Long is wrong

I'm pretty sure I first heard the phrase "long is wrong" on an ESPN poker show; it means that if you take a long time when it's your turn to act, you increase your likelihood of making the wrong decision. I can't confirm or deny the truth of this poker aphorism in its original context, but I can confirm its truth in another context -- namely, session length. The more hands you play, the greater the likelihood that your session will be a losing one.

One of the data points I capture per session is the number of hands, except in the rare cases where the PokerStars software hiccups and resets its counters midway through a session, or in the rarer cases when I forget to save the session stats. I've long maintained a MySQL database containing my starting balance, delta, and ending balance, but I never bothered to include the number of hands. Tonight I added that data for the Texas Hold'em hands I've played since switching back to Hold'em from seven card stud. The results are interesting, but not surprising; the average session length for the 16 losing sessions is a whopping 64.19, whereas the average session length for the 19 winning sessions is a toned and slender 34.68.

I need to learn to call it a night somewhere around the 35-40 hand mark, regardless of how I'm doing.

On Monday night, I played 89 hands; it's almost superfluous to mention that it was a losing session.

delta: $-15,100
balance: $869,038