@Johnny what do you mean 2k hours? How long were you break-even? If you say anything over 400 hours, you're probably not very good.

400 hour breakeven is not at all unreasonable. I recently had one just shy of 400 hours. I admit I probably played badly at times. Maybe you wouldn't consider me a good player, either. It's hard to play your A-game when you've made no money in 300 hours and sit down to drop a buy-in immediately.

This formula represents how long it could take before you can have a certain confidence of having profit.

n0 = (z*SD/WR)^2

If your SD:WR ratio is 10, which seems pretty standard, that means 400 hours of breakeven is a -2 SD event, which is about 1/40, but that's for any given 400 hour stretch. Cherry pick your worst 400 hour stretch over your entire sample and it becomes significantly more likely, but I don't know how to figure that out off of the top of my head.

About 1/1000 10BB/h crushers with a SD of 100BB/h will not make money in a given 1000 hour stretch.

I just don't see anyone good winning 10bb/hr+ going on 400 BE stretches. You know why? It's rare and takes huge STD to accumulate if your true win-rate is 10bb or higher.

It's got to be something very small like <1% chance (something like 99.8%-99.9%) If you have massive STD. I can see this becoming a lot more common.

For example, something like 200bb/100 you are probably like 5% chance at having 400hr B/E stretches. Which is a lot if you put in serious volume, but still very unlikely. Add 1000 hours and you're probably talking like 99.5% chance of positive win-rate.

Something like 300bb/100 would give you a massive 13.5%+ chance and at 1000 hours you would be looking at roughly 4%. Which is very large.

If you're winning something like 15bb/hr just stone cold crushing with massive STD you're chance of breaking even @ 300bb/100 STD is <1%. Put this down to 150bb/100 and you have 0%.

Now if we have some tougher/deep games and 500bb/100 win a 10bb/hr win-rate you're talking 15% chance of breaking even @ 1000 hours. @400 you'd be roughly 25%.


Put your win-rate down to 5bb/hr and you'd be talking 37% of the time @500/100 over 400 hours.

I think you are clearly a good player browni and enjoy your contributions to the forum.

I'm not sure how long my breakeven stretch was/is at 2/5 but I know it's north of 200 hours. My first 1500 hours of live poker I didnt know what losing was, so its easy to lose sight of things when that happens.

Closer to something somewhat usable, my last 2k hands at 10NL I won 10 buy ins first 1k then lost 10 buy ins second 1k. 10NL is the closest game to live 2/5. And 2k hands is about 65 hours of live poker.

I told my gf that the first 1k hands was the sickest heater I've ever experienced (lol). Not to be blinded/jaded by stakes, just objectively viewing my results, it was crazy. I was getting dealt AA on 3 tables at once, flopping every set, backdooring every draw. It was pretty neat.

Then the following 1k hands the reverse took place.

Also excel graphs ftw

Variance in poker is a bitch, just have a big br and focus on improving. Results will come.

2016-2017

that's pretty balling no matter what the y-axis is

Certainly impressive in its consistency.

What was the "big" downswing @ 1300 hrs in bbs?

GcluelessdownswingnoobG

Diggin the graph.

@G, if he tells you that, you can easily calculate the total earnings.

If I had to guess, that's roughly just over 1000bb.

Ha, yeah, true enough. I was just honestly interested in the downswing size though. Took me over 1800 hours to go on a downswing bigger than >= 500bbs.

Gflatliningin2017G

You play a different game I am sure of that. From your posts, you play a very tighter low variance route that works, it's just tough to ever win a lot of money that way. You'll be consistent though.

Results haven't been nearly as easy peasy consistent in my last 1300 hours. Session winning percentage has plummetted, which I'm convinced is a useless metric, but at the same time I can't seem to ignore it either.

GcluelessingeneralG

Time for a tweak of your game, you've become static. That's actually been a legitimate issue of mine in the past vs certain smaller player pools. Especially the ones where they improved and I was not working towards improving.

I've actually considered tightening up more.

GforrealzG

If that's the issue. It could be, perhaps post some hands (reminds me to post a hand, I'll do it tonight)

I play in some small player pools (home and local games) where I see the same players over and over again. It's *very* easy to fall into the trap of being too predictable in that setting, especially if you're a tighter player. Your ability to get value from a made hand plummets unless there are two other players in the hand driving the action against each other, and the smarter V's will start moving you off hands more often than they'd do a random.

In a big pool against random players that don't really know you, it's easy to print money at a slow steady pace playing a tight game. They don't adjust and spew money off to you.

I've been trying to come up with a good adjustment for a small pool because I like a bunch of the guys I'm playing with and the games are a lot of *fun*. I think the best adjustment would be to open up and play *more* hands, somewhat as semi-bluffs looking to get more folds than calls to start. My BRs kind of short right now so I haven't had the stomach to really open it up yet though.

Course, my overall take on this is much different than most everyone else's (which is basically in a raked game your opponents have to be much worse than you in order for you to outrun the rake at a great clip, and you're fooling yourself if you think there is much you can do if everyone catches up to a great degree other than sitting at a better table).

I'm actually quite pleased with last years results (lol sample size 540 hours), and I'm quite pleased with the quality of the tables I've sat at so far this year (although that hasn't translated into $$$ yet, but lol 75 hours).

I am trying to improve, and I think one of the best things might be to tighten up more in EP/MP by not attempting to get into as many pots with speculative hands (especially at more non-******ed tables, where getting paid off OOP is very difficult).

Gnotconvincedmygameneedsasmuchtweakingaseveryoneel sedoes,butIcouldbewrongG

This is not true. Just because it has never happened to you doesn't mean it doesn't happen to good players (and quite often).

STD is the big key factor along with win-rate.

Depending on the stake WR can only be so high, if lower stake games, it's pretty hard to go on 400 hr BE stretches, if you're over 10bb/hr. The STD deviation over 3-4 hours has to be huge.


What's your or the average STD over a 100 hand sample? For most 100bb max buy-in games.

Someone did the math above and it's something like 1 in 40 400 hour stretches would be breakeven for a crusher, I wouldn't call that uncommon at all.

So if you're not "a crusher" you're "not very good" now? There's no "decent to good player that had a bad year" anymore?

Everything's black and white now, haven't you heard?

Geitherthegreatestortheworst,juryisstilldecidingG

I just mean it towards 1/2-2/5 in most instances, the word "very good" in those games to me is 10bb+.

If you're under that win-rate variance is going to be much larger and you'll see those 400 hour break even stretches a lot more than if you were winning at a higher clip. Especially if the STD is not large. Your STD average is what you're looking for, because you're going to play in games where the STD is really low and others where it's really high, so I'd try to aim for the middle ground and work with that.

You could chew out of non 400hr BE stretches and have a low win-rate with really low STD. Or you could chew out really high hourly with high STD and hit a ton of 400 HR BE stretches.

I'd like to believe a lot of people getting 400hr BE stretches @ 1/2-2/5 are probably just not beating the game for the maximum and/or have a really high STD.

Words like "good" and "very good" are subjective to the person.

Looking at standard deviation of an individual game or session is completely meaningless..

"Some people, pros even won't play no limit. They can't handle the swings." February has been a roller coaster...

[IMG][/IMG]