When to stop?

[dimeetrees]

I usually stop when Im busto, but u know, my style isnt for everyone.

[dimeetrees]

Oh and if u didnt know, the longer u play, the larger the chance of chips happening. Keep that in mind ;-)

[We Major]

[ QUOTE ]
So i've been doing a lot of thinking lately about stop/losses and about when it is right to quit your session even if your way up.

I have always had a 5 buyin stop loss-- meaning I will stop until I have reviewed why i've dropped 5 buyins in a session. After review, if I've been playing B game or better and just running bad, i keep playing, if not I just quit altogether I play really long sessions, usually 3-5k hands. Mostly because I can only play 3-4 days a week.

I think I have lost a ton of $ because I can't seem to know when to quit when i'm way up. When im running good or on a heater I think its going to keep going up and never quit. The problem is I usually drop a buyin or two towards the end of these and theeeen decide to quit. Im sure over my poker career this has cost me a lot of $. How do you all avoid this problem? How do you know when its time to quit a heater and what kind of stop losses do you put on your sessions?

thanks
-dex

[/ QUOTE ]

I've had this feeling too. Sometimes you're up a lot and you're like wow, that's a pretty good day and I don't want to ruin my day so you leave and go do something else. It's also very frustrating to be up a lot and have a lot of money at all your tables and then slowly piss it away.

That being said, I don't recommend it stopping when you've reached a certain amount of money for several reasons.

1. You're too focused on how much money you've made and trying to hit your stop point.
2. There are many instances where you'll be 5-10 bucks away then start pushing to hit your goal for the day and stop playing optimally.
3. It's also very frustrating to be close to your goal then taking a huge bad beat.
4. You have a huge psychological advantage when deep.
5. I have to stress this again. If you play any sort of LAG game you have a huge advantage when you're deep. One, you can play very aggressively because people are risking their stacks against you everytime. Two, you can play a looser style which is more effective when you're deep. Three, people are scared of a huge stack on the table. If you're playing 50NL and you have 200 bucks on the table people get intimidated and back down. I force myself to tighten up with 1 buy in and I loosen up to a 24/16/3 style when deep.

As far as stop losses for downswings, I usually stop after 3 buyins. I feel that losing 2 buyins is relatively normal. If I lose 3 buyins or take a huge suckout sometimes I lose it emotionally and start pushing, playing bad, thinking they can't have it again, and proceed to lose more. If I look at a lot of my losing sessions it starts when I take a bad beat, or lose a big pot as a huge favorite and it starts going downhill on all my tables as I try to bluff people off hands more, start spewing, etc.

[kflip]

Although I also get the feeling of losing money towards the end of a session, this has to be just an illusion from a rational point of view. I believe our brains confuse cause and effect here. So I think in reality our brains tell us to stop after losing some pots (it's not fun at that moment to play).
While we're winning pots, it's fun and there's no emotional appeal to stop, we're not even thinking about it then most of the time.