How long should a poker session be?

For cash game players, session length varies a lot — from a quick 30 minutes online to several days at a live table. It usually depends on a delicate and unpredictable mix of enjoyment, profitability and schedule. And once making money over the long run becomes the priority, it gets genuinely hard to know when to stop.

So why does it matter?

After 7 hours at a live table and a decent profit, it's not always obvious whether an extra hour is worth it. You might be a bit tired, you might be running card dead, maybe you feel like playing a hand or two for fun. But it might be a good moment to stop, and maybe you should have done so an hour ago.

When you get tired you're prone to make more mistakes, simply because you're not in a position to follow all the action. You can miss some action, miss a tell, or just take a sub-optimal decision that costs you right away.

What one tired mistake actually costs

A single mistake from inattention, or an unconscious loosening of your game, can have a surprisingly big impact on your hourly. Here's the arithmetic:

Cash games are forgiving, because you can quit as soon as you're not playing your best game. Doing the same at the end of a tournament is another story — a bad move there can send you to the rail early and make you miss the big payouts of the final table.

The slower costs

Mistakes will also increase your risk of tilting, and you want to avoid tilt at any cost. A single tilt session is never good for your results or your mental health, and for some players it builds up over time and ends up with a pretty disastrous impact on the bankroll.

Over the long run, especially if poker is your main source of income, there's also a lack of motivation and burnout waiting for you. Those take a real toll on you and on your bankroll, so it's worth being cautious about it.

More often than not it's a good thing to stop even if you still want to play. You'll be extra motivated for the following session.

And limiting a session gives you time back. Time to:

• Work on your game and get better;
• Get in a better condition for the next sessions, with whatever works for you: working out, getting more sleep, meditating;
• Enjoy your time doing something else entirely.

When should you stop, then?

There are a lot of signs telling you it's time to leave the table. If you recognize a few of these, it's probably worth asking yourself whether this is a good moment to go.

Some of them are about you:

• Plain fatigue. You start to yawn, you feel uncomfortable on your chair, you just want to sleep.
• You're constantly distracted by what's happening around the table and you're having trouble following all the action.
• You've just lost a big pot and you can feel the next twenty minutes won't be your best poker.

And some are about the game:

• The whale at the table went bust or left.
• The field got tough and the game won't be very profitable anymore.
• You've played a significant amount of time, made a decent profit, and you're happy to leave with that result.

One more, if you have a heavy schedule of 8-hour sessions five or more days a week: try playing one hour less every day and see how it goes for you. You can set an alarm to remind you to leave the table.

Finding your own number

Everything above is judgement. The measured version needs only two things you're already recording: how long each session ran, and what it made.

Track enough sessions and a shape appears — your hourly holding up to a certain point, then dropping off after it. That point is yours, and it moves with the game, with live versus online, and with the time of day you play.

We compute it for you, and as far as we know we're still the only tracker that does. The optimal duration report takes your own sessions and shows where your results stop improving with time played, separately for live and online. The hourly efficiency report does the same thing by time of day. There's also a stop notification: once the app knows your optimal duration, it simply tells you when you've played enough — nothing to set up, you just get notified when the time has come.

Two things worth mentioning, though. It needs a history of around 50 sessions before it can say anything. And if you're a losing player the app won't calculate a duration at all, because your priority is probably on the technical side rather than on the clock.

Keep in mind too that poker results are subject to variance, and so is your optimal duration. Take it as a reminder that playing as long as you can every time you sit at a table is probably never a great idea, rather than as a hard number.

Decide before you sit down

Picking a limit at the table doesn't really work, because at hour nine you're the last person qualified to judge whether hour ten is a good idea. Pick the number in advance, from your own data, and then make it easy to respect: set an alarm, plan something afterwards, agree on it with whoever drove you there.

And treat it as a reminder rather than a law. If you're two hours in and playing badly, nothing obliges you to stay. Leaving early is always fine.

So take your time management seriously, it has a real impact both short and long term. There's always a point where playing more won't produce a positive effect, and there's probably a better way to allocate those hours so you get better results when you do play. Think about what you want to achieve in poker, and go get those chips!

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