Exit strategy or, when to take your chips and run

I am, for all intents, new to no limit ring games as I haven't played them in years and when I did I paid no mind to whether I was winning or losing. My question is one I never quite answered for limit either, but here I am wondering specifically about NL.

How do you plan your exit strategy at a table? I would assume you don't want to leave so long as you are winning, but how do you decide that it's time to go? On limit I would leave a table if I lost 25% of the winnings I had made or if I dropped below 75% of my initial buy-in. Obviously, in NL these are extremely tight numbers.

Two examples from today:

On a 2NL table I won a huge hand and was up $1.71. By the time I left the table (due to external forces) I was down to a $1.01 profit. While I'm quite happy with a dollar, the extra .70 would have helped make up for the second table.

On the second 2NL table, I was up about .93 when I lost $2.00 to higher trips, leaving me with .93 on the table. The two players to my left were both completely nuts, reraising almost every hand or going all-in on the flop even with absolutely nothing. I hung on for about half an hour with no real profit or loss, then busted out on a 2-outer to one of these two.

I have been playing following fx's guidelines to 2NL so my play is fairly tight and aggressive, but I don't bluff or fish. I am thinking that perhaps, given the position of being first to act in front of two loose cannons, I should have left that table sooner rather than hoping to get all-in and double up. On the first table, I really don't know what I should have done.

Any thoughts? (wish I could link Kenny Rogers here ...)

If the table is good I will hang around. Ideally you want loose players to your right and tight players to your left, if im going to be mostly OOP against the loose players then I will change tables. If I think that there are better tables available I will leave and join those tables. Futhermore you should have autorebuy on as you want to be playing with a full stack at all times, so that when you get a big hand you can get paid the maximum amount.

YES.




I feel like I've said this a thousand times but I'll go again so I'm not spamming too much.

You sit at a table and after a couple rounds you can tell if it's a decent table or not. If it's a good table then stay, if it's a bad one, leave and find a better one. That's how we start.

So we have a few tables going and we're playing well. We keep playing until one of these things is no longer true. If one of our tables becomes a bad one, we leave and open a new one. If we start to get tired and we're no longer playing well, we should leave all our tables and come back later. If we start to get tilted and can't shake it off after a couple hands then we leave all our tables. If we get a bad beat and feel like we're about to rage tilt, leave straight away. If we're up loads of money and the tables are good then keep playing and take even more money.


Basically it doesn't matter if you're up or down in or out or shaking it all about. It's about how well you are playing and how good the tables are. If you aren't playing well because of tilt then leave, simple as.

The only thing I would suggest, especially for newer players is a stop loss. People tend to play worse when they're down a couple buyins (everyone's limit is different) but say you know that you play worse when you're down a couple buyins, well set that as your limit and always quit as soon as you hit it. It stops those -10buyin days resulting from tilt.



A few other hints. Auto top up to 100bb's. Don't focus on results so much, it's all one long session whether you're up on one table or not. In cash games you can rebuy, so don't treat it as busting or something like that, you're making decisions and using money as a tool, you won't bust because you should be able to reload and keep playing at all times.

stack someone for 100bbs
Run
Profit.

FYP
My strategy - works perfectly every time.

Wrong mindset. Every hand you ever played or will ever play all belong to the same session. There's no such thing as an exit strategy.

The only thing that might be relevant is the depth of your stack at any given table. If it gets too deep for your confort, you should rathole.

I guess I was asking the question the wrong way. Perhaps if I rephrased it as, how do you determine that a table has "turned" and no longer optimal for play - or not optimal in the first place?

It seems to me that if you have gained $1.50 on a $2.00 buy-in and then lose $1.00 of it in nickels and dimes, there probably were some signs that you could get a better return on a different table. Or if there are two different players who together reraise your first five raises (extreme, but possible) it might be better to seek a softer table.

I understand that it's all one long session, but given that (at least on Stars) you generally have 15-20 tables to choose from at any given time it seems that you would be looking to find the tables that offer the best return. I suppose this gets easier as you build info on players and start color coding to make assessing a table quicker.

Perhaps I am applying too much stock market thought to it, but I see each table as a unit and my job is to extract the maximum profit with the minimum loss from each unit - in the market you often place stop-loss orders to prevent a major loss and there are investors who recommend an upward stop-loss as well to protect profit.

A market portfolio is the same as a poker bankroll, but each stock within that portfolio is assessed and managed differently. I would not hold on to a stock that had gained 75% and then lost 60% of that simply because "it's all one portfolio", I would want to know if there were factors that meant a likely further loss. In poker, these factors might include a table swinging from mostly tight/passive to mostly loose/aggressive, tiredness or distraction by me, or other things I'm not aware of.

Sorry for the ramble, it's early ...

Do you use HEM or PT3?

How much you won or lost at a given table is entirely irrelevant to determining your edge over that table. Short term results are so heavily influenced by luck that there's no way the skill component of your results at a given table can be anything but hidden below short term luck.

Leave when it's no longer profitable for you to stay.

The only real questions are:

Am I playing well? When I suffer a bad beat does it affect my play?

If you shove preflop with AA and villain calls with 44 and flops a set you played well.

If you call a pre-flop shove with 44 and flop a set and stack AA you played badly.

It is as important to analyze the hands that you played poorly and got lucky as it is to analyze the hands you played properly and got unlucky.

I had a session yesterday where I lost twice with AA (once when villain shoved 44 and I called and he flopped a set), once with KK, once with AKS and once with AKo. I reviewed the hands afterwards and considered stack sizes, villain's assumed range and my equity against and dead money in the pot and realized I made the correct moves in each hand, I just got unlucky. I was not the least it discouraged. I ended my session on schedule, made dinner for the family, did the dishes and sat back down to crush souls.

For me personally, I have decided that it is best for me to leave a table when I sit there with twice the starting stack. So for 5nl that would be $10. The reason for this is because of my own ill discipline, I find that when I'm up more money on a table, I start to naturally play looser and more risky which ends up losing me money.

I agree that table selection is important, but for someone like myself, it makes sense to leave if we hit a certain profit mark.