Quitting
Posted by Tommy Angelo
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I see a lot of your videos and it seems most people are having issues to quit, not to gamble, to spew (impatience video), sticking to brm etc.
I am completely the opposite (hesitant to start playing, afraid of making mistakes, and therefore overfolding/playing too weak, not trying new lines). Got any words for this? A video would be great too obviously. This is hurting my growth as a player a lot and often I wish I had more if a gambler in me.
play WELL within your BR where you can feel comfortable spewing off at least 500bb before it affects you even the slightest. most people will be more willing to play a lower stake more frequently, and feel less of an attachment to the money if it is less significant to their livelihood. scared money don't make money, so don't be scared...drop stakes and feel better rolled. increase your volume at a stake that you should crush then move up when you have at minimum 4000BB for the next level. that's my advice, but I'm kind of a BR nit.
My last shot was when I had 80BI for the new limit so 160BI for the old one. Even with that I played too nitty. I am a 4bb/100 winner for almost 300k hands now. This all seems solid enough but still I am a chicken...
That said yes, I never feel comfortable even spewing of one buyin so 5 will be a challenge...
That's one of the few poker problems I haven't had, so it's one of my weakest areas when it comes to coaching. But I have worked with at least three pros who would tell you that one of their biggest leaks is simply not getting in enough volume.
I am convinced that the desired changes cannot happen all of a sudden, or even in a year. We're not talking about poker styles. We're talking about personality traits. So I try to help by suggesting small changes that they think are do-able. The idea isn't just to improve results. It's to train in making small changes, for life. So that's my suggestion for you, is to make your objective to make yourself more changeable, by getting in the habit of making little changes that you think up.
Read "Jared tendler: mental Game of poker"
The next question I would ask >>> "How do we then fulfill the wish to increase the gambler in you?".
You say you are hesitant to start playing, afraid of making mistakes etc. What if I offered you, that for your next session I would cover 50% of a potential losing session and double (increase by 100%) any winnings... Do you feel differently about starting to play now?
Your body/mind is pretty talented at adjusting (whether you notice or not), so it only really wants to play when there are more reasons to play than reasons to not play.
So you could now either start increasing the amount of reasons you have for starting to play poker, or decrease the amount of reasons for not playing :) I hope you got less confused there than I. F.ex: what made you excited to play poker when you first started?
Most people look for things we closely relate to poker to increase the amount of reasons there are to play poker like money, the thrill of competition and winning etc. "If I make this much money I can buy this car/house"/whatever. If the money you can earn in a session/day at your stakes is not enough in and of itself to make you excited about starting to play, then perhaps it's time to look for other incentives to start playing (or incentives from other areas outside poker)?
If you don't know where to start, sometimes a seemingly meaningless treat of your choice at the end of a tough day/session can be a good way to slowly start becoming someone that's eager to start playing poker more often and excited to try new lines instead of someone who is often hesitant and afraid.
Tommy's advice on making small do-able changes is an incredibly easy but effective approach I wish I fully understood a long time ago fyi.
Hope that helps,
-spassewr
awesome video. Ill never forget what one of your former students said of you. "Tommy didn't teach me things i wanted to learn, he taught me things i needed to learn."- jay rosenkrantz
Loved the godfather banjo right after Phil talks about automated quitting. Maybe it's just me, but in my head I heard "make him an offer he can't refuse" :)
Big fan of the vids Tommy! I feel paradoxically the better I am at away from the table skills the more I get out of these vids even though I have less I need to learn. When I was really terrible at a lot of these skills I was so much more apt to think of this stuff as bullshit. I wonder how to bridge that gap, maybe it's just impossible; have to burn yourself before you fear the fire etc.
Hi Ben!
A somewhat related story...
A couple years after the boom, a player contacted me about coaching who was brand new to the game, and serious about making it a career. We talked a bit about poker pain and poker tilt, and basically I said to get good value from my coaching, you have to have done a fair amount of tilting.
The call ended cordially, and the next day she wrote to thank me for my time. In her letter she wrote, "I want you to know that I am a 50-year-old lesbian, and you are the first person to tell me I haven't suffered enough."
Great vid tommy! After your vid in the next two sessions I quit at or near my peak.. Game I play if you're up have to call 30. Once I felt the vibe change called my 30 won an extra 800 and went home at my peak for the night. I always felt like there was more dollars out there when I was playing well. But dollars there will be more tomorrow especially if I finish on a good note
Fantastic video! With all of the production, music, and expert commentary.
Just wondering, is there a default amount of big blinds you would usually stop at per session, or per day, if playing no limit or plo? And if you go past your stop loss and quit, do you like to take a day off the next day. How long does it normally take until you are ready to play again?
I'll answer that past and present because I've changed so much. Today when I play, I have no stop losses at any level. I'm always way over-rolled at the table, and I play stakes that are very small relative to my net worth.
Back when I was grinding full time, tilt and bad quitting were serious problems for me, and my bankroll was never what it needed to be to make me feel secure, so I used every kind of stop loss imaginable. The actual number of buy-ins I might stop at in any given session depended on too many variable to go into. But the use of stop losses, at all levels, was standard day to day stuff.
Sometimes yes. That's just another level of stop loss the way I see it.
My typical poker funk lasted three days.
You've outdone yourself yet again, well done!
