There are many things you need to learn in order to be a good poker player, and one of the most important lessons is knowing when it is time to stop playing. There will be times when you really want to keep playing, but you have to get up, while other times you will want nothing more than to leave a game behind but you won’t be able to. This is all part of the process of becoming a world-class player. Anytime that your table has run out of luck or the money isn’t coming your way is a good time to call it quits.

Exhaustion

Playing poker is an intense psychological game that takes tremendous exertion and concentration to play, and there is no doubt that a long session of playing poker will leave you drained. Just look around the table at the end of a long day of playing and you will not see the same level of energy that you started with. Keeping track of the cards, hands, people as well as your own thoughts and feelings will keep you on your toes all day long.

When you start to get tired you cannot play as well as when you are not tired. There are sometimes when it is good to play through fatigue and win even when you are tired. For many people however, this isn’t an option.

Until you have mastered the art of playing cards through your exhaustion, the smartest thing to do when you start to feel tired is to leave the table before you start losing.

After a while you will find that the exhaustion is pushed to the back of your mind and you can continue with your entire concentration on the game, but before that can happen you will need to know when it’s time to call it quits.

This is the time when you should cash in your chips and consider yourself lucky that you got as far as you did. The next time you play you will find that you will be able to play longer, and eventually you won’t notice the fatigue at all because you will be fully concentrating on the game. If you can’t fully get away then at least take a break and let yourself recuperate.

Tilt

Tilt is another good reason to leave the table as it is interfering with your concentration. Anytime you let a previous hand or game bother you instead of putting your full concentration on the game at hand you are on a tilt. This can be dangerous as you will be eager to “make up” your bad hands and may start making poor decisions.

Just like fatigue, it takes a lot of playing to get past tilt. Eventually you will get over it and just realize that poker is a brutal game. After so many bad beats you will just start to accept them and realize that it is going to happen.

Until you start to accept tilt, you must be able to get up and leave a table when you feel yourself get frustrated. Unless you manage to get lucky, there is nothing good that could come from being on tilt. Just get up, walk away and come back after you have cooled down. Playing at that state of mind is going to mess everything up for you. If you are thinking about what happened in the last hand or 100 hands ago, you cannot put your focus towards what is going on now.

There is no tried and true formula for any poker player to know when they should leave the table, but if you are telling yourself “just one more hand” then you are already telling yourself it is time to give up, and should take your own advice before it starts to cost you.

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