Three small things that matter in poker Part 2: Leaving

In days of old it was big things that made the difference between winning and losing poker players; players either knew pot odds, the chance of making a straight draw, and starting hand rankings or they didn’t. In today’s poker world the emphasis has shifted to the little things in poker, as the overwhelming majority of poker players understand the basic concepts of the game that keep them from making huge mistake after huge mistake.

Because of this shift, as poker players we need to look at all of the little things we can do to add to our win-rate, even if by themselves they seem insignificant -after all making 10 changes that each add $1 an hour to your win rate is still $10 an hour!

In this series of articles I’m going to look at three incredibly simple things you can do to increase your win rate. In Part 1 I looked at posting when you enter a game, in Part 2 I will look at leaving before the blinds:

Never leave before the blinds:

Leaving prematurely from a poker table is just as egregious an error as posting your blinds in the first place. Basically the blinds you post are payment for the next round of cards you will be dealt, so if you leave with three more hands to be played before you are once again in the blinds you are basically skipping three free hands of poker!

Let’s do the math on this again to illustrate my point: Suppose you are once again playing in a $10/$20 NLHE game of poker and you leave, on average, three hands early every session. Since it’s costing you $3 per hand to play in this game you are simply handing $9 to your opponents! After 300 sessions your yearly loss from this would be $2,700!!!

The mistake is even more troubling if you are a winning player who averages $1 per hand in profit. In these cases you are not only losing the percentage of your blinds that these hands represent, but also the profit you will earn from these hands in the long-run.

Now imagine if you commit the double whammy of posting early and leaving early: You’d be leaving over $5,000 on the table every single year, basically from impatience.

In the final part of this series I will be taking a look at tipping in brick and mortar card-rooms, and how you’re tipping practices affect your overall profit in the long-run, as well as offering you a few suggestions on how to properly tip the dealers and floor people without giving away the store, so to speak.