Poker Articles

I'm in a Great Game, Mom, Send Money
By Mike Paulle

There is no greater service any of us poker gurus can offer than to help you stop the BIG LOSSES. These are times when you lose 25%-100% of your poker bankroll for the month in one night.

You know what I'm talking about: The "Nightmare" Session. Where you get great cards all night against complete idiots and have every nut hand cracked.

These horrible experiences happen to everyone who's played for more than a couple of weeks. Often there is a drunk or maniac at the table who is raising every hand with garbage and winning gigantic pots with miracle cards on the river.

You, on the other hand, are getting the best starting hands you've had in recent memory and are flopping monsters or monster draws. You can't get off these hands with a gun pointed at your head. You are getting two or three times pot and implied odds on every hand.

In other words it's a typical Nightmare Session.

What makes it a nightmare is that you keep rebuying chips even when you know you shouldn't. How can you stop rebuying? The pots are so big; first it's one pot that would get you even for the night. Then it becomes two pots to break even. Soon, it's three pots.

If you could just catch a short rush, you'd be ok.

But the rush never comes. You get more and more desperate. Your decisions become worse and worse as the pressure to win ONE POT increases. After a while you are playing hands worse than the drunk or maniac, because it's driving you crazy to see them win repeatedly with such bad starting cards.

You can't get yourself to wake up from this nightmare. It's a form of temporary insanity. You swear to yourself that you will give up poker forever if you could just get even.

If none of the above sounds familiar, you have my permission to quit reading this article.

The reason I know so much about your Nightmare Sessions is because they still happen to me once in a great while. I've been able to stop them from happening as often as they used to by tricking myself into behaving rationally.

With experience and thought comes a rational approach to playing poker for money.

When that fails, you have to use trickery to fool yourself into going home with some money left in your pocket.

Since this is, as I've said, the most important lesson any of us can learn from one another I'll devote a couple of articles toward avoiding the Nightmare Session.

For this article I'll concentrate on the classic trick I learned playing the stock market. It works in poker, also. The principle is exactly the same for both stock trading and poker playing.

The name of the principle is: The Stop/Loss.

With the Stop/Loss you count how much money you have budgeted for playing poker and divide that amount by 20. You now know what 5% of your poker bankroll is. Just as you would dump a stock that moved against you 5%, proving that you were wrong about it from the beginning, so a 5% loss of your poker bankroll should convince you that you were wrong about how 'great' this poker evening was. One stock/one session.

When the 5% is lost you dump the session, just as you would a poor performing stock.

That's the rational part. Next time I'll discuss the tricks that will help you stick to your Stop/Loss formula.