No, I don't think you should. Natural up and down of the game and low volume would create such adverse psychological effect that it would probably effect other aspects of your life.

And crushing before moving up is like maxing out TH before upgrading to next TH (right bip?)...just upgrade already!

Those stats for tips aren't really meaningful nor bankroll. I used to put in any money I spent on a massage at table as tip. But rarely do that anymore anyway. Same with bankroll number. I haven't kept track of that in there at all. I've cleared it out from time to time and prob what's just showing most recent profits.

Sent from my SM-G900V using 2+2 Forums

The only useful thing about tracking results is to use it as reminder that I need to work on my game.

^ And for when those pesky IRS agents come around asking.

+1

But how much did you lose?

This is why I never book a winning session. Who wants to deal with that hassle?

Is this a sustainable month?

Surprisingly, the same amount as my salary.

Take shots and move down if you are losing and it is getting to you.

Most importantly, take your shots on friday or saturday night after 10pm.

Another option is to play online to try and work on your game without the risk of losing thousands. You could deposit $1k and start grinding 50NL if you really are not comfortable at the 2/5 tables. This makes it easy to isolate and fix your leaks too, since every click you make will be tracked and put into a database(HM2, PT4).

OK.

So I finally sat down and dug into some of my session statistics a little.

First some background on the data:
Just under 3500 hours since mid/late 2008, 3218 of which was of $1/2 NLHE (with some varying buy in caps).
About 100 hours of PLO, and an assortment of other games.
Roughly 2000 hours at my local "regular" casino, nearly 1000 hours at the local charity rooms and home games, and the other 500 hours distributed in 2-40 hour blocks at other rooms across the country.

I've mostly been a rec player. Used to put in a Friday evening and a Sunday afternoon session downtown like clockwork. 12ish hours/week, plus a little time on forums and reading books on the side. I honestly wasn't really very good when I first started (who is?) but managed to run up a nice roll quickly and have improved my game a lot since then. Now I play more shorter sessions in local rooms during the week too.


First off, winrates:


The first thing that jumps out from this is that my "other" games have been pretty much a wash so far. Some of that was playing stupid tournaments that I never made money from, but mostly it's been learning PLO. At least I'm not losing money there.

My $1/2 results seem to have a pretty constant slope with a bunch of heaters/downswings that offset the trend. Around 700 hours I started buying in deeper and trying to implement things that I'd read about. -$2500 swing by mis-ranging opponents and pushing in the wrong spots until I got a hang of it. Around 1200 hours that homework and experience paid and I had a nice heater while traveling to Vegas.

After that my results got swingyer but it doesn't seem to show in the session results (below). I think it may be related to a decrease in session length introducing more +-$600 spots.

The nearly $5k downswing near 2000 hours sucked hard. I won't claim it all to be "variance", I handled some of those losing sessions very poorly. Chasing losses, overplaying some hands I should have folded, folding hands I should have played because I was gunshy. There were a bunch of really gnarly $1000+ pots I lost from ahead that hit my BR and psyche hard though.

At 2500 hours I was finishing my graduate degree and my game (and health, and sanity) suffered. After finishing that everything seemed to start clicking again. Really interesting the effect that "life" can have on our games.


The lower figure shows my winrate over the past 100 hours, 500 hours, and overall, only for $1/2 NLHE. This is really interesting. The noise in the 100 hour sample is larger than I would have thought. For a purely rec player that 100 hours might take them 2-3 months to put in. This tells me that even playing against another regular player there's a lot of noise in our perception of them.

The trailing 500 hour rate seems to remove a lot of that noise and show how my game has evolved over time. All of the previously discussed events show up as changes in that value.

Of course the overall win-rate is difficult to move for a sample of this size.

All subsequent plots are $1/2 NLHE only.


Now for some session information:



In the upper left I've plotted session win rate vs session length. No visibly correlation. Although as the session length increases the volatility in the winrate decreases.

In the upper right the session wins/losses also fail to show any visible correlation to session length. The marathon sessions on the far right end up being "normal" wins/losses, not huge wins or losses.

In the lower left the distribution of number of sessions vs session length shows a fairly normal distribution centered around 5 hours, with only a few marathon sessions.

The lower right shows session wins/losses over time. I'd expected to see some shift in volatility as I developed as a player, but it's not really coming through.

Considering session length over time:



I can pretty clearly see my changing life priorities. Shorter sessions more recently and very rarely do I get a full 8+ hour day to go play. Interestingly, having more short sessions recently (when I'm better than I used to be) doesn't show up in Win-rate vs session length, while it did show up in the trailing 500 hour win-rate.

Lastly, distribution of sessions winnings:



With large ($100) bin sizes my sessions seem to be pretty normally distributed, with a little more weight on the winning side, especially at the high end.

Dropping the bin size flattens the peak a little bit and starts showing some interesting peaks on the losing side.

Going all the way to $20/bin shows some surprising features. The spikes occur at -$600, -$400, -$300, -$200, and -$100. My stop loss is $600, and I typically buy in for either $200 or $300 depending on the max buy in. So there are a lot of sessions that look like I lose a buy in or two and quit. There's less banding in the winning sessions though, although there is a bit visible at $300, $400, and $700.

This points at a couple of things. I probably need to top up more aggressively and/or leave before getting felted and running into a hard loss limit. Better to stand up with $35 and go home than push AT and coinflip at best.

