Good luck moving forward paulhamr!

Gmostofusarefish;thekeyistobeoneofthebetterfishatt hetableyouareplayingatG

Just found your thread. Sorry for the late bump but you have a lot of good material here. Will definitely be reading it more in the weeks to come and look forward to getting more updates!

Hi All,

This past 12 months I have been working on my own 1k hour challenge at 1/2 NL. Needless to say it's not going well. I have been only able to play 8-10 hours every two weeks, but I'm down 6.5 buyins at 200 hrs.

The challenge though has taught me a lot. I have gotten better at categorizing players and thinking more critically about hands. Been a struggle to apply this to my game but I'll get there. I need to get in the habit of thinking at the table. After a day or two and thinking about the hand it seems a lot clearer. I just need to think at the table.

I have also just been introduced to variance, and boy is it a *****. I have taken a 10 buyin hit over the last three sessions due to running cold with limited premium hands, and 2nd best when I do hit. Since this challenge has began,I have lost 8/10 of the biggest pots I have played.

AA < KK twice for ~650 each
AA < 44. Dude flopped quads.
AA < 10-8os for 1300 - biggest pot I have ever played. I botched the flop big time.
10-9 < 44 ~780 - turned flush vs a set. Money goes in, he binks river
88 < QJ on J 8 2 board. Runner runner straight for 850. He went bonkers on flopand got it all in.

Oh well. I'll get there. Variance eventually turns right? RIGHT!?!?! :-)


Best of luck at the tables everyone. I look forward to updating progress soon.

I wish I knew where this game is that you have people playing these size pots.

Ha, thanks for the thread bump! I'll be updating it again in another 320 hours or when I go busto, which ever comes first.

A 10 BI hit is obviously possible, but at the same time it is probably also one you should be a little concerned about too. I haven't quite had a 10 BI downswing yet, although I'm currently digging out of my second 9.5 BI downswing. For example: I'm assuming those AA vs KK hands were all-in preflop? If so, nothing to worry about; but if only a small percentage of stacks went in preflop and the bulk of the 215 bbs went in postflop, then you might want to evaluate your play. Ditto for the AA < 44 (again, if decent percentages of stacks went in preflop, especially HU, probably fine). Without seeing the exact HHs its hard to evaluate, but they could also easily just be coolers / run bad.

The scope of variance is probably a thing most of us will never fully wrap our heads around, it can be quite a monster. For example, lets say you play 10 pots this year getting in the money as a 80/20 fave and run at exactly EV, winning 8 and losing 2; however, it's possible the 8 pots you won were all small ones, while the 2 you lost were huge ones. You could still "run at EV" overall, in 80/20 spots, and still be a big loser! Course, over your lifetime (lol, like that means anything in poker), you should hopefully run near EV in all your big pots. But how many big pots will you really play? Might not be nearly as many as you think. This year I've gotten in $400+ (130+ bbs) twice preflop that I can remember (AK vs 63o and AK vs QJ vs ATC) and lost them both; if I had of won those two hands, my winrate this year would be 50% (!!!) higher than what it is over a ~500 hour sample size to date this year. Not that winning them would be running at EV (it would be running way over EV), but simply an example of how running good in big pots makes a huge difference over even a non-trivial sample size. Earlier this year someone popped into the chat thread and stated something along the lines of how his whole year was saved by winning a single hugenormous pot.

Anyways, just my rambling 2 cents, and good luck moving forward.

ETA: Also, as Mike says above, these are some pretty massive pots that I rarely see played in my 1/3 NL game. In which case, you will probably experience some pretty wild swings (where booking a 10 BI downswing will be a lot easier to accomplish).

GIswearthatisnotmyalternateaccount!G

A Clueless NL Noob Reaches 4000 Hours of Live 1/3 NL:

Much like my 3000 hour post, this ain't a pat-on-the-back post, but rather a cautionary post to offset my no doubt too optimistic 1000 / 2000 hour posts.





GitiswhatitisG

~7 bbs/hr … WP!

What app is that?

Oh yeah, forgot to mention:

First 2000 hours: 9.44 bb/hr, I'm a crusher!

Second 2000 hours: 4.35 bb/hr, I'm incredibly mediocre!

G2000hoursamplesizes,lolG

PokerJournal.

Gnotsureit'ssupportedanymore?G

Definitely subscribing to this. It'll be interesting to get behind the logic of the notoriously nitty GG. I'm sure I can find some nuggets to improve my game.
I've been drinking my own kool-aid this year and waiting for the second shoe to drop. I hadn't even considered that a 2000 hr sample could still be mostly variance. I know I need to do a better job at table selection. I'll read through the initial post in more detail this week.

Still no ideas on what could be different from the first 2k hours to the last? I've found in the past that getting comfortable with a game sometimes caused me to loosen up pre flop which was a major leak.

2k hours = 60k hands.

60k hands is nothing. Literally. Nothing.

