Hello Poker players,

I'm a cash game player, and I want to tell you about my last 4 times playing live in the casino in my town.

1st- up £60
2nd up £15
3rd up £200
4th up £100

The thing is all of these sessions have lasted less than two hours, and I have been leaving when I'm up and not even played for very long. The 3rd cash game when I made £200 I was there for less than an hour! So, is it the wrong thing to do? I said to myself yesterday I would make £100 and leave, so I did. But once again I was there for only an hour or so!

Leave when your up a good amount, or play a set number of hours? 9pm-2am ect.

What would you do?



Thanks everyone.

Never leave when you're winning if your intention is to make money. Also, 4 sessions isn't really much of a sample. You probably want 50 to 100 samples before you start looking for patterns.

Depends on what your goal is. You are free leave whenever you want, nothing "wrong" with playing short sessions. That being said, short term results are more influenced by variance that skill. If your goal is to make as much money as you can over the long term, a better strategy would be to play as many hours as possible while the game conditions are still good and you are playing well.

Thanks guys!

I appreciate the feedback.

It's all one session.

I think you run a risk of being seen in a negative light if you keep up very short sessions in your local casino. The players will get to know you if they haven't already and won't be that happy with you if you win a big pot and then leave. That said, the idea is to walk out a winner, and that should be the goal each time you play.

My suggestion would be to set a minimum play time of two hours (unless you bust through that day's bankroll quicker). If you're ahead at that point and want to leave, then you can always say that you've played a couple hours and have other things you want to do with your day. There will be many days where you're behind or just slightly ahead at the two hour mark and you'll want to stay anyway.

When you set a goal and reach your goal, follow through on it. I'm sure that most everyone here has set a goal, reached it, kept playing, and gone on to have a horrible session afterwards.

If you need to re-think your goals, that's fine, but if you're going to approach the game with a specific amount in mind, then you owe it to yourself to stick to it when you reach it. Even if you're only at the table for a few minutes.

Your goal for a session should not be an amount. It should be to play well. If you don't think you are playing well, leave. If you are playing well, stay.

Of course there are psychological reasons to set stop-loss and win limits. But those are just markers to indicate if you are playing poorly or might begin to. There are also real world time considerations that are independent of money.

Poker results are measured in thousands of hours and not tens of hours. No one hand or one session determines if you are a winning or losing player.

I don't disagree with you. But I don't like the idea of setting a goal, hitting the goal, and then abandoning that goal because you're worried about poor form.

You say you've been leaving early when you're up a good amount. I guess it depends on your definition for session 1, but why did you leave early from session 2?

He never claimed to be either. He also wasn't asking about that.

OP (Original Poster) you can search this site for similar threads like this one and get some additional feedback. But a lot of what you will see is already here ...

1) If you are playing well, stay .. if not, leave
2) If you feel you are playing 'differently' than you would like, then leave (scared money syndrome)

3) If the table is one where you think you can make money, then stay .. as long as you are playing well.
4) I think, for newer players, it's wise to set both win and loss marks. But this also depends on how much you 'can' or are willing to lose. How much are you starting with and how much do you bring to the room?

5) If this pattern continues and your room is fairly small, then you probably wont get much action in 'your' hands. Players will figure out that you 'cash-n-dash' and not want to pay off your bets, which leads to smaller wins ... and much larger losses since players will only stay in hands where they can (or are) crush(ing) you!
6) If you can't figure out whether or not you played a hand well or just got lucky, then take a walk NOT go home and then come back to the table for some more. It can be hard to focus on the hand in play if you are caught up in a previous hand.

The biggest thing with poker is that is should be fun. If you get nervous when you have a profit in your stack, then you probably aren't having fun anymore and should move on ... but the more this happens you should force yourself to stay '5 more minutes' just to feel better about it.

The best way to feel more comfortable at the table is to 'be' at the table. When you aren't in a hand, pretend that you are and try to guess what the other players are holding ... and what you might or might not do in their spot. Of course you get nervous when you have AA or try to bluff someone ... the first 30 times ... but once you go through those experiences they become 'automatic'.

Do what's best for you and your game. I still get caught up going into 'cruise control' (lock down) when I feel obligated to stay in a room until closing 'to keep the game going' and then lose some back because I wasn't as sharp as I should be ... but there are also nights when I send 3 more guys home in the last hour as well. GL

Hi Jose johnny.

I left early from sesion two, simple because I was getting tired. I would rather be a small winner in a game than a big loser.

Thanks for all your replies.

If you are still a newish player playing for fun, leaving a winner is fine.

