I've written an android app for logging poker sessions (called poker log). I'm working on a better game summary now -- let me know if you have any suggestions, and I'd be happy to look into it.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/45...racker-802011/

Ya but the thing I like is not having to type it all out. Worst case, you have to put in some :;.,? And you're done

last 3 trips i won 800 in 20 hours.

I'm not convinced that live play is so vastly different than online play in terms of winrate or bankroll requirement. I win 6bb/100 online, using the kelly criterion, the absolute smallest bankroll I need for a certain stake is 30 buyins. Now if we say that the average live pro wins 8bb/100 or 2.5bb/hour. Then at 2/5 this equate to a $12.5 hour job and you would need a minimum of less than $15,000 bankroll and 6 months of living expenses (1500/month or like 9K).

So with all this in consideration you would 24K in the bank and expect to make 12.50 an hour from your job (+-$10 an hour). The hourly might be slightly higher, but given the fact that no one has any reasonable sample sizes and people only brag about their hourly when its high, its probably about right.

How do you use the kelley criterion to figure your BR req for a particular level, or figure the level you should play with $x bankroll? And how do you com up with 30bi? I though Kelly would be a lot more aggressive than that.

$12.50/hr is more like 1/2. If you were doing that at 2/5 you'd obviously be a winner, but you definately be worse than mediocre. And no I havent seen anyone come on here with a 100k hand sample, but honestly live you dont need a 100k hand sample as it is much much easier than online. Id say about 2k hours would get yoy close to what you average would be. I think limon has some numbers on what he thinks average 2/5 and 5/10 players should make. I trust those numbers.

Edit: Sorry for grammar errors. Typed from
Iphone.

You can look it up online, but I assumed a static 6bb winrate for any level and a standard deviation of about 95/100. So if I'm playing 2/4 online I expect to make about $24/100, but If I'm playing 1/2 I expect to make $12/100. To justify the extra $12/100 I need to have a bankroll of 12,000.

We never hear from the aspiring pro who was good enough to beat the game, but ran 35 buyins below expectation in his first year. But we do hear the pro who has run 35 buyins above expectation. This causes a gigantic shift in our expectations on winrates, because we never hear about the downswings-- because most of them are forced to quit.

Live is a completely different game from online. Online pros sacrifice a lot of edge to greater volume by multitabling (increase $/hr at expense of bb/100). If you convert live winrates to bb/100 you get absurd looking numbers - because you're really not comparing the same thing.

Live, you have one table, and have all your attention focused on it, so you are absolutely maximizing your edge. Also, players at a given stake level have way, way poorer fundamentals live. Also, because you can get such good reads from body language and other factors, you can deviate farther from optimal play into exploitative play and extract much more making laydowns or value-bets that would be impossible online.

Also, a player who can beat a game for 6bb/100 playing 8 tables producing 400 hands/hr can live on what he makes even at 1/2 ($24/hr). When you can only beat a game for 6bb/100 and can only get in 30 hands/hr it gets pretty dicey, even if you step up to 2/5. Pros are going to be beating the games for something at least at the bottom end of what was mentioned above, which at 2/5 was what ?$35/hr? So working backwards we produce upwards of 21bb/100.

Which of course relates back to the RoR, which is decreased for two reasons - one is that the edge is bigger. The other is that the variance (/stdv) is smaller (better reads mean getting it in as a dog less and therefore a decrease in variance). When you combine those two things, you shrink RoR dramatically.

RoR = e ^ (-2 * WR * BR / (SD * SD ) )

A few examples of starting bankrolls (Please note - the underlying assumption here is that the bankroll is allowed to grow naturally, no cashing out for hookers & blow!):

wr: 10 sd: 350 br: 5000 --> RoR: .4420...

wr: 35 sd: 350 br: 5000 --> RoR: .0574...

wr: 55 sd: 350 br: 5000 --> RoR: .0112...

That's just changing the edge and not adjusting stdv at all - and based on my personal data that's a very high live stdv. If we shrink stdv as well, we get an even better glimpse of the edge/variance/bankroll/RoR relationship:

wr: 10 sd: 200 br: 5000 --> RoR: .0820...

wr: 35 sd: 350 br: 5000 --> RoR: .00015... (yes, three zeroes)

wr: 55 sd: 350 br: 5000 --> RoR: .00000106...

Let's do one more iteration using the starting, highly conservative stdv estimate and change bankroll this time:

wr: 10 sd: 200 br: 10,000 --> RoR: .1954...
(20,000) (.0381...)
(30,000) (.0074...)

wr: 35 sd: 350 br: 10,000 --> RoR: .0032...

wr: 55 sd: 350 br: 10,000 --> RoR: .00012...


As you can see, hopefully now much more obviously, edge has a huge impact on what the necessary bankroll is. Please note that for a pro on a fixed bankroll (i.e. cashing out profits when greater than stated bankroll amount) every time a cashout was made, the pro would have to roll the RoR dice all over again, because he's essentially starting the game over. Thus for a skilled pro, even though $10k might produce a pretty attractive RoR, it gets less attractive when you face it repeatedly, so you would want a bigger roll and truly microscopic RoR.

