How long do you play for? - Page 3

Harv72b · #21 08-16-2005, 12:27 AM

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I am down 5 bb virtually every session I play -- then along comes that 20 bb pot...

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This is an excellent point, and one that deserves to be stressed. Especially when you're playing full ring games, you are going to "lose" money 1-2 BBs at a time for several hands, but when you win a pot it's often going to push you several bets into the black. You have to get used to seeing your stack move up and down like this over the course of your session; 5 BBs is truly nothing on the grand scale of things.

Probably not a great example, but donking around on a .50/1 table with a bunch of other 2+2'ers and a few unfortunate players caught in the middle last week, I went through a -110 BB downswing, a +115 BB upswing, another -100 BB downswing, and finally a +105 BB upswing in the same session. Obviously the fact that I was playing something like 60% of my hands at that table led to the huge amount of variance, but if you cut those in thirds (to simulate a more natural 20% VPIP), you still see up & downswings in the 30-40 BB range within one session. That is completely normal, given enough hands.

TeeVeeDude · #22 08-16-2005, 11:14 AM

My wife complained about poker eating up too much of my free time, so now Thursday is my "Poker night." On Thursdays I play five or six hours.

The rest of the week I'll grab a few hands while eating breakfast or lunch. My general rule is that I don't play unless I have time to stay for a full orbit, so the blinds don't eat me up.

So my shortest sessions run 10 to 15 minutes, my longest are five or six hours.

Don't focus on your results in a particular session. As someone else said, it's all one long session.

deception5 · #23 08-16-2005, 11:37 AM

I usually play 2-3 6-max tables for 1-3 hours. I used to have the same problem you describe but recently I seem to have finally gotten past it. It used to be the case that if I was down overall or especially when I was down on all 3 tables I would begin to tilt and feel like I had to make the money back. I've finally started to really realize that it's just variance and I will make the money back over time, I don't need to end every session profitably.

What I do now is whenever one of my tables gets down 10-20BB I top it off so I pretty much always have the same amount of money at the tables unless I am doing very well. Then I try to forget how many times I've topped off. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] The hardest concept to grasp is that you will have losing and winning sessions due to no fault of your own. What is important is that you do not have losing sessions because you tilt or because you played worse than usual. If I lose but feel like I wouldn't play anything differently then I feel like it was a successful session.

deception5 · #24 08-16-2005, 11:41 AM

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My wife complained about poker eating up too much of my free time

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Mine too. Then I read one of GrunchCan's posts about how 1/6th of his profits went towards the house. +EV! After I put a bunch of poker money towards paying bills it became much more accepted [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]