Knowing when to stop is one of the most critical keys in increasing your win-rate. In fact, quitting is a necessary ability if you want to be a great winner and play poker in the long run.
There are several reasons why you should reconsider your approach to ending a poker game.
We’ll go through some of the most essential ones in this poker tips and poker strategies resource.
Here are some things you should know when you need to quit a poker session, online poker sites or leave the poker table.
Stopping the rot
When you’re losing, it’s evident that you should end your poker session. Regrettably, quitting is most tough when you’re trapped.
Have a look at your sessions if you have an online poker monitoring software package. Often times, it is almost certain that all of your longest sessions are ones where you lost money early on and spent hours on end grinding to earn it back via cash games.
Sometimes when you play poker and your poker strategy is not working, you should just stop playing poker in that round.
Losing ten buy-ins in a session is not uncommon for online cash game players, especially if you play a lot of tables, and no matter how strong your resolve, you will not be able to play your ‘A-game’ after such a horrible run.
As painful as it may appear, resigning now is a wise move.
The following is a nice approach to look at it from: Assume you lose 10 buy-ins (equal to 1000 large blinds) while multi-tabling at 1000 hands each hour.
Provided you’re a solid winner in the games, you may anticipate 5 big blinds each hundred hands (assuming you’re playing well, which is a large assumption at this stage) or 50 big blinds per hour.
It means it will take you 20 hours to break even in terms of expected value. You’re obviously not going to play for that long, so why are you still playing?
When it Looks Like Tilt is about to take over, you have to quit the poker table
If you’re prone to poor tilts, the ability to resign will be much more essential to your long-term win-rate.
Tilt in poker is basically another word for frustration and a lot of factors can lead to tilt when playing.
It could be that your poker strategy is failing, you have a bad poker hand in consecutive rounds, bad decision making has led to you losing money or maybe your mind is elsewhere entirely.
Tilt awareness and management is one of the most important soft skills for a poker player to have.
Even the best professional poker players know that they would have never reached the top if they went on bankroll-busting tilt sessions following a botched call or a lost coin-flip in a huge hand.
You have to pay attention to these things because it is a huge quality of a winning player. Apart from this, your fellow players will be ruthless if they notice.
If you see that you’re making moves while playing online poker that you wouldn’t typically make while you’re getting positive poker results, no matter how little, you should immediately turn off your computer. Do not just close the client; switch off the computer and exit as quickly as possible.
Your bankroll allows you to play online poker, do not lose everything
As a poker player, one of the most essential skills that you must have in your locker is bankroll management.
If you want to keep playing poker for a long time, you must understand how to manage your money, how to ration your spending and most importantly, how not to lose everything at the poker table.
When tilt takes over and a player is on a bad run, there is a tendency to keep playing online poker in the hopes of turning the tide but when you do that, you lose more money than you gain and other players will take advantage of this as much as possible.
You have to make sure you do not fall down this rabbit hole when you play online or you will lose everything you have.
Things you can do to stop playing a poker session
In this section, we provide some valuable tips and triggers that beginner players or even professional poker players can use to figure out when to stop playing poker.
Establish a time limit for yourself
Similarly, instead of trying to achieve a specific number of hands before calling it a night, you may establish a time restriction that, when reached, tells you when to call it a night.
Decide how much time you want to spend playing poker, and then experiment with playing during these hours to determine if it works for you and your present living circumstances.
You may either set an alarm to go off and inform you after a certain amount of time, or simply monitor the clock to see how long you’ve been playing for.
Plan a time out or take some time off
Another smart technique to stop playing poker is to set a few poker-free periods of time so that you have regular breaks and time away from the poker table.
This will help clear your mind and better prepare you to be in the appropriate mindset for your next game, so you can return ready to rub elbows with the best of them.
It will do you a lot of good mentally, and it may even help you rediscover that spark of enthusiasm you used to experience every time you sat down at a casino poker table.
Only Play a specific number of hands
If you play online poker, there is always the chance that you find yourself playing too many hands all at once. In order to make sure you do not do this, the greatest thing you can do is set a limit on the amount of hands you will play.
This is something experienced players do a lot and it will be the most profitable play for you to make in the long run even for recreational players.
This is successful because it provides you with a clear and unambiguous objective to shoot at. You know precisely how many hands to play and when to stop.
Now, how many hands you should play depends on whether or not you multi-table. If you just play at one poker table, you may set a goal of 200 hands.
You have to always remind yourself that most online 6max tables will deal roughly 80 hands each hour (or 60 hands per hour for a full ring).
Hence, if you play on one 6max table, it should take you around 2.5 hours to finish your 200-hand session.
If this is too long for you, reduce the number of hands to, say, 100. Of course, if you play at two, four, eight, twelve, or more tables, this amount multiplies substantially.
Extend your session if you are playing well
We know that this article is about when to quit poker but at the same time, quitting while you are ahead is not always a good idea.
Poker is a game of skill but it is also a confidence game.
If you have things going your way, you probably should play more in order to build your confidence through playing winning poker and crushing your opponents who are low on confidence themselves.
Just like how your longest sessions will be those where you got stuck early, your shortest sessions will be those where you won a few buy-ins early on and chose to ‘book a win’ and go do something else.
When you’re winning and things are going your way, you’re most likely playing in an easy game and will naturally play more comfortably, while your opponents may be playing poorly if you’ve been taking a lot of money off of them.