Not trying to take away from gg's *accomplishment* of 4k hours, which is sic ofc

This is humbling. I was late to the tracking party and only started tracking in 2014. I'm a similar weekend warrior with a full time job and family and only have 2215 hrs in the app. When can I start to draw conclusions? 5k hours?

You can figure a 95% confidence interval pretty easily. It will just be wider than you thought it would. Search in the winrates thread for directions.

@ cornbread

I'm too lazy to look back at my 3000 hour conclusions for why my winrate has changed, but off the top of my head they are:

- I probably simply ran good in a very good game while playing slightly more looser/aggro than I am now (the holy trifecta of how to win gobs of $$$ at pokrs) for that period between mid 2012 and mid 2014 (where I basically didn't lose); not discounting it as we're all entitled to our periods of run good just as our run bad
- the rake has increased from a maximum of $5 to $7 over the last few years; my guess is that alone could account for 1.5 - 2 bbs/hr.
- increased dealer responsibility has decreased the number of hands per hour from what it was at the start of this giraffe; ex. if I was getting 30 hands/hour, and now the extra dealer responsibilities takes 3 hands/hour out of the mix, that's a reduction of 10% of hands/hour, and therefore a reduction of 10% of winrate; so, in my case, could easily account for ~1 bb/hr
- room conditions are much worse than what they once were; has been years since a Limit game or nightly tournament has attracted a different crowd that may sit in the NL game, plus reduced tables make it difficult for walk-by noobs to get into a game (lol, like walk-by noobs even exist)
- and finally, and most obviously, the difference in skill level between me and my opponents has decreased drastically; of course there are still lots of examples of "pokr ain't dead", but those examples occur at far less a rate than before, and meanwhile people are learning not to suck as much; here's two examples from my last session: ex. long term loser with AQcc sees a J93ccAr turn and donks into my AJ in a multiway limped pot on the turn after I bet the flop and got 3 callers, and then tanks forever before finally calling my smallish sized shove (cliffs: biggest fish at the table with TP2Knutflush draw just tanked forever before calling a smallish sized shove, like that ever happened before?); ex. semi-reg semi-unknown that I have little/zero history with and has only seen me bleed chips in the hour he's been at the table with me, claims 99, calls my preflop raise and my flop bet and then tank/folds 766hh4r to my 2/3 PSB (cliffs: overpairs now folded on turn in relatively smallish pot); obviously adjustments can/should be made, but this is stuff that simply didn't happen years ago and makes a huge difference to winrates
- and, as Ava mentions, lol @ 2000 hour sample sizes

GonegiantlevelsimplytryingtoattracttraffictomyYouT ubemusicchannelG

Thanks, sounds like a good lunchtime activity.

@GG, fair enough.

Bah, my app doesn't have BB/hr STD. Guess I'm screwed. I need a new app. Is there a clear best choice? Poker Journal? The transition is going to suck.

IMHO, standard deviation is pretty useless because the state of your game will likely change so much over time, especially as a rec player not putting in huge volume every year. But I'll let the math guys have the last word on that.

ETA: Regarding PokerJournal, you'd have to look into it but I'm not sure it's supported any more and it's possible there may have even been a question with how it computed SD (I could totally be wrong on that, it's just something I seem to remember coming up at one time).

GimhoG

Wait what? I thought the 95% conf calc using STD was the cheat to get an idea using a small sample size since I don't have 100k hands and tons of hours?

Again, I'll let the math guys confirm, but all of that is useless if the conditions you get your sample size in then change. And conditions simply won't stay the same.

GcluelessNLnoobG

I’ve always kind of wondered what use a standard deviation figure per session is.

I can see that you can create % confidence intervals of mean plus 1.96 std devs etc. But still I’m not sure what use that is really...

Come on, you're being ridiculous. 60k hands can be a huge amount, or it can be "nothing." It depends on what you're trying to use it for.

The assertion is that the difference in win-rates over the two 2k hour periods is due to changing game conditions rather than variance. Don't you have enough knowledge of stats to make an actual math-based judgement on that, rather than just saying lolsamplesize?

I thought you revealed some stats knowledge in the past. Forgive me if I'm wrong.

60,000 live hands against players that mostly suck is a **** ton.

congrats on your success gg. 80k from your hobby is a great achievement

I would think your sample and even the 1k hour break ups is pretty indicative. Maybe you ran hotter to start with or are running less well now but imo, the games have changed and your game hasn't changed sufficiently to exploit these changes/you've made unhelpful adjustments

I'm hoping this doesn't become the catalyst for some of the usual flaming that happens when we discuss your play, but it makes total sense to me that your nittier style of play used to make more in less sophisticated poker times (or when people didn't know your game as well) than it does today when a pure value strategy is less effective.

from the outside looking in, your greatest strength is your discipline around hand selection and ability not to spew and these alone would seem to be worth the 4/5 bb hr win rate you have. It's always felt frustrating to me that somebody with your experience and discipline could make better adjustments than the one you have (play shorter stacked, tighten up your ranges) but these aren't natural to you and you're still enjoying and profiting from your hobby so...

vnh, wp