Dealing with bad runs

I'd like to direct this question to all of you who play basically for a living.

How do you deal with bad runs of cards/luck. When you go long stretchs without any good cards, and when you do get good cards they get beat?

Do you set a limit for the day? If you lose $X then you quit for the day, or do you just keep plugging away until i t turns?

[Doc7]

standard: poker's a lifetime game, play every hand as well as you can and it works out in the long run.

[jomatty]

that may be the standard responce but for us non robotic types playing your best when losing can be tough and there are some things the poster can do to help him psycologically when running bad. if you have control problems and tend to go off for big numbers you may want to set a stop loss.
if your confidence is shaken put some wins together. play some shorter than normal sessions and lock up some wins, getting your confidence back is one of the hardest things when running bad.
stay in the moment, and try to make every decision as well as you can now. its seems obvious but it can be difficult to realize when your getting killed. you cant affect the past or the future but you can make good decisions NOW, so make sure you do. concentrate on making one good decision at a time.
matty

[SycoFrogg]

Ice-cream always makes me feel better after a tough beat.

Beats are tough to clear out of your mind, but you just have to remember:
Baldwin said after the 1981 tournament. 'But if they want to better their game and better their emotional state while playing, they should realize it's a mirage. If you are an excellent player, people are going to draw out on you a lot more than you're going to draw out on them because they're simply going to have the worst hand against you a lot more times than you have the worst hand against them. There's no way you're going to draw out on anybody if you don't get all your money in there on the worst hand.'

in short accept people sucking out on you repeatedly, this means that you were getting money in with the better hand. proper BR management will help you not worry so much, as will keeping sharp accounting records ie PokerTracker.

[Guernica4000]

Remember Your "Good Beats"
A "good beat" occurs when you are the lucky idiot who misplays his hand, catches a miracle card, and wins a large pot. Because we want to believe that we play well, but are unlucky, we remember bad beats, but forget good ones. This pattern protects our egos, but causes lots of anger.
So if you remember those outrageously lucky good beats, you won't get so upset when someone sucks out on you.
You may pretend that you never make such mistakes or get that lucky, but everybody does it. You are just as lucky and unlucky as everyone else.

[RoundersRocks!]

I find getting a day job to remind you what money actually is helped for me. One day of filing some dudes file cabinet helped me remeber why I need to seriously consider every single decision when I play. keller wrote an article about keeping that kind of fear in you in the latest Card Player, althou he didn't put it that way. Also, drugs and alcohol are a great way to foget anything.

I am a newbie - and right now, the hardest thing for me is when I run what I call "flop dead". I can handle getting crappy hole cards because then I can just get out of the hand. However, I recently had a run of excellent hole cards that just never hit the flop. Like JJ and the board comes AKx - or AK and the board comes 789 - and so on.

Then, I started getting the worst cards to follow that - thinks like A8o, or KTo - hands that, under ordinary circumstances I probably wouldn't play, but which I am now going in on because I start feeling that SOMETHING has to hit for me.

[Wacken]

I do not play for a living, but i do not see reason to set limits to losings or winnings for stopping to play.

Play as long as you play well and better than the other players at the table. Stop if you play bad or worse than the other players.

[mikehildebrand]

i think setting limits for yourself is a bad idea, per se. What I mean by that is you have to stop when you have become emotionally attached to the amount you have either lost or WON.
I am turning around now on a 3 month dead flop on tournaments, cashing in my last two. It has been a hard experience, I read a book about Zen and Poker and it helped. Howard Lederer on howardlederer.com has a great article about Zen and Poker, which I also find helpful (especially knowing I am not the only one looking this way).
Always remember:
River Happens!