No matter what? The villain on your left is shoving any two preflop. You call a 1,5 buyin shove with AA and lose to 72o. Do you leave instantly? Sounds like -ev.

Sigh -- I knew someone would say this.

We're mixing two concepts here -- the general rule is you never leave the table if you can afford to play, and you believe it to be profitable. Rules of thumb -- $X loss, 30 Big bets, etc. are just that.

This being said -- If I sit down at a NL table with only one buy in (undercapitalized) and I lose it on the first hand, with a bad beat, I'm leaving. I set a limit as to the amount I can lose in a session. If I go through my stop loss amount, unless I have a damned good reason to keep playing (your example would qualify).

If money management is a problem, you have to set limits for yourself. Unless you have the ability to know when you're playing well, a limit isn't a bad idea.

If someone is consistently giving back their winnings session after session, yes, leaving after the bad beat may be the right thing to do -- maybe it's a precurser to tilting. You have to get into the habit of leaving the casino a winner. And the only way to do that is to get up when you have more chips than when you started with.

If you're going to beat yourself up (as OP did) when your profits dissipate, yeah, leave the table while you're still a winner, you'll feel better.

In either case, it's an exercise in discipline. If you know why you're still playing, and aren't going to be upset with variance, play on.

"Stop Loss Order" is probably a better term to google. It's an investment term, I apply the concept to money management in poker.

thanks