So, inspired by Angrist's charts, I decided to take my data and play with them in Excel yesterday. The key part is choosing the best trendline and I am not sure I did, so based on the feedback I get, hopefully, I can make the second versions of those charts more interesting.
First, because there was some conversation about how one's play is affected according to how many hours he's been playing, i did a chart on big blind profit based on game duration.
Excel offers 4 ways to do a trendline. Linear, logarithmic, polynomial and moving average. On this chart I used the polynomial because it sort of tells a story. As I play more hours I tend to win more. Then as I reach 10-14 hours my profits fall, only to rise again on longer sessions.
Since there are so few data after the 10 hour mark, I don't think cannot draw any safe conclusions. The data is too unreliable.
Thinking about game duration's impact on profit however, i think this is the crux of the matter.
Do I win less because I play long hours and I am tired, or do I win less, because I am stuck and I play longer hours so as to get unstuck. A lot of posters have said that it's the former. I tend to think it's the latter. It's far easier for me to show discipline and get up after 8 or 9 hours. I get more stubborn trying to make a losing session a winning one.
Then I did a chart that showed my profit in blinds by session.
This all looks pretty random (and that gives a bit of a perspective about what you should expect when you visit the casino each time) save for the fact that as time goes by, I tend to have sessions with larger wins and losses. That's probably misleading however. In the beginning of those results, I tended to play shorter sessions; while the past couple of years the tendency is to play longer ones.
That's why, I divided session profit by session duration to get an hourly BB/hr rate per session. This gave me this:
The discrepancy between the early and the late period isn't as big as it is on the previous chart. However, the trendline does show that as time goes by, average profit tends to increase. Hopefully, that reflects the fact that I have been improving as a player.
What I wanted to do is do the thing Angrist does by tracking my hourly based on the last 100, 500 and 1000 hours. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a way to do that on Excel. I am not even sure that this is the stat I should actually be attempting this with.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to do it, I will be happy to hear them.