Quote:
Originally Posted by swingdoc
What does this mean? Rake or variance or ... ? will cause one person to go broke? Sorry, I'm pretty terrible at poker.
Just variance. Rake will make sure it'll happen faster, but negligibly so at the stakes they're playing. Imagine flipping fair coins with a given bankroll. Let's say you have the bankroll for 5 flips and we do 50 flips, what are your odds of somebody going broke by the end? Quite high. There's actually a 6% chance somebody will go broke in the first 5 flips! After the first flip somebody will have 4 units left. The odds of the next 4 units coming the specific head/tail needed is obviously just .5^4 = 6%.
As you increase the bankrolls the odds of going bust obviously decrease, but they never hit zero. It's the sick thing about this game. It's definitely a game of skill, but if 1000 equally skilled players played a freezeout for long enough, somebody would eventually come out with all the money and there's a pretty good chance they're not going to think they just got lucky. After all, what are the odds of that?