Setting Limits: The Good & The Bad (Part II)

In my last post, I discussed a few of the positives and negatives about setting limits for how much I lose per session.

How about win limits? This is where a player decides that if they get ahead a certain amount of money, they will be happy and quit for the day. For professional grinders, this is often called "making their daily nut." The beauty of this is that you set your goal, you reach your goal, and then you can go about the rest of your day happy that you have booked a nice win. You also prevent yourself from losing it all back. On the surface, this sounds like a pretty good strategy for a winning player to have.

But it has a few problems. One of them is pretty obvious. If I set a win limit, I am literally limiting the amount that I can win. So if I am in a very profitable game, and playing really well, I'm forcibly removing myself from the ideal poker situation. If my win limit is $300, and I reach it, I never allow myself to have +$1,000 days on those days that a really awful player shows up to unload his paycheck to the poker economy. I would miss out on the really gargantuan scores that we all drool for. And since you never know in poker when you are going to go on a dry spell and have several losing sessions in a row, you want to have some major wins to counteract those rougher patches.

Another problem is when you are just short of the target, but for whatever reason the table conditions are no longer optimal. Sticking with the $300 example, say I get up to $280, then lose a pot by getting outdrawn and am down to $240. Further assume that the donkey that just doubled up off me hits and runs and the remaining players are all tough tricky players with deep stacks. Do I want to continue in the game just to get over that $300 hump? A problem with setting targets is that it can become too much of a focus and get in the way of other important aspects of the game.

I think the top professional players would say that setting win targets/limits is not the best way to go, for the reasons I have described. But there are several lower-level grinders who swear by this method. They put in their time at the table, and if they hit their target early they are free to do whatever they want with the rest of their time. Personally I agree with the top pros that it isn't the ideal thing to do, but honestly I find myself doing it sometimes. Since I don't have an enormous bankroll, it is very important for me to regularly book winning sessions. So for whatever stakes I am playing, generally if I quadruple my buy-in, I start thinking about making an exit. I may play a little longer to see if I can go even further. But if I buy in for $100 and am able to take my stack to $450, I generally will tell myself I will play on but if I get below a stack of $400 I will call it quits. Or something along those lines. However, I leave myself the flexibility to stay in the game if my opponents are playing very poorly and I am playing very well. So I avoid giving back my winnings but also have the option to win more.

Finally, there are time limits. Time limits have a lot in common with win limits. You play up until a certain point and then you stop no matter what. Up, down, doesn't matter. This way you can just focus on playing to the best of your ability, and don't worry so much about winning or losing in individual sessions. You play your career like one long poker session, and if you are a winning player, the results be there in the long run. Like punching a clock. Players do this because they are self-aware enough to realize that they generally start to play worse after a certain length of time passes. They get bored. They get tired. Whatever the reason, they only want to play for so long each time out.

The problem with this method is that it doesn't take into account the conditions of the table on a particular day. Even if I play in the same cardroom, at the same level five days in a row, I might encounter five unique sets of table conditions that may be either good for me or not so good. So instead of playing for four hours on each of those days, it might make more sense for me to play for eight hours against the worst players, and only three hours on the other days.

I am not a huge fan of time limits on poker sessions. (At least not self-imposed ones; many times you have to leave for other reasons. I get that.) I think if you have the flexibility to do so, you should be able to quit at any point and to stay for as long as the game is good and you are playing well. Like it or not, we are not always in the mode of playing our A+ game. So I think it is wise to capitalize on those times when we are.

So, that's my two cents regarding setting limits. I hope it was as good for you as it was for me, but as The Wife can attest, it probably wasn't. Nevertheless, I would sum up by saying that I think stop-losses are good, but winning targets and time limits may not be (though I am guilty of setting win targets myself). See ya next time.