The camouflaged quit signal

Poker is a game of pattern recognition, but the patterns are not always, or even often, obvious. Sometimes they only appear after the fact, when you stare at the data long enough. I've never written about the camouflaged quit signal before, but I've thought about it, off and on, for quite a while. What do I mean by the camouflaged quit signal? For those of you who have ever done any day trading, which I tried my hand at recently, it's the poker equivalent of a particular trend line scenario. Last night's bar chart illustrates it quite well. There's a clear down trend in the first half of the session. That's followed by a period of prosperity above the trend line which lasts about a third of the session. After that, in the final sixth of the session, the trend line is rejoined. The correct play to make, I now believe, is to quit as soon as the trend line is rejoined, since rejoining it bodes continued descent and eventual bankruptcy. The trouble with this advice is that unless you keep a live bar chart up during your session, you're not going to realize when the trend line has been rejoined.

Of course, this theory is somewhat flawed; I came up with it based on a specific scenario whose outcome was already known, so it won't necessarily apply in the general case. I'm sure there are many times when I didn't hit the felt after rejoining a downward trend line. Unfortunately for me, last night wasn't one of them :-)

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 76 hands and saw flop:
 - 9 out of 10 times while in big blind (90%)
 - 6 out of 10 times while in small blind (60%)
 - 28 out of 56 times in other positions (50%)
 - a total of 43 out of 76 (56%)
 Pots won at showdown - 3 of 11 (27%)
 Pots won without showdown - 4

delta: $-50,000
cash game no limit hold'em balance: $5,127,829
balance: $7,484,782