If you have a goal of being a profitable player over the long haul;, the rules of thumb are as follows

1. Have a big enough bankroll so that short term variance won't kill you (so you don't feel compelled to 'book a win' just to preserve your bankroll)
2. Treat your entire career as one continuous session, and track accordingly
3. Do not be results oriented. Stay if you feel like you have an advantage, leave when you don't. If I am playing at a table of loose, donkish players who give tons of actions, but I am down three buy ins because of bad variance, I buy in again because it is a good game. Likewise, I might be up two buy ins, but if the table is much better than me and I am just getting lucky, I go

Obviously, to do this correctly you have to have great self awareness so you can separate 'how am I playing' from 'am I winning'. You have to know what bad play from you feels like (do you start feeling that pressure in the back of your head as frustration mounts, causing you to call wider and wider? Do you get a sense of invulnerability after hitting a few sraws and start calling gutshots and poorly priced flush draws?) and you have to be disciplined enough to walk when you recognize that you are playing bad or are outclassed.

Time limits are good if you know you have a finite endurance. A lot of people go into automaton like play after 4 to 6 hours, and they should leave but don't.

TLDR
1. leave when you are playing bad or outclassed, stay when you have an advantage
2. don't be results oriented
3. have a big enough bankroll that you can treat it all like one big session

Neither.

In cash games the most important thing is to make sure you are at a good table in a good seat at that table, playing well enough to win.

By good table I mean one in which you think you play well enough to win. You don't have to be the best player but if you are one of the worst it probably won't go well.

However, having said that, there are many situations where you can be one of the worst players and come out a winner, if for example it is a tight table except for one or two loose horrible players to your right.

By "good seat" I mean the looser "bad" players should be on your immediate right if possible and the tighter players on your left. And the best players across the table if possible. Learning how to change seats can help you turn a "losing" table into a "winning" table.

By "playing well enough to win" this is subjective and you will have to get good at knowing yourself at the poker table. For me, I set a stop loss limit because when I am losing badly I tend to open up my range of playable hands and it will likely spiral downward from there. Similarly when I am crushing it, I have to watch out for "happy tilt".

But I don't ever set a win stop limit. Because sometimes the table is such that it is like printing money. Unless you are the best player in your cardroom, it is insane to limit your winning situations while not limiting your losing situations. That will lead to disaster. It reminds me of the Martingale system in Roulette.

I will typically leave a cash game if:
- I am playing badly,
- I have hit a stop/loss limit. Typically I set it at about 2.5 full buy-ins (and I don't necessarily buy-in for the max in NL).
- The table is too difficult (and I can't change tables)
- It is after midnight and my table has lost its worst player(s) and fresh looking players have sat in their place. Or if the table is so depleted we are joining tables (late at night its is too much for me to figure out a new table)

I am mostly a tournament player now, so I only rarely play cash games and not always because I am trying to win. Sometimes I want to practice a new technique that I want to apply to tournaments.

So the irony is that I am almost always playing until a time limit is hit (win or lose). There have been times though where the cash game has been so good that I just skip the evening daily tournament or miss the first half hour or so.

Best of luck to you!

I think it's good to set a leave goal for each session. For me, if I triple up, play for so-and-so hours, or lose X amount, I'll leave. Those are my "rules."

I'm usually better off when I follow them, but I don't always follow them

What is kind of funny is that people complain about 2-hour sessions being "short."

90% of people in a poker room, including at least 50% of people who think they're in the 10%, would have more money if they played 0 hour sessions.

Until you're more confident in your skills, playing for an hour or two and spending the next few days dissecting your play is absolutely the way to go.

One of my recent sessions was 19 hours, so 2 does seem a little short

I think 90%+ of my sessions have been under 1.5 hours (I used to play during lunch) so 2 hours is long.

I’ve had plenty of sessions where just the “should I leave soon?” part takes 2 hours.

What if you don't have a winning session. Do you keep going for tens or hundreds of hours before the downswing is over?

I personally just do periods of time, or whether I think im playing well, or how juicy the table is, but there actuall6 is a result of when you get up based on wins or losses that people should be aware of if they plan to go this eoute.



so actually “rather be a small winner” also causes “big loser”. If you leave when you are up $50 but not when youre down $50, youll end up having a large number of small wins, and a small number of big losses. I thknk the phrase is eat like a bird crap like an elephant.

To the degree that I do manipulate when I leave, I rarely leave when im a small loser, and very often leave when I am a large loser. I find that losing a massive amount weighs on me, so even when the table is good and im playing well, ill leave once ive lost 2-2.5 buyins, and when im down a small amount, ill leave if ive got somewhere to go, or if im not playing well, but if i was just thinking of leaving to get food or sleep or whatever, Ill use my small loss to encourage me to get more hours in (because losing $50 vs 200 feels similarly to me, so its good to wait around for $150 worth of variance if im down 50)

as most have said it depends on what you want out of it. typically however, you should always stay if you think you can continue to beat the game and keep your eyes open, if this can not happen then you should leave

edit- not included is if you have an appointment to get to (work, family, etc)

A set number of hours is not the right approach. It's more important to recognize it if you are not playing your best game and be able to leave if that will cost you money. I try to quantify mistakes as a percentage of buy-in.

Playing deeper is more difficult, and can be very challenging if good players are also playing deep. You never have an obligation to stay longer than you want to, you never win money without putting your own at risk.