiway pot and turn the stone cold nuts, 1 villain shoves, I call and BOOM I win another $1k.

So within 1 hour I managed to win $2k and the table was still ridiculously juicy. Two of the super donks are sitting $3k deep, everyone else is around $1k deep... but I just crossed over the 20% threshold.

I'm at a dream table, people are drinking, bets in the dark, etc etc but....
30% of my bankroll is on the table. I was on the button and I immediately folded my hand without looking at it, racked up, and cashed out.

leaving that table was hard, but I knew that if I could leave that table and follow my rules, then I could make it as a pro. You see, if you can't follow your own rules then you have no chance of making it as a pro. Discipline is just as important as patience which is just as important as focus which is just as important as a hundred other intangible concepts that separate consistent winners from everyone else.


The following joke helps keep me in the right state of mind as far as all of this is concerned.

A young bull and an old bull are on a hill overlooking a field of cows. The young bull turns to the old bull and says, "Hey, I got an idea, lets run down the hill, screw a cow, and run back up the hill."

The old bull chews on a tuft of grass for a minute and then turns to the young eager bull and says, "Hell son, i've got a better idea, lets walk down the hill and screw them all..."

Players that could "never leave such a juicy table" remind me of the young bull. Players that can't follow their own rules remind of the young bull. Players that don't truly appreciate risk and the consequences of their actions remind me of the young bull.

And I vow to not be that young bull. I want to be the old bull. So when I'm building my bankroll and I hit that 20% then it is time to go. No ifs ands or buts. No next hand, no one more orbit, no waiting till the blinds... just rack it up and leave...

I have a little more tolerance for sticking around than you do ... but good god man, I hope you took a walk, grabbed a meal, and came an hour later to sit back down in that game with a standard buy in.

x2, dream table!

No, it was Friday or Saturday night-- board was insane and there was a table change list a mile long to get on that table

So I knew getting up was getting up for the day.

But on a related point, I believe that when we are in "build a bankroll mode" , I think it is really good for our state of mind to end the session for the day in these spots, take the money home, relax, do something else.

the psychological benefit of locking down a solid win and building our bankroll is extremely positive and powerful reinforcer to our long term success. Not to say there is anything wrong with table changing, ratholing, and then starting another session. As long as we are on our A-game, that is fine as well. But I'm a big fan of locking down wins and building our bankroll when we are in that fragile state of having fledgling anemic bankrolls (if that makes any sense).

if we do the above, it doesn't take too long to build a healthy roll. usually, we can build a healthy roll inside of a month.

But if you look at the big picture you never stop playing, you just change tables. If you're at a juicy table today and you leave for a lesser table tomorrow, you're really just opting for poor table selection.

I understand mitigating risk but is variance really so high that you bust 20% of the time you're deep at a juicy table?

That's a shame

All good points on the mental side of building a bankroll though. I think that just getting up immediately and leaving is *much* better than what I see a lot of people do, which is to just shut down and try to play super tight. It kills their winrate, bleeds them of chips by playing suboptimally, then when they do get into a hand everyone knows that they have a tight range and only gives them action when crushed. When it's time to go it's time to go, just leave.

Thanks for this. Invaluable advice.