Wou Daniel Devore is a beastttt!!! i like his comments a lot!
Re: Dvoress' comments, I don't think it's about reducing the variability of your betting strategy so much as increasing your confidence in it. Where there is self-doubt, there is tilt. Where there is self-confidence, there is not (imo). You can have a very high-variance betting strategy, but if you have a lot of confidence in the decisions you're making, you're going to be far less prone to tilt compared to someone with weaker technical skills.
Obviously it's different if the source of your tilt comes from arbitrary psychological anchor points, i.e. your net worth at the start of your session. But it's easier to train yourself to overcome this rationally by recognising it as a cognitive flaw.
I'm a little like the student who said he only plays two hours a day. I mean, I play more than that, but I don't play as much as I plan to or I think I should. It's always a struggle to force myself to play more.
After watching this video and hearing Phil, James, and Daniel's comments, I think part of the reason is I simply don't love poker the way some other pros do. My path to poker didn't start with playing all the time because I loved it. If not for the money, I would play poker rarely - if ever.
Which isn't to say I hate it or I'm always miserable when I'm playing. I like poker well enough. But I don't have that deep love constantly pushing me to play.
Additionally, my two biggest weaknesses as a poker player are fear and laziness. Obviously those both push me to play less.
I've now gone from being an online pro to a live pro, back to being an online pro. Once I got used to it, I found it easier to play long hours in live poker. Once you've made it to the casino, all you have to do is physically keep your butt in the seat, and you get a lot of hours. Online there is always an (easy) option of quitting.
Confidence also plays a role: I reached a point in live poker where I had been playing in the same games for a long time and was extremely confident in my edge. This made the game a lot let stressful. I think I often quit because of stress, or because stress makes me tilt, which then causes me to quit. For awhile sitting at the (live) poker table was the least stressful part of my life.
Well, maybe that's some insight into the mentality of someone who quits too soon and too often.
DirtyD,
While I agree that some pros simply love poker more than others and thus have an advantage, how much you love poker is not a constant and to a large extent under your control.
Poker is an insanely complicated, intricate and diverse game. If you feel like you don't love poker enough, find something within the huge subset of things that make up poker, and learn to love poker through that. If you like math and game theory, find spots where you can get the slightest edge on your opponents and get off on knowing the solution to that spot better than everyone else. Hate math? Learn all there is about human behavior and go crush live poker. Feel like you're at a predisposed disadvantage to perceiving human behavior and not good at math? Play a game with a small player pool and learn the intricacies of all of the regulars and take the best notes out of everyone in that player pool.
Given how many things make up the game of poker, I just can't be convinced that there isn't something within it that will make you tic. I speak from personal experience - I started having significantly more success and way less motivational issues when I stopped approaching poker from the aspect of making money and switched my focus to finding every possible edge on my opponents.
You talked about meditation in your last video, can you recommend how I can get into it? Good websites or books etc
The book I recommend to every beginner I've coached is called Wherever You Go, There You Are.
I do plan to do one or more RIO videos about meditation. About how to do it, how to keep it going, common questions and objections, and guest appearances from RIO coaches who either meditate, or wish they did. Stay tuned!
Tommy
hi tommy/guys, i am Patrick and i play live 2/5.To simplify things, i pay 30$ per hour for 30 hands on average or 1$ per hand, plus 25$ daily expenses that i like to call (casino expenses: fuel, parking, water,entrance fee ect....) even thou i have a schedule, i have a problem with quitting because of the below variables:
every cigarette is costing me 3 hands or 3$
every tilt walk/ meditation walk on the terrace is costing 1 orbit 9$
bad beat stories in the toilet :) 3 $
pipi 2$ ect.....
my approach towards the game and mindset are very good and i am a winning player with an elite average per hour, but my problem with quitting must be remedied, i play to many hours and my game drops to c game my perceptiveness is low and my focus level is ridiculous.
i wish i can grind for 11hours of full Agame daily /full casino session, and go home with the employees. 11hours are 330 hands that online players can cap much much faster.
does anyone else have a similar problem with live?
is it humanly possible to grind this much?
can my endurance of maintaining Agame be worked up to this much?
can i delete my spews caused by overplaying and ffing my hourly rate?
what do you think mr tommy and guys?
I think you should stop thinking of your breaks as costing you money. You should think of your breaks as making you money because the only way to play well all the time putting in the kind of hours you are is to take a shit-ton of breaks in your life. If you think of your breaks as a liability, you're screwed, mentally, because you won't be able to take good breaks and love your breaks.
Another adjustment I think you should make is to stop comparing online poker to live poker in any way whatsoever, but especially, in your case, the difference in hands-per-hour. Just pretend online poker never existed. Poker was doing just fine before that. There was never a thought in anyone's mind that "this game is too slow."
Merci tommy, ur one of my favorite poker brains and i can say proudly that i read most of ur materials in the past years and it helped me alot, i think quitting is a reciprocal edge if applied properly. can u make more videos oriented to live cash game and what real old school hardcore grinders go thru. also if u can advise some links and videos about live grinding , runitonce is an amazing site but its all about gto , technical, 6 max online, online online all the way...... no human aspect , traits of players and behavior, tells, betting patterns and lines, table dynamics ect....
i am at minute 6 and the music is making me tilt and i am close to quit this video. lets see if this has a deeper sense.
absurd good thx alot to the poet
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