Either I'm reading things wrong or you like average multiple sessions a day?

Ghasplayed3sessionsinFeb,up9bbs,whoop!G

Any experienced poker player, especially one who has read some of my posts in the last year where Ive talked about my win rate quite a bit, can probably decipher my Y-axis. I covered it for other personal reasons.

Yeah, i take breaks... eat/nap/shower/change casinos etc.

Breaking into multiple sessions may have its merit's. I recently discovered I have not made a single penny above 5 hours of play. That's about 1k hours of my 2k hour sample. In other words, 100% of my profit came from <5 hour sessionso which made up half of my total volume.

I'm not sure about everyone else but I get sick if I sit for prolonged periods of time. Happens when I have 10-12 hour days at work too. I feel hungover and my chest hurts the whole next day.

Mike, we all know it's 3.50

^ Yeah I become a vegetable when I play long sessions. I'm pretty much just on auto pilot wasting time. Def should if there's a bunch of soft spots at the table tho.

My casino takes time rake too, so usually if i'm going to take a 30min - 1hr break i just pick up

I'm kinda surprised more people don't track their games down to smaller segments than "session", which is routinely a subjective amount of time. I'm only a rec player, so I've never really felt worried about this, but if I was playing for a living I would probably track every hour and keep notes to try to figure out my sweet spot for hours to play per session. Obv it's never going to be exact, but if I were to see that after 7 hours (or whatever) I rarely play well in spots I feel I should be, than I would adjust accordingly.

That's an interesting observation. I don't have the time to put in many long sessions any more and am limited to about 3 hours on average. But I have no problems sitting at a table for 10-12 hours in a day. I get up to eat or take a leak, and I'll stand up and stretch occasionally too. No major problems staying focused or healthy while doing it.

Although I will say that it seems like less tends to happen at the end of a longer session. I have some theories about how table conditions evolve over time, but in general I think play tightens up and the money gets sucked off by the rake. Changing tables (preferably to a new table) can help improve that.

I think that tracking hour by hour would cause more problems than it would solve for most players. It's too easy to get focused on really short term results that way. That being said ... if I had a good easy way to track that at the table, and a quick way to make notes on interesting or big hands I'd probably do it. (I may or may not have a problem with liking large datasets.)

I can't quite figure out what you mean. Do you mean:

(a) If you tallied all your sessions that were >= 5 hours, they would add up to $0?

or

(b) All the time you spent at a table >= 5 hours into a session, you broke even? How do you even track that?


Here's a quick PokerJournal breakdown of my 407 1/3 NL session lengths (hrs) / winrate / # of sessions, but I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing:

1-, $78.55 (2)
1-2, $70.70 (6)
3-4, $30.88 (2)
4-5, $59.69 (4)
5-6, $22.57 (52)
6-7, $24.38 (132)
7-8, $8.51 (14)
8-9, $15.02 (19)
9-10, $16.34 (69)
10-11, $20.04 (64)
11-12, $34.77 (29)
12+, $32.78 (14)

I almost always simply stay in a game to a predetermined time.

In the end, much like my day-of-week stats, I'm pretty convinced these are interesting and yet in the end completely meaningless stats that are simply affected greatly by short term variance / lol sample size. In the end, it is no coincidence that the greatest sample size (6-7 hours @ 132 sessions) is also pretty much the closest to my overall winrate (with 5-6 actually being only off by $0.02/hr).

Not convinced these mean anything.

GcluelesssessionlengthnoobG

if I filter by "sessions longer than 3 hours", as I suspected after posting last time, but forgot to do until now, it's 33% of my sessions but 2.5x the overall winrate. So apparently I should play longer.

Ha, looks like I would be better off putting in either a 1 hour session or a 12 hour session.

Git'shours2thru11thatkillmeG

The session length can be misleading too. Sometimes if you win piles of chips within your first 3 hours you might pack it up and call it a day. Sometimes you lose 3 buyins in your first hour and next thing you know your tallying your 12th hour trying to salvage the session.

If Ava's statement mean he's actually breaking even in hours 5+ when sitting at the table (which is my guess as to what he is getting at, although I'd be interested in how he's tracking that, sample size, etc.), that result has interesting implications. Mainly cuz you'd think by the 5+ hour mark you'd be moving into deeper stack play, which perhaps indicates your deepstack play isn't as profitable as you'd think? Course that's assuming capped BIs, etc. which might not be the case.

GmakingassumptionsG

As I say, for my results that isn't the case. I believe I've tapped out early twice in 407 sessions, and only chased at a good table longer than my allotted time like maybe a half dozen times.