And now that I've edumacated you all, time for a brag: my 2/5 wr and sd are sufficient that with a $1000 bankroll I would have less than a 1% risk of ruin

i've been kicking around an idea of a scalable buy-in BR for someone who is willing to move up or down according to results. it's not really a difficult concept, and it gets talked about a lot circumspectly, but not quantified or crystalized.

say a player wants to move up a level with over 20 BI and is willing to move down if he only has 10 BI left.

so starting with $1000, he plays NL50, but loses 10 BI. now he has $500, but also drops down to NL25, so he has 20 BI again. this is a familiar idea.

but instead of saying the player has 20 BI for NL50 in his BR, i think we should say he has 10 BI for NL50--because he is outta there if he drops 10 BI. however, he also has 10 BI for NL25 and 15 BI for NL10 and finally still 20 BI left for NL5 as he is dropping down. this gives us a much more realistic assessment of how badly he really needs to run (/play) to go thoroughly busto.

so as long as the player moves down in a disciplined fashion according to his BRM rules, he really has 55 BI.

which as you can see from the wonderful BR/RoR calculations some excellent poster left for us above, makes a huge difference.

(though this does rely on the problematic assumptions that the player a) is disciplined and b) has a modicum of humility and a robust ego)

fmp

What would be the proper way to calculate stdev from live play?

I track my stats in Excel. One of the things I track is my net for each hour during a session. So for example, if a 4 hour session ended +150, my hourly track could look like 100,25,(50),125. Currently I'm using =stdev('Range'), where 'Range' is my table of hourly nets.

Say, for example, I calculated a WR of $21.50/hr, and STDEV of 143.2. Since my WR is in $/hr, STDEV # of elements in hours, and STDEV data values in $, is the return value of =stdev('Range') my correct stdev, since it's calculated using the same units?

Fantabulous post, AnyMouse...you need to come by the Sun more often, though!

Out of curiosity, what is your 2/5 SD?

you chasing me around iwsj? good to hear from you - or maybe it's good to hear from me...

OT:
i put in long sessions nights of the 5th, 7th, and 12th. i often don't get there until late, though (freq after midnight - rare for me to arrive before 10p). what is up with the MS thread nazis lately?

want to know my sd so you can back out my winrate?

at 2/5 over 350 hours it's 150.
at MS at 2/5 over 270 hours it's 130.

at 1/2 over 600 hours it's 126, but that includes a lot of online, which is skewing it high.
at MS at 1/2 over 215 hours it's 102.
online at one site at 1/2 FR over 206 hours it's 184.

Nope, I am just curious so that I can roll myself, as we have similar S.Ds for 1/2 (105, fwiw) and would likely have similar for 2/5, as well. This is now my full-time gig, and the last thing I want is to go busto >_<.

But it is indeed good to hear from you, and trust me, the MS thread-patrol has me tilting, as well .

I have started bringing a small notebook and pen and write down how many hours ive played and what the end result is. I also write down a couple big hands or tough hands I played to review later.

I plug it into a spreadsheet I made that calculates out hourly, ptbb/100, rough number of hands (assume 27/hr at the casino I play) and net hourly (includes driving time and travel costs).

Started doing this recently and just hit my first full time week of 40 hours of play. Making $38/hr over that sample, which is just over 1,000 hands.

It makes me sad to know that I very likely cant maintain that winrate in the long run but it has been a good start I guess.

What stakes? I just recently ended a streak of 7 straight 6+-hour sessions in which I have yet to flop a set that wasn't out-flopped by a higher set. Takes a blow to your confidence and win-rate, and IMO, can be used as the "run bad scenario" by which one can plausibly enter risk of ruin.

just 1/2

I have had 6 of 7 winning sessions so I definitely realize a bad session could be around the corner. I have run somewhat good I guess as far as flopping sets occasionally and getting a stack maybe 20 percent of those times that I do.

I have been able to tighten up a lot when running badly in the past. I am just hoping to get some more good sessions in before I hit a downer so I can really get my roll strong

you play poker. a bad session could always be around the corner.

i don't mean to sound harsh, but this is like saying "my last 6 of 7 coinflips have been heads, but i realize tails come be around the corner." it's not perfectly analogous, but you get my drift. results for poker sessions are random variables with some unknown distribution (your true stdv) around some unknown mean (your true winrate).

that said, keep up the good work! $38/hr at 1/2 is tremendous and overwhelmingly likely to be unsustainable, but hopefully you'll settle in the 25-30 range. best of luck!

please refer to this excellent thread, sir

ty my post more to state how I track my play but I thought I'd throw in the minor brag while it lasts

Anymouse, I don't understand how your RoR calculations account for stakes.

