Knowing when not to play

Made a nice play last night...... I didnt Play.

I try to play everynight and grind out a bank roll. But it never fails if i sit down at the computer and Im tired or my mind is somewhere else, I will no doubt have a losing session.

So last night after I'd already worked 10+ hours in the day. I sat down at the computer and decided No, Im not going to keep doing my past mistakes. I pushed away from the computer and went and watched the WSOP and probably saved myself $10 to $20.

Anyone else had to find this discipline the hard way like me?

Thanks

Good job!

I need to work on this too!

Yes, I learned that you should not play when tired in a live cash game. I started the long session with some good wins and in a few hours was up HKD 2600 (About USD 400), but was a bit too greedy as the table was so fishy that I didn't stop when I was getting tired which ended up with me being about HKD 1200 (Approx. USD 200) in the red.

It is quite hard to analyze what percentage of the money was lost due to being tired because I was getting somewhat of a cold deck, but I am sure that being tired exagerated the effects of the cold deck.

Also as you learn in Physics you want to minimize uncertainty through lowering the amount of variables when you are doing experiments. In poker this means it is much easier to see why you lost or won money when you know that you were alert and on your constant good game.

A couple of things to watch out for imo are playing when too tired, and trying too hard to get back what you lost because of a bad beat. Good for you that you took a break.

WRT to WSOP, you could check out pokerstars.tv online section and watch how successful online players play situations. Good stuff to be seen/learnt there. I always catch the sunday million replay with hands revealed.

Want to talk about Schrödinger’s poor cat again?

It happens to me too, especially trying to unlock the bonus. It's hard not to play when you want to, but you know your mind won't be fully there.

Yeah, this bit me hard last night. I was tired and it was late, but I wanted to clear out my FT bonus before it expires next week, and we're leaving for vacation mid-week so I don't have a lot more time. I used to play strictly cash on Stars, but switched up and have been doing pretty well in MTT/SnG's at FT lately. But that doesn't clear a bonus very fast (not with the time I have to play, and I don't multi-table tourneys).

So last night I fired up 4 tables of 50NL during happy hour, figuring that if I just played TAG and kept about even, I'd clear my FT bonus pretty quickly and end up ahead. Well, my next mistake was turning on auto-rebuy to auto-top me constantly, and not being used to it. So I'm playing along 4-tabling after being away from cash for awhile, and am pretty much card dead for most of the session. When I did have a hand, it was a small-mid PP or unimproved overcards facing a coordinated flop and a lot of action, so I folded a lot of those postflop and just bled off the chips. I seldom limp a pot unless the odds are staggering and I have passive players behind me, so whenever I saw a flop the pot tended to be sizable. Sometimes I would chase or call them down figuring they couldn't make a hand every time, but of course when I barreled through, they did. I lost count of how many traps I fell into. The accumulation of damage wasn't obvious because of the auto-rebuy. By the time I actually looked at my balance, I had spewed about 5 buy-ins in less than 2 hours -- way more than what I had left to clear on the bonus! Honestly in the long term view it's not a huge deal, and was barely a dent in my BR, but I'm just not used to spewing that much in a short session. And being tired already, it put me on tilt something fierce. I had to force myself to stop playing at that point and resist the urge to try and recover, which was the smartest play I made all night. Lesson learned.

Think I'll forget the rest of the bonus and put off 50NL again until I win/cash another MTT/SnG...

Just like any other activity, you have to be prepared to play poker.
Unless you are just playing for fun, you need to have the right mental attitude for sitting down either in a live game or online.

Whenever I get the urge to play online, I first make sure I am ready both mentally and physically.
Am I tired from work, have I been drinking, am I just bored?
Then no way am I playing.

Also as someone mentioned, FT has the auto top option in cash games and it is only useful for FTP not for you!!
Turn this option off.
If you need to rebuy, then do it but don't allow the FT software to do it for you, especially when multi-tabling several cash games.

Just take a break and play at a later date thats the smartest thing you can do.