In the past, I've been very resistant to adopting any kind of strict stop-loss policy. My reasoning was basically that when tons of money starts flying back and forth, someone is probably going to tilt. I thought that by using analysis and using the rational part of my mind to know how to balance my play I would be the one to tilt less. After all, even if I am losing and frustrated a bit, I can still follow my gameplan which I have set out, since I don't have to make particularly complex snap decisions in most situations. I thought this would enable me to play nearly as well losing as when winning, which would be great, since then I could pretty much never quit if I thought I had a non negligible edge. The other huge attraction of not quitting was that I often have to wait for action for hours: so when I do get in a good/fun game, I want to get a bunch of hands in if at all possible. The one caveat I had was that if I saw myself play a hand in a way which was obviously bad- for example the AA hand vs noluck17 I just posted- then I would force myself to quit instantly. The other caveat I had was that if I was getting very tired, unfocused, or feeling like I 'couldn't win' the match, then I would just quit as well. For example, if I finished a 2k hand match with a regular and a regular I would normally play sat down with me, I would always quit, thinking that I would inevitably be more tired than my opponent. As another check on my tilt, I would go over every big and medium pot more carefully after sessions when I was stuck and look for mistakes. This seemed like a good idea, and I have been winning a bunch, but I'm going to rethink it. I'm curious what other readers think of this first paragraph, does it sound right or not? So, cliff notes, I thought that (in contrast to all accepted poker wisdom) I was going to be able to play well when losing. My quantitative reasoning for this was also as follows: in hu poker, we can expect large and frequent swings, some people call every large loss tilt, but it could just as easily be variance. Why quit and cowtow to variance ?

Anyways, I'm pretty sure this is wrong, for a few reasons. In order of importance.

1. Why would I possibly think that winning the most money is the goal of poker? There is a reason we poker players do not follow the Kelly criterion for our bankroll management or any modification thereof. In the past 5 years since high school that I have played poker, I don't seem to have grasped the lesson that when I lose a lot, I don't have control of my emotions. Granted, a lot of times I do- there are a ton of sessions where I lose 20bi and don't care. However, there are zero sessions where I lose 3 bi and get frustrated. When I get frustrated, I do things like act grumpy to my friends/girlfriend (I'm usually a pretty chill guy by all accounts, so I'm not really too much of an asshole when losing, but it is a bit out of character) and complain to various people I know on skype/aim/life. I don't like myself when I complain about poker, a game which has treated me very well. I think the only way I can accomplish the goal of (almost) never feeling intense frustration at poker and having that frustration reinforce acting like a whiny bitch/ being an asshole is to circumvent the shoddy emotional part of my brain (which 5 years has proven I can't overcome) and quit early and often. I think the magic number here is 3 buy ins, 1 buy in when taking a 'shot'. In my head I was thinking "weeellllll 4 bi against a regular multitabling does not really matter, that sounds about right." Then I realized to get that worm of doubt out of the way I had to make it 3, where in my mind I'm thinking "3 buy ins WTF. Against a tough regular that does not matter AT ALL. I can lose that in a couple hands randomly."

2. Thus far, I have sort of granted that I play nearly as well losing as I do winning, and have criticized myself for making bad away-from-the-table decisions. That being said, a little analysis shows that this probably is not true either. Let's do a little empirical analysis. In the past 4 months where I have data, I have played roughly 80k hands of hu nlhe and hu plo, 22k of which have been with stacks greater than 175bb. My standard deviation for the deepstacked hands was 215bb for nlhe and a bit less for plo. I have also had a negative winrate- in this admittedly small sample (all I am trying to say there is that I don't have a winrate reason to really want to play super deepstacked). Ok. So in this 80k hand sample, I have had a 4.44 bb winrate. What are my largest downswings in bi? 1) -37.5 bi in 2k hands vs noluck17. 2) -28 bi in 2800 hands vs nutsinho, 3) Some string of losses vs urnot, I think on the order of -18 bi in mb 7 or 8k hands, 4-5) some -20bi PLO sessions, a -10+ bi day vs harrington, I can think of at least 3 other -20 bi sessions at 25/50 hu since last summer. So now let's examine these 'big-loss' sessions vs what I should expect to see using the ++ev poker tools variance simulator. I inputted winrate= 4.44, #/hands=2200, #/trials= 40, std dev=200. http://www.evplusplus.com/site_media...downswings.png

I think this is pretty striking. Bump the #/trials to 400 and it still tops out at -25 bi.

What does this mean? Well, I have pretty good empirical evidence to think that when stacks get deep and I'm stuck, I am a breakeven or losing player, no matter how much I have tried to analyze the game or police my own emotional state.

3) I've spent a ton of time experimenting with different strategies, and testing out different ideas. Why have I had this emphasis on experimenting with strategies, but have made much less effort to experiment with game rejection decisions which could conceivably help my winrate much more than little strategic tweaks. In the future, I am going to try to look at how I play given different psychological variables (am I winning/losing?, have I been playing a long time?, how many tables am I playing at once?) and see if there is statistically significant evidence for me to make firm behavioural rules for myself. I hope there is, since I don't have to get any smarter to quit playing at certain times, all I have to do is get less dumb.

Rule #1: 3 bi stop loss (from any point in a session). We'll see how it goes...

gl all

Ben