Let us say for instance that the poker gods have decreed that you are about to endure a very big 200 big bet downswing at $10-$20 limit Texas Hold’em poker which equates to $4000. Let us also say that you are multi-tabling online so that kind of swing will happen over a much smaller time frame.

Each and every one of us has a personal pain threshold be it physical pain or mental pain. Let us also say that in this instance our personal pain threshold when related to poker losses is in the region of $2000 meaning that once you have lost this amount of money that it actually starts to hurt you.

Why not stop at say $2000 and give yourself some time to get over that loss and get it totally out of your system. If you simply plough on through this barrier then not only do you risk playing badly and tilting but as we have already stated, the gap between you and your opponents widens or narrows, whichever the case may be.

But if chopping that same $4000 negative swing into two manageable $2000 stints that are separated by enough time for you to absorb the first one then this could just end up saving you an amount of money that was much greater than the $4000 should you have ended up tilting even more money away.

So while cutting your losses in the trading world is done for a totally different reason, it is still worth remembering that cutting your losses is a tactic that can be applied to poker as well. Because if you are prone to playing badly and tilting when you are losing then fragmenting those losses can actually lead to you cutting your losses.

Letting the Profits Run

We have already touched on this above but it still staggers me just how many people quit an online poker game just because they get in front. The reasons why people do this are psychological in nature. Deeply embedded within people is the desire to experience something positive in life and poker winnings are indeed that….positive.

So when Joe gets a couple of hundred ahead in his usual $3-$6 game of No Limit then he quits because he likes the idea of recording a win in his diary because it makes him feel good. Yet two players in this game were throwing an absolute party and tilting badly but yet he left the best game that he has been in all year and all because he wanted to clock a win.

Joe was winning money so he was feeling good, his opponents were losing money and were possibly feeling bad, he also has a skill advantage over his opponents so why in gods name is he leaving the game?

Well we already know the reason why but that does not stop us from asking the question again all the same. People crave positive experiences in life and shun or try to ignore negative ones. This is a major reason why many players play on when they are losing in an effort to try and get the money back. They don’t want to end the session losing which is a crazy thing to try and do in poker as the game will simply not allow you to win every single session.

Of course the type of person that I am referring to here is the one who quits the game purely and simply in order to clock a win. I am not referring to anyone who leaves a great game for valid reasons like being tired or late for an appointment or some other commitment.

But in my experience, too many poker players do just the exact opposite of what they should be doing. Instead of cutting their losses and letting their profits run they end up running their losses all the way to tilt and cutting short their wins….a recipe for disaster.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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