There are a few things that are essential to know when it comes to really winning at poker. One of these essentials is knowing when to throw in the towel and knowing when to stick with it.

When one is winning over and over again, it can be very easy to continue playing indefinitely; eventually, the games starting going sour and you realize at the end that the winning streak ended long ago.

However, you didn’t notice that the streak was really over because you were so busy thinking that just one more hand would turn things around for you. It’s easy to let this become an ingrained pattern and before you know it, you’ve been saying for an hour that each hand was going to turn the tables in your favor. Sometimes the tables are just not in your favor.

Sometimes the cards that you need are just nowhere to be found. One of the finer talents of top poker players is knowing where the fine line is between being on the cusp of turning the tables back in your favor and being on a downright losing streak. Once you’re on a losing streak, it’s time to cut your losses instead of trying to win them back. If you cut your losses, you will end up losing less in the end.

The bottom line is that, in the end, it’s all about how much you’ve managed to control your game. Poker is not about luck, it’s about control. From your cards to your face, poker is all about having control of the table and control of yourself. Getting caught up in the moment might feel like the right thing to do, but it almost always ends in loss. In your winning moments, being caught up in the excitement is fun; however, when you’re losing, getting caught up in the moment means that you end up losing even more. Of course, nobody actually wants to lose more, losing more and more is only a result of poor judgment…and sometimes a result of getting caught up in the moment.

If you’ve been playing for a while on one night and you’ve tripled the amount that you went into the game with—that might be a good moment to decide to quit for the night. You’ll be living with significantly more than you came in with. Another option is to keep playing indefinitely, which usually means winning a little bit more, but also losing a little bit more. Sometimes, you’ll end up with tripled money, sometimes though; your profits will fall back from having tripled to only having doubled. Then you should have cut yourself off at an earlier point, but of course you cannot go back and change it in hindsight.

If you’re in a losing streak, and you’ve got more money than you started with even though you’ve been losing pretty steadily for quite some time, it’s time to cut your losses. At this point, you’ll not have actually lost money; you just won’t have won too awfully much. This is a much better moment to al it quits than continuing to play on and then in the end being left with absolutely nothing, which is a lot less than you entered the game with at the beginning of the evening. Cutting one’s losses does not always mean defeat; very often, cutting one’s losses means being smart enough to know that you’ve played your game and that the game is over. Poker is unique in that sense, you can bow out when you want; you don’t have to stick around and get slaughtered. Take the easy road once in a while.