anomaly16

I was coming to the end of a session last night.. I'd run bad early on (AA losing to AK flush) and was $100 below EV but things improved and I was up $100 despite the EV. I was tired and made that horrible decision - "I've been running well in the second half of the session and have a seat at 2 lovely tables so I'll just play a couple more orbits".

The cards started to run colder but yet I still didn't quit. It took me losing almost a full stack at 100NL before I closed the tables. (I'd 3bet with AKs and had 2 callers and stupidly started to bet on a Q high flop with only 1 spade against two fishy calling stations and having got rid of one I pushed on the turn to be called down by KQ and no A came to save my foolishness).

The section about quitting in Elements of Poker came to mind and in particular .. if you have a good session and are X Happy, how much happier are you going to be if you play on a few hands and win a bit more compared to how unhappy you are going to feel if it goes bad as above?

The trouble with quitting decisions is that you might make great quitting decisions most days, but you never have any concrete evidence that it was a good decision to help reinforce good quitting behaviour.

This was definitely a -HAPPY decision and I'll have to watch out more for this in the future. I only ended up down $60 for the day so its probably a good value lesson. Much better to go and donk away $10 at microstakes if I really don't want to quit straight away in situations like this.