Knowing whether your SnG play is profitable or not needs a lot of tournaments to be played.
Even 1,000 SnGs gives you just a rough estimation of you true return of investment. Since a big part of SnGs are push or fold decisions, streaks of luck or bad-luck can be extremely long and this makes it so difficult to assess even small strategy-changes.
I'm working on a way to take the luck factor out of the equation by comparing each all-in situition with it's statistical-expectation. This accelerates the process of estimating SnG-strategies dramatically. It can tell you e.g. if you are just a lucky bad player or an unlucky good player and calculates a correction-factor for your true ROI.
For now, I have developed an application which I call "SnG Luck Analyzer" and I would like to introduce a first beta version to any interested poker player.
So far it only works for Full Tilt Poker. [Edit: and only for 9-player tournaments]
How does it work:
1. It scans each hand played by reading the hand history file for all-in situtaions. Either Hero is all-in or Hero calls someones all-in. All other hands will be ignored.
2. The chip movement will be weighted and translated into an equity change based on the Independent Chip Model theory.
3. This equity change will be compared with the statistically expected outcome of the same situation. The difference is what we call luck (or bad luck).
Example 1:
6 PLayers left
Blinds are 30/60
Hero has 2815 chips, his equity (compared to the other player's chip stacks) is 20.1%
Hero goes all-in with KK and gets called by Opponent with 44 (Opponent has Hero covered, total pot is 5630)
Hero is 80.9% favorite but looses
Equity change is -20.1%
Statistically expected equity change is +16.3%
Luck is -36.4%
Example 2:
8 PLayers left
Blinds are 40/80
Hero has 1335 chips
Hero goes all-in with JJ and gets called by Opponent with AA (total pot is 2790)
Hero is only 18.9% favorite but wins
Equity change is +16.0%
Statistically expected equity change is -13.0%
Luck is +29.0%
Here is a screenshot of SnG Luck Analyzer.
The left hand side shows the last 50 all-in matchups.
The bar-graph on the bottom (Match) shows whether Hero was favorite or underdog.
Above (Chips) the chip movement is displayed as well as the expected chip move movement by the small lines within the bar graph.
Above (equity) the chip movement is translated into an equity movement based on ICM. Expected equity movement is displayed by small lines again.
On top (Luck) the difference between actual and expected equity movement is displayed.
The area in the middle shows detailed informations about a selected hand. Basically the same as on the left hand side.
The graph on the top right shows the accumulation of statistically expected equity change / actual equity change / the difference of both (let's call this luck).
Below you see the status of your luck in percent as well as a translation into bucks (chipEV -> $EV). This dollar value is the actual ROI correction factor, when added to your overall ROI, which is calculated be several third party applications, e.g. sharkscope.
Below you see various filters which can be set by right-clicking them.
We tested this apllication with more than 20k hands but still you can't expect a 100% working release. This is a beta version and bugs have to be expected, so please bare with me. I can't guarantee anything. It has a time-limit of 30 days. No manual is available yet but I think this apllication is pretty intuitve to handle. You can get it from this free file hoster (click "Click here to Download your file" and run it):
SnG Luck Analyzer
First thing to do after installation is to point to the hand history folder you want to scan by clicking the "File" button on the top right (remember: so far only Full Tilt hands will be processed). The last folder selected will be monitored and new all-in hands will be captured in real-time.
Now, I'm looking forward to hear any comments about this approach and this application itself.
Thanks!
Bodypull
Last edited by Bodypull; 01-13-2008 at 03:36 PM.
Reason: Added: it only works for 9-player tournaments so far