I also see where I'd get kind of stuck with an even $100 increment on cashing out. I used to call bets and play hands until I chipped down to an even stack, hoping for a lock before putting in more money. This is obviously a mistake that I've cut out, although I'll still sometimes tip a random amount at cashout rather than take loose chips. (Does keep me informed about juicy games from floorpeople and dealers texting me when a whale walks in.)



I'm not sure how relevant or helpful any of these statistics will be to anyone else, but I found them interesting. I'm open to discussing them. If anyone would like to see some other figures or could suggest any other metrics to look at just let me know.

Thanks for sharing. What are your standard deviation #s?

Mean and standard deviation of *Session* win rates for all $1/2 NLHE data are:

7.9081 $/hr

88.9589 $/hr

Edit:

I think these make more sense weighted, even with the otherwise similar session distributions.

Overall mean winrate: 6.995 $/hr (hooray for making less than minimum wage)
Weighted standard deviation: 72.0971 $/hr (weighted by session hours, using MATLAB's sqrt(var(Rate,Hours)) ).

OK, here's another interesting one:




Standard deviation of session winrate over time. Using either the trailing X hours, or *all* trailing hours, matching the winrate figure in the prior post. Weighting by session hours pulls the rate down a little bit without changing the trend.

Again, a 100 hour window is very noisy.

This figure shows the increased volatility I was expecting to see after about 1200 hours.

When you guys say the StDev, you're recording your hourly for each session then taking the StDev of that?

Also, is there a reason you guys like to look at that more than another stat? I usually just record important hands in a Word doc. with kind of a play by play on each street, and some "types" of situations. If I'm making the optimal EV play in the important hands, nothing I can do regarding the outcome. But the "types" are important because if once an hour I can steal a pot I don't normally, i.e., that can realy increase my winrate. I've never been looking at StDev but I see it asked for in here a lot.

[PHP][/PHP] But how much did you lose?

'bout $3.50

I record the start and end time of each session, location, and win/loss. Then I take notes about anything interesting that happened or hands I want to review.

The StDev numbers come from the individual session results, with and without weighting by the session length doesn't seem to make a large difference.

This is really the first time I've dug into the data. So I'm not sure what I should be looking for to help my game.

Yeah, it does nothing to help your game. It is for figuring out a ballpark bankroll, expectations for downswings and break-even periods.

It is not very important in the grand scheme of trying to improve and move up... but this is the WR, bankrolls, and finance thread - so the discussion is relevant ITT.

I think it's pretty cool to look at. Especially since I'm too lazy to do it myself. I'd be interested to look at those stats compared to a similar player in a different region. Angrist plays in some pretty wild games. I wonder what impact those have on his StDev.

Stupid question (which I've probably asked before, sorry):

Do you have to record your total buyin / cashout in order to have an accurate standard deviation, or is simply recording amount won / lost give the exact same standard deviation results?

Ex1: Let's say I buy in for $300, then thru out the session buy for a total of $500 more, and at the end of the night I cash out a total of $1000. Is recording this as $800 buyin / $1000 cash out going to produce the exact same standard deviation result as if I recorded this as a $300 buyin with $500 cash out?

Ex2: My game is a $300 maximum BI, but I always initially buy $400 (keeping $100 in my pocket to top up if necessary, but I don't necessarily ever touch those chips if I run good out of the gate). So let's say I don't touch the extra $100, and cash out $500 at the end of the session. Is recording $400 buyin / $500 cash out equivalent to $300 buyin / $400 cashout with regards to computing standard deviation?

The only reason I ask is because I won't be able to trust my PokerJournal standard deviation if the methods for recording wins/losses affects how it is calculated (due to recording all of my initial pre-PokerJournal sessions as simply wins/losses, plus always buying in for more than maximum BI but not necessarily touching it).

Gboring,threadneedsmorepicsofhalfnakedgirls,imoG

tks bip! for telling me about standard deviation and informing me about breaking even between 10-15K hands is bad play not variance.

I like to look at the worst case scenario. I don't know what my winrate is(haven't put in enough hrs) hoping its around $15-20hr. I plan on grinding 1/2nl for a living in Vegas starting in March and I plan on playing 12-15% hands preflop, making non-spewy c-bets and b/f on the turn and river. I have a 6K bankroll. What do you(bip!) and others think my RoR is...1%? tks.

I'm a stats n00b, but I would think you record what amount you put in play would be the applicable number, in other it's about your win/loss. If you have a black chip in your pocket to top off your stack but you never use it, it's the same as having $100 bill in your wallet. It's not in play so it won't be entered into your stats.

Net +/- all that matters. Your stats would be among the most meaningful ITT (2000 hours, etc)

It seems strange to me that net +/- is all that matters? So Mr. Low Variance player A consistently buys in for $300 and cashes out $500 10 hours later is the exact same standard deviation wise as Mr. High Variance player B who consistently buys in for $2000 over 10 hours and always cashes out $2200? Although I guess over every 10 hour increment they are always up $200, so the same? I guess that makes sense.

FWIW, PokerJournal has my 1/3 NL at:

2102:55 hours
271 sessions
$27.76/hour
Standard Deviation $177.41/hour
Standard Deviation $504.27/session (average session time 7.76 hours)

Gso50/50atbeingbustobynextmonth?G