Rules For When To Keep Playing & When To Quit A Live Poker Session

Poker has that little wrinkle where even when the game is great, you feel great and decide to kick in the after-burners to play a long session, you still might not end up a winner. Often enough you'll play until you're over-tired and wind up kicking yourself for not quitting sooner. Even though I frequently fail to listen to my own advice, I do know the secret of avoiding this problem altogether and still getting in a ton of hours. It's all about balancing your life.

Some players have a prescribed amout of time that they'll play poker. Regardless of the quality of the game and the quality of their cards, they always quit after a set amount of time. While this may help achieve psychological and physiological balance in life, this attitude also forces you out of some great games, which is totally lame in my opinion. Why would you quit a great game prematurely when you're raking in pot after pot? It's an idiotic approach to live poker. Yet this 'business-like' approach is based on the need to find balance in your life, and over-looking this need is also idiotic. So again, it comes back to balance.

- playing for too long can leave you steaming and put you on life-tilt

Here's my recipe for success with regard to timing your sessions, in the form of a list of rules. If I had been sticking to this from the beginning of my career I have no doubts I'd be a richer man today.

Rules for when to play and when to quit a live poker session:

1- Avoid at ALL COST playing so long that you mess up your sleeping routine. This basically means that 15-16 hours is the absolute maximum you should play in normal-time.

2- Know what an average sessions length is for you. It should be number of hours you are comfortable with playing everyday, say 6-9 hours. Once you get these hours in, quit the game unless both of the following are true:

• A- Your table image is good to great. 
• B- Your game is clearly above average. 

I recommend this because I believe that unless you're going to earn a decent chunk more than you'd normally make in a game, it's not worth sacrificing a solid day-to day routine. If you feel you're earning time and a half or double-time, then clock-in some overtime. But remember to follow rule #1.

3- Setting a stop loss is a very good idea if you play in a regular game that is more or less the same each day. There's no reason to ever play with the frustration of being stuck and feeling like you're fighting an uphill battle.  Ask yourself this question right now:  After a session in which you lost money, are you more often angry with yourself for quitting prematurely, or for staying too long? There's nothing wrong with quitting after only a few hours of play when you can return to the same game tomorrow refreshed, even and ready to kick some ass.

Finally, I want to justify my points further with some scientific truths that I've discovered in my time playing poker. The amount you win or lose at poker can be expressed mathematically as an hourly rate. So long as you play a similar style in a similar game your winnings increase as you get in more hours, simple. While it may seems like the best way to get in the hours is to play long sessions, it's NOT. Human beings are meant to live by daily routines that revolve around sleeping, eating and exercise. When you have a solid routine I believe you'll find it way easier to get in more hours over time.