For example, you say that your WR and SD are such that $1000 has a 1% RoR for 2/5 NL. I'm sure this is true if you're playing 10NL online, but when you buy in for $500 or $1000, your RoR has to be much much higher than 1%.

What this calculation does not say: I have a 1% chance of losing $1000 evar.

What this calculation does say: If I start with a bankroll of X and play my standard game, there is less than a 1% chance that I will ever reach X-$1000 at the end of a session (and no "playing to get even" - std sessions only) if all my winnings stay in my roll.

At first, this seems preposterous, but if you break it down it gets a little more reasonable.

The biggest risk of "going broke" is a $1000 downswing off the bat. Everyone has had 200bb downswings, but the chance that you're going to go on one right now is low. After a few hours of play, your roll, by definition of winrate, is expected to be X + hrs*winrate. Now, you would have to go on a 200bb + hrs*winrate downswing. So if I (hypothetically - this is not really my estimated rate) won at $30/hr then after 10 hrs of play, my BR is now expected to be 1300, so I need a 260bb downswing to "go broke". After 50 hrs, my expected win is 1500 so BR is 2500 so now it's a 500bb downswing.

Given that the number of times I've lost $1000 or more live I can count on one hand and $2500 is slightly bigger than my record live downswong, it's pretty safe to say I get there and pretty safe to say once I'm there I'm out of the woods.

Problem: What I'm pretty sure this doesn't adjust for is intra-session fluctuations. So technically a $1000 "BR" is different because there is a hard stop at zero and because my stdv estimate is based on full sessions, it does not account for getting stuck $1000 and then unstuck during the same session - this shows up as X hrs of breakeven poker instead of 1/2 X hrs of dramatically losing poker and 1/2 X hours of dramatically winning poker. So what I can actually claim is only that if I played completely standard sessions, there is less than a 1% chance that at the end of any session I would be more than $1000 short of where my BR started, but there is a greater chance that during a session I would get more than $1000 (sum total of all play) in the hole and come back to above -$1000 before the session was over.

But that's a much longer way of saying mostly the same thing. Also, I usually buy short and also, I'm not about to actually play 2/5 on any $1k roll. It's mostly a fun academic barg - ahh, rather, exercise.

Also also, my winrate and sd are not very nearly normal, as far as I can tell. Very, very few players (as evidenced from the examples above) could make the same claim (hence: garb).

Also, let me reiterate that playing live, swongs can be dramatically reduced because:

in a spot where online you have to get money in because you're at least even against the villain's range for the spot but behind in this particular instance, you can make a fold live because you know even though villain's range is probably XYZ, you know he's in the top 10% of his range right now - increasing winrate and decreasing stdv for the woots and BR robustos.

Intro:

Hello all,

I post mostly in the HUNL forum but in fact around 45-55% of my time playing poker is in the live arena. I've easily clocked several thousand hours live in the last four or five years, mostly at 1/2, 1/3, 2/5, and 5/10 NL. I've enjoyed quite a bit of success in live cash games, and the majority of my poker income has been derived from them. A particular highlight was making 31,000 euros at a clip of 110 euros / hr in a three month span in Amsterdam playing 5/5 euro NL (run a little better, rum)

Recently I've been struggling quite a bit online for a number of reasons (on a pretty big and fairly steady downswing since mid-November), but my live results have remained very good. The games are certainly easier, and the live venue also plays more to my strengths in terms of reading people and actively cultivating an aggressive image. There are a lot of ways you can cultivate this image in the live venue without actually being excessively aggressive. I also enjoy the social aspect of live poker, and have met quite a few interesting people (poker professionals and "real people" too) at the tables.

In addition, I wrote a guide to live poker that some of you might find useful. It talks about etiquette, strategy adjustments from live to online, and player profiles: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/58...-poker-647381/

Rumnchess's Self-Challenge


Five months of excessive spending, travelling the world, losing money online followed by six weeks of Vegas certainly takes its toll. As a result, I'm in a pretty poor financial situation at the moment. As a potential solution, I've decided to commit the next two weeks (minimum) to grinding it out playing 5/10 NL at the Commerce casino.

The Goal: To make $12,000 in 14 days. This will allow me $2,000 to cover expenses (mostly just the hotel) and leave me with $10,000 profit.

I plan on using this thread to provide daily updates as I move towards that $12,000 goal. It's certainly an ambitious venture, and I plan on grinding a lot of hours and also exercising and eating well. These are things I have not focused enough on in the past.

Each day I will include an update on the results of my session, as well as two or three noteworthy hands. These might be hands I played well, hands I played poorly, or hands that are worthy of discussion. I also actively invite any questions about my live poker experiences or about live poker in general. Anything from bankroll questions to questions about where to play in Vegas, or strategy questions. I've played all over Vegas, at Foxwoods, LA, Niagara Falls, London, Sydney, Melbourne & Amsterdam, so if anyone has any specific questions about any of those places I can answer those as well.

OK...Time to hit the tables for my first session!