Quitting

It’s a question a lot of players wonder about, when to quit.  The old adage of “quit while you’re ahead” may provide some apparently solid advice, but why?  How do we unpack this?

Matt Hilger in his book, The Poker Mindset: Essential Attitudes for Poker Success makes note that players often talk about going on a heater; a hot streak when they catch good cards and make all the right decisions.  The idea being that if you sense you are on a heater you MUST continue playing no matter what because you never know when another one will come around.  But, heaters are the same as downturns in that they don’t exist in reality.  They are random blips in a distribution curve.  Because they don’t really exist you can’t predict when they will start, end or how intense they will be.  In poker, all you have is the hand you are playing now.  So, in that sense, breaking your poker play into discrete sessions is of no objective value.  You may tell yourself, “I’ve got to keep playing, I’m really hot tonight” thinking that if you quit, and come back the next day, your streak will be over.  But, the truth is your poker play, all of it, every hour, every hand, is one long session.

So, using Hilger’s thinking, there is no optimal time to continue playing.  He suggests that there are only reasons for players to stop playing:

1.)    If the players in the game are clearly of superior skill to me and I am obviously being outplayed.

2.)    If I am on tilt.

3.)    If I have something better to do.

These seem pretty straightforward but they do require some conscience effort, especially reasons 1 and 2.  The aggregate skill level at a table is a moving target and good players are constantly taking stock of it.  It changes when players come and go and individual players wax and wane in playing their best.  Good players are also very astute in sensing their own level of tilt (in all its flavors) and its impact on their game.

Tommy Angelo also has an interesting take on quitting, through (of course) the lens of reciprocality.  Tommy notes that all poker players decide to quit at one point or another.  My goal should be to quit “better” on average than my opponents and money will flow my way.  Although probability and the distribution curve tell us that dividing up our poker play into sessions is arbitrary, if I can impose some sort of structure on my play that helps me avoid tilt, there may still be some value.  For example, I almost always feel good about my game when I finish a session ahead.  I almost always feel bad when I end up booking a loss.  An important factor in trying to play my A game whenever I go out is confidence.  I tend to play better when I’ve been meeting with some success, when my bankroll has been moving upward, not down.  I tend to not play my A game when I’m worried about being in a downswing, concerned about going broke or my low confidence is causing me to be a bit paranoid.

Most players can relate to a situation when they are not super tired and could keep playing but they just finished digging themselves out of a hole and may be up by only a few dollars.  So, the question becomes, “Do I risk chasing some profit to ‘make this session worth my while’ or is there some value to quitting now and just book the win?”  If I make the decision to take the win, over and over while my opponents choose to chase the profit but only succeed maybe one out of three times, after hundreds of sessions I’ll have come very far out on the profitable side of quitting reciprocality.