I had coffee with Tommy Angelo last week. I love treating Tommy because he orders regular drip coffee, black, thank you. He even orders the small – then he goes back and gets a refill. That way he gets two small cups of steaming hot coffee instead of half a large cup of hot coffee and half a cup of tepid coffee. Even if I throw the barista a couple of bucks for the refill, Tommy’s a cheap date.
As usual, we didn’t talk about poker so much, though we did giggle at the idea of modeling Oaks regular D.D. in a solver and wondered what the game theory optimal strategy against him would be.
But mostly we talked about family and friends, medical miracles – the usual things.
Standing up
Tommy has said enough pithy things in his poker writing career to fill a book. Which is convenient because he did write a book – it’s called Elements of Poker, and it improved Phil Galfond’s golf game. It was when Tommy and I were standing up to leave that I thought about standing up, and what Tommy said about it:
Walking away is easy. The hard part is standing up.
–T. Angelo
Any poker player who has ever been stuck in a good game, ahead piles in a bad game, or anywhere in between, recognizes this. Of course, this only applies to cash games – in tournament poker, they make you stand up just when you were really starting to have fun. But if you’re a cash game player, you could be forgiven for thinking that they pour super-glue on the chairs – it’s hard to stand up.
Painless departure – the session quit timer
A few months ago, I had a couple poker sessions where every fiber of my being said to stand up. Except, ironically, my quads, hamstrings, glutes, and abs – the muscles that do the actual standing.
So I sat. And lost more money.
After that, I realized that I needed to find a way to get the message all the way to my leg muscles. And I came up with the perfect solution: the session quit timer.
A session quit timer could be as trivial as an alarm going off on your phone that says, “Stand up, cash out, and drive carefully on the way home.” Now, when I say “your phone,” I’m being literal, because I sure as hell don’t trust that to work on my phone.
But it’s not as if I can’t be responsible when it really matters. I often pick up my grandchild (the legendary “E-Blast”) at school. If I’m not standing outside their classroom door when the release bell sounds, pause a beat and then start calling hospitals.
I just needed a device that would move my level of session quitting responsibility into the same zip code as “Fourth-grader pick-up.”
Accountability works wonders
I’m in a small poker discussion group on Discord with a handful of trusted friends. We don’t have near the traffic as the cash game poker discussion group on the PokerCoaching Discord (which is an awesome gathering place), but we all know and trust each other.
I set up a thread on that server called “Session Quit Timers.” When I sit down to start a poker session, I post something like:
Usually somebody will drop a thumbs-up or heart on that post. That’s all it takes. Sure enough…
It’s like E-blast is waiting for me at school. And man, I have put this thing to the acid test. Like I have a “No BB past 12:30am” post in that thread, but at 12:15am I am buried in an incredible game. My wife is sound asleep and will have no idea of what time I get home. The Oaks cappuccino machine is now online, and (wait for this…) they’re going to keep dealing cards all night if that’s what the players want.
Doesn’t matter. When the big blind reaches me, if it’s past 12:30am, I’m gone.
The comfort of departure
Somewhat to my surprise, I find it comforting knowing that there’s a hard stop. Because while I could get unstuck in the hour between 12:30am and 1:30am, Tommy, my Discord buddies, and I all know it’s unlikely.
In the new regime, I don’t angst over the demonic calculus of another hour or three of poker against decent sleep, cognitive function the next day, and so on. I know I’m going to make my best poker strategy decisions until that first post-12:30am big blind comes around.
Then I’m going to stand up, cash out, and safely drive home.
Sometimes Tommy is wrong
Sometimes Tommy Angelo is right, but sometimes Tommy doesn’t even know what day it is. It turns out that standing up can be just as easy as walking away.