GcluelesstimelimitnoobG

You're probably not getting all that deep. Players are going to come and go, win and lose (hopefully mostly lose) and I don't expect the average stack depth to move too much over the course of a session in a casino. So even if *we* run up a stack we're still not deep against (most of) our opponents.

Well this was interesting. Mostly 2/5 100bb cap:



There's an obvious bias -- I am much more likely to leave early if I am up big, and much more likely to stay longer if I am even or stuck. It's not that I'm a stone crusher in my first two hours and an absolute turd after 7.

GG, it was a)

Yes, I realize there is a confirmation bias and that correlation does not imply causation.

The big caveat to my curious little discovery is what Tiltyjoker mentioned. That your longer sessions are often dedicated to recovery of what were likely early losses.

What this means is that even if I stopped at 5 hours, the 5 hour mark would become the new "biggest loser" mark. Following the curve that DK Barrel illustrated above (which is similar to mine and exactly what I was talking about)

The only way to begin to remove the bias would be to have predetermined set times that you adhere to. Example would be 3 hours, 6 hours, 9 hours, you alternate between the 3 each session (but you pick beforehand) If there was still the diminishing return curve over 50k hands it would be interesting.

So yes I realize that the bias exists, but I still intend to play shorter sessions now as a rule. The correlation is that strong.

To answer your question about sample, it was almost dead even. I've played 2k hours and half of them are from >5 hour sessions. My entire profit has come from <5 hour sessions. >5 hours added up to - $800. Over 1000 hours.

BS777, perhaps you want the General Gambling> Other Gambling Games forum.

Generally, the higher the stakes, the less bb/hr are possible, as you are playing much better Vs.

Roulette requires an infinite bankroll.

Not if you play Mike Caro's Roulette strategy

I'm the same way. I haven't tracked my sessions down to the hour and don't have graphs to back this up, I just know that my game really starts to deteriorate after about the 5hr mark. Plus a contributing factor for me is that I have a bad back (I feel like I'm way too young to have the back problems that I do), and it's very uncomfortable for me to sit in one place for hours on end. When I play, I'm usually on a walk/smoke break for 7-8 minutes out of every hour, but even with frequently leaving the table for a few minutes it's very hard for me to play long sessions most days.

I feel you there. I'm likely both younger than you and have a worse back (not that its a competition or something to really brag about).

That being said, I actually play super long sessions. If I'm running really poorly though I'll sometimes cut it short (short for me being a 5 hour session).

You should really start working on your posture at the table (and away from the table) and probably take some physical therapy. I'll tell you though it's a struggle -- kinda feel like any $$$ I made from poker is worthless given how ****ed up I am physcially due to the endless hours of sitting in horrible positions at the poker table (well, i'm sure the tons of computer use contributed as well)

I'm 33 now, but my problems started from a car wreck in my early 20s. Tack on 13 years of working a blue collar job, and here I am. LOL

I'm sure posture plays a role in my issues too. My posture is terrible. Sometimes when my back really starts hurting at the table I'll try to sit "correctly" for a few minutes. When I do that, it really looks like I'm sitting 6 inches higher in my seat. I have fairly long arms too, and I think it compounds my posture issues because I'm always able reach and function sitting down even if I'm slouched, so I'm used to not needing to sit correctly to function when sitting. Anyways, a bit off topic, but I definitely understand the physical issues that you go through at the table.

I too suffer from a bad back (on the real, I've had 3 MRIs in the last 5 years). I kind of hate it when folks hop on the "bad back me too" train bc I have actual crippling pain often, just want to let you guys know you are not alone. I'm 30.

Also. Yes, it starts to get worse after about 2 hours of sitting. At work I remember to take hourly walks but it's harder in the poker room bc I'm always at "DA BEST TABLE EVARRRR" and never want to get up lol.

If you haven't found a good physical therapist, keep searching. I finally found one that gave a sh*t and she helped alot, though these days I've been slacking and I'm paying for it dearly.

I bet if you graphed my back pain scale and my wr they would directly correlate.

Sorry if it seems I am coming at you or ****ting on you lately but this poast makes no sense to me. You imply (or maybe flat out state) that your player pool has gotten appreciably better over the last X years. Presumably that means they are now capable of reading you as a nitty, nut peddler and your solution is to become even more of a nitty, nut peddler? Seems counter to what you should be trying to do IMO.

Again I think you do yourself a disservice by not allowing yourself to improve and add elements to your game as a response to the player pool growing tougher.