There is no comparison between online and live as they are completely different games. Before black friday I was beating 50NL 6-max and had previously crushed 25NL 6-max. After black friday I began playing some live poker. I quickly moved directly to 2/5 after realizing how much of a joke 1/2 was and went fulltime in late 2011. Looking back though I was still a pretty awful player...in all truth probably break even or slightly better at 2/5. There are definitely adjustments that have to be made moving from online to live.

It's hard for me to say how online compares now given that we dont have access to Full Tilt or Pokerstars in the US. Online players keep talking about how difficult online has gotten, and that certainly isn't the case on Bovada. I played 10NL 6max and players are just giving there money away there. 25NL seems like a joke. I played one 400NL 6-max session and players were definitely very aggressive which makes the game tougher but they didn't seem to be world beaters or anything. Mainly just solid players with very aggressive styles but who were still making plenty of bad decisions. I've played the Double Up SNGs on Bovada as well and the $10 ones are a complete joke. It isn't until you get to $100 that most all of the players are playing a super solid game but even then they are playing a bit too tight late to be optimal.

2014 was the first year this rec-fish decided to start tracking and play poker more often. I've definitely grown over the year, and I'm taking the game more seriously now than at the start. These numbers are almost certainly above my EV for the year, but my goal is to match it in 2015 without being a lucksack.

Half 1/3 and half 1/2 NL, both games 300 max with 4+1 rake (and five hours of 0.25/0.50 home game)

Regarding ChipKellys graph, is it fair to compare the smoothness if his x axis is Hours versus most everyone else who is displaying in Sessions? Just a thought

I assume you're asking because of the above graph? I think that is still in sessions, see the plotted points along the x line? Unless you enter your wins/losses every couple hours into the app I don't see another explanation.

Re: posted graph, 68% winning sessions seems over expectation but I could be wrong on that.

That is really a meaningless stat. If you are a crushing player but play really short sessions, then it could be really low. If I consider my life to be one long session then I'm at 100%, but if I break it down into 4 hr blocks I'm only around 60%.

It's not meaningless if you're a rec player with a limited poker br trying to run it up before other bills eat it all up like I'm at 50/50 in my limited sample which hurts a lot

it doesn't take into account the amounts you win or lose though. You can have 8 $1 "wins" and 2 $50 losses and your win % is 80%. See?

Well, see I have something like 120 sessions and never a session loss bigger than $520 (stop loss) and never a win bigger than $720 (have been up slightly more during sessions but never +1k as I would snap rack up). And there's a wide variety of positive and negative amounts inside those boundaries. Lot of shortish sessions though.

I got a idea for a much better phone app from this conversation.

homer:

what is your point here?

Sorry was thinking out loud again. There is no point without further details like total amount in for during each session.

Like basically I'm sure a lot of us could win a huge amount of sessions if we were willing to be in a game for 500-1000bb at a time and could play long enough to get even (mental/tilt/fatigue factors aside).

My point was either that guy is crushing the games, is running good, or just has the fortitude and means to keep playing when down a lot to make a comeback. But live tracking makes it kinda impossible to know from just the graph.

Nothing will replace hands or tournaments played as the x axis for an actual representation on graphs so maybe something better can be devised for live pokers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wu598ENenk&t=0m20s

Congrats!

My guess is very few players in your player pool are actually winning players. So far, you are one of them. There are certainly some crushing winrates in this thread, but don't let those undervalue your accomplishment!

Ggoodluck!G

I'm currently sitting at 70.3% but as Spike says this probably has more to do with average session length (mine's 7.75 hours/session).

GcluelessNLnoobG

I have 66.4% over 393 tracked sessions. Most of my friends that are crushing are around 65-70%

How come it always feels like I should leave when I am up a bunch of money ? Is there a strategic reason for that feeling ?

Probably a BR related feeling.

Would you leave if you are playing .01/.02 and up $20?

I've never been in that situation.

Questions:

Some here say that a winrate of 10BB/hr is the absolute ceiling for a sample size of thousands of hours, and any rate higher than that is too small of a sample size. Does everyone agree on that?


What is a reasonable sample size? 250 hrs? 500 hrs ? 2,000 hrs ?


Can't you improve your win rate ceiling by being very studious and deliberate with Table Selection ? (ie - identify and leave difficult or unprofitable games ASAP)

I don't think all agree at least at the lowest stakes (ie 1/2)

^ The original post in the thread addresses your question best.

I'm of the opinion that you really can't ever nail down anything too reliable because the landscape of poker changes too often and too quickly. By the time you get any "meaningful" sample on any live room or online poker site, the landscape when you started, during, and stopped taking a sample has changed or will change for the next x hands/hours you play. You can still probably glean some information but everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

To those wondering what a normal "winning percentage" is (I was curious too! Even though it doesn't matter, it's all one long session, etc) I've tried to build a simulation model.

I decided to gather data by tracking strong players on live at the bike. I would sort each hand into a range of winnings

I only gathered 122 hands which wasn't nearly enough, especially given that so much of a live player's winrate comes from the big hands that only happen once every several hours. Also the players I tracked ran pretty hot. So using the little data I had as a guide I kind of guessed at what a per-hand distribution should look like.



So the simulation works by running every hand like, you've got a 5/1706 chance of winning 120bb, a 10/1706 chance of winning 85bb, and so on.

I don't really think those numbers are accurate, seems like you should be winning or losing a stack more often than I've put, so if anyone has ideas for better numbers let me know and I will recompile it. Or if there's interest I could even make it so that you can input your own frequencies.

These are also based on strong players who play a pretty wide range of hands, the simulation results would probably be a lot different for players who don't win as much and play a lot tighter.

What did surprise me was that I expected results to regress upwards a lot faster. I figured 1 hour sessions would be imperceptibly above 50/50 but if a 5.5bb/hr crusher played 10hr sessions he'd win like 70%. It seems the difference in the amount of winning sessions if you tend to play a few hours longer is pretty small.


Link to simulator (no download, it's just flash): http://www.fastswf.com/lU9qrCE

In other words, a winning player wins during his heater sessions, in which he wins close to 70% of hands.

That doesn't seem right?

I'm guessing my typical monster sessions boil down to simply winning a couple of big hands, so it doesn't really matter what I did on the other 99% of hands (so long as I didn't spew / run bad on those).

And DK, I'm also still expecting the hours/session to basically be the only factor in determining a winning players session winrate. You're saying your results say otherwise?

GcluelessstatsnoobG