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

Session length

Last Friday, I played a long session -- 101 hands. One thing I've noticed about long sessions is that they don't pay; in almost every case, I would have done better to quit earlier. It's hard to quit, though, when you're having fun and haven't played that many hands.

I think there must be some ideal session length, and I know it's way less than a hundred hands. My guess is that it's about thirty five hands. In thirty five hands, you shouldn't be in any danger of hitting the felt, and there's a good chance you'll be dealt some quality hands which you can use to increase the size of your stack.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 101 hands and saw flop:
- 18 out of 20 times while in big blind (90%)
- 22 out of 23 times while in small blind (95%)
- 53 out of 58 times in other positions (91%)
- a total of 93 out of 101 (92%)
Pots won at showdown - 11 of 24 (45%)
Pots won without showdown - 12

delta: $10,400
balance: $912,387