Does Stop-Win Have Place in Online Poker: Discussion

You often hear about stop-loss in the stock market and poker world, but EVERY single response to a stop-win poker query advises against it. Why? The first response out of the gate is always “Why walk away from a profitable table”? Well, honestly, how many times have all of us fellow degens kicked ourselves in the butt for not leaving while we were ahead? Especially in a game with such high variance. I think you’d be injecting a level of self control and discipline by doing so. Most grinders already set time limits on their sessions, so why not a win limit? It’s almost impossible to do so at home games without being labeled a hit & run player, but I see no issues doing it online.

There can also be the situation where the money you’ve won has become a serious percentage of your bankroll. At that point, worth leaving because you probably are very exploitable playing scared in big pots. This happened to me when I decided to take a shot at 2/5 with a 5K bankroll. I bought in for 500 and ran it up to 2.7K. At that point, I should have left, but I ended up giving a bunch back because I played stressed out (ended up leaving with 2K, so not terrible).

My argument would be that even when the conditions are good, your mental abilities will slowly deteriorate the longer you play. This is true of anyone, but it also gets worse the older you get, or if you aren’t in good physical health. So while the conditions remain good, your abilities go down the longer the session goes on. People need to learn to listen to their bodies and see the signs that they aren’t at their best, and walk away before they get too tired.

Whatever the case, you shouldn’t keep playing if you start worrying about losing the money you’ve made. If hitting a certain threshold is going to cause you to start playing scared, passive or overly-protective then you’re better off cashing out and returning another time to ensure it doesn’t impact your play.

Stop loss prevents catastrophic loss. Stop win prevents significant win. If you quit every good game early, you hit a stop loss every 2 games and then stop winning the third game.. rather than 2 stop losses and a huge win. The point is to quit bad games early and stay in the good games.

The math of EV is driven by the tail end of your sessions since they start at approximately the same buy-in. Your stop\-loss is how many buy-ins you set, but your stop-win being bounded only hurts your EV. You can choose lower variance and cash out when you reach some stack depth if you no longer understand +EV strategies like you probably do for your start stack. But if you think you are +EV in the game, having deeper stacks benefits you and cutting out is a form of playing with scared money.

You want to be setting hourly goals not dollar amount goals, if you’re up but haven’t hit your hourly goal it likely means you’re playing well in a good game and should stay. but there are situations where you’re up and hit your hourly goal or you’re up but know you’re playing badly and it’s reasonable to walk away. it’s about being able to assess if your quality of play can continue or if you run the risk of getting fatigued/making bad decisions about your play (or this may mean you get a bad night of sleep and won’t be able to play as well tomorrow). your win/loss amounts shouldn’t be impacting your decision if you’re playing at the top level, but your hours of play should impact that decision.

It’s not just about walking away from a profitable table. You do that almost every time you leave, but you have to leave at some point. Winning players make money and overcome variance through volume, so placing restrictions on yourself which limit your volume is not good. If you’re a degen leaving once ahead to lock in a win is not a bad idea at all. If you’re jesting a bit when you use that term and you’re really trying to talk about serious, winning players, both stop wins *and* stop losses are somewhat bad practice. There is nothing wrong with going up 5 buy-ins, punting it all back and booking a breakeven or a losing session, as long as you were +EV the whole time. There is something wrong with cutting your table-hours in half because you are leaving early all the time after hitting your stop win or loss.