Here's a chunk of a Jesse quote from this
thread
Quote:
StDev : Expected Win Rate
For live 20/40, this number for me is somewhere around 7.5. Mason Malmuth's book says that anything under 10 is usually bearable for a live professional gambler. In online 6-max games, I've heard this number can be as high as 15, which is quite frankly terrifying, and is the reason awesome players from the online world think that when you play live you can run good/bad "forever"
You take Jesse with a 2BB/HR WR and a 15 BB/HR standard deviation at 20/40. His 1% RoR BR is ~ 260BB.
You take me at 3/6 6m, with a 1 BB/100 WR and a 17BB/100 stanard deviation, and my 1% RoR BR is ~ 665BB.
In essence, a winning live player is going to see downswings smaller than a 6m donk (me) by a factor of about 2.6. That's huge. You're going to have 200BB downswings about as often as I have 500 BB ones. A 500 BB live downswing would be like a 1.25k downswing for me. I'd have moved down 3 limits before that happened... or quit forever.
Quote:
i would think a 500 BB downswing for a very good live player would be inevitable over a sufficient time frame (lets say over a 30 year career)
Over 30 years, sure. I know that I'm not tilt-immune, so as my WR goes down, these big swings become more likely. If you're a Hold'em bot live, your RoR would be .015% to go bust with a 500BB BR 2 BB/HR WR and a 15 BB/HR STDEV. If you drop 500 BB, you had the worst 6 days of your life, back to back.
That same 500BB swong online is like the worst month of the year for someone who has as low a WR as I do.