The Lazarus Line

I hit the felt last night on my 78th hand. Looking at the bar chart of my stack size over the course of the session, the downward trend is very conspicuous. I wasn't playing well, but I wasn't playing that poorly, either; I just couldn't get anything going. In hindsight, I should have realized at some point that my night was not going to turn around, and quit before I hit the felt.

I've written before about poker death spirals. I want to crystallize that thinking with a neo neo. Thus "The Lazarus Line". The Lazarus Line is the percentage of your starting stack amount below which your chip stack must not fall. If at any point your stack does fall below it, your best bet is to quit playing right then, since only a Lazarus-like (i.e., highly unlikely) chip rebound can save you at that point.

This concept borrows from baseball's "Mendoza Line", defined by Wikipedia as follows:

"The Mendoza Line takes its name from the shortstop Mario Mendoza's lifetime batting average of .215. It is baseball slang for the threshold of incompetent hitting."

My current feeling is that the Lazarus Line is around .22, quite close to the Mendoza Line.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 78 hands and saw flop:
- 7 out of 10 times while in big blind (70%)
- 11 out of 12 times while in small blind (91%)
- 41 out of 56 times in other positions (73%)
- a total of 59 out of 78 (75%)
Pots won at showdown - 2 of 8 (25%)
Pots won without showdown - 5

delta: $-40,000
balance: $1,610,469