Quote:
Originally Posted by mpethybridge
This is what everyone says who has yet to experience negative variance.
I hate to pile on, but your posting a graph with a $60-something win rate followed by "I run pretty bad" was pretty ridiculous.
You could well be a $60 an hour winner at 2/5, I'm not saying you're not. But if you are, that means that you've played a small sample at or near your true win rate, which, by definition, means you haven't run bad over that sample.
If you're not tracking your variance, then you really have no idea how you're running. It's really hard to tell in live poker for several reasons. One is the slow motion aspect of it--at the end of a year of full time play, you have maybe 60k hands, which is the lower bound of what I consider likely a reliable sample when I do online database reviews. But it's hard to imagine that you ran hot or cold or whatever for a whole year, so it's natural for a year's results to feel reliable to you.
But in my experience, a 60k hand sample is usually influenced by some sort of variance--not necessarily so much as to be useless, but enough so that it I have to go through it carefully adjusting for variance to get an approximation of the player's true win rate for the sample. Samples below 40k are useless often enough that I won't even waste someone's time trying to analyze them--I've set my minimum at 50k hands because of that.
As for -8 buy in downswings being impossible for solid winners, well, that's just wrong. In a big enough sample, it's guaranteed to happen. The fact that you haven't had one just means you haven't played a big enough sample, or that you're running good.
Comparing online to live poker is fundamentally flawed, with the exception that they are both played with cards they are completely different.
Me saying "I run pretty bad" was a joke. I posting shortly after that I am likely on the positive side of variance, if I'm on the negative it is not by much.
I also think you, like many other people do, are using the term "downswing" incorrectly.
Saying I went on a x buyin downswing should mean that you lost x amount of buyins in 100% of situations that are completely out of your control, or that you had the best hand/an unavoidable cooler in each spot. It should also reference that the size of your bets is close to optimal in situations where you need to be getting value from the best hand.
Losing 2 buyins set over set, then tilt shoving 2 draws in terrible spots is not a 4 buy-in downswing. It's a 2 buyin downswing with you donking off 2 buyins as a result of previous negative variance.
I shouldn't really use the word "impossible" because it is certainly incorrect and overgeneralizing. I will reword it to highly, highly and unlikely, and if it does happen, chances are there are spots of bad play in the 8 buyin "downswing", whether or not you can recognize this, or how to recognize this is a completely different discussion.
Fwiw, my live sample is 1200hrs total. I am running at 66$/hr over my last 600 hrs, 50$/hr over 800+ hours of 2/5, 260hrs of 1/2 and <100hrs of 5/10.