Repenting at leisure

There's an old saying, "Marry in haste, repent at leisure". This lesson applies to poker as well; it can be paraphrased, "Be frisky in haste, repent at leisure". When you play poker friskily, you're likely to hit the felt. It generally takes a long time to recover from that, if you can manage it at all. Last night, I hit the felt on hand 17, playing much too friskily. I lost a whopping $41,204 on the hand. I reupped for the max, then settled in for a long climb back. I finally got there on hand 129, when I won a pot worth $100,250 with a queen high flush.

When I started playing online poker, I soon realized that a good way to limit my losses was to quit playing for the night if I ever hit the felt; I made it a rule and a point of honor never to reup. That lasted for a year or so, but finally I got fed up with that rule :-) Was I right to ditch it? I wrote some more utilities to find out. As it turns out, I was right. Here are the numbers:

I've hit the felt at least once in 241 of the 722 sessions of cash game no limit hold'em poker I've played. Had I not reupped a single time, I would have lost a grand total of $10,320,000 in those sessions. However, I did reup in a good number of them, and the total amount of play money I lost in those sessions actually comes out to $9,054,111. So I recouped more than a million play dollars by having the stubbornness to believe that hitting the felt is just a hiccup, and that a big rebound from a big loss is never far away.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 130 hands and saw flop:
 - 9 out of 16 times while in big blind (56%)
 - 12 out of 17 times while in small blind (70%)
 - 61 out of 97 times in other positions (62%)
 - a total of 82 out of 130 (63%)
 Pots won at showdown - 12 of 27 (44%)
 Pots won without showdown - 8

delta: $16,749
cash game no limit hold'em balance: $6,642,132
balance: $9,547,231