to clarify, i am saying that the CLT allows us to say something about the distribution of theaverage payoff per hour, not the distribution of the payoff per hour.

for example, if you repeatedly flip a fair coin 1 million times then you would expect the % of heads to be about 50%. the CLT tells us that the observed % will be approximately*** normally distributed with mean 50% and standard dev = .05%. so you'd expect the observed frequency to be between 49.90% and 50.10% with 95% probability.

the normality argument is for the observed statistic and is a mathematical certainty, but it says nothing about the underlying distribution that generated that statistic. you shouldn't expect the next flip to be normally distributed; that's ridiculous. you should expect it to be distributed like a coin flip.

*** it converges to normality as N -> infinity but 1mm trials is more than enough for effective convergence

does anyone have an online poker db handy that could post a histogram of pot-sizes in BBs?

what do you estimate the average pot size is?

i think you can estimate on average you'll win ~2 hands an hour. so you're going to pay between $20 and $30 an hour in rake. add $1 if you're average session is 5 hrs for the sitdown fee.

if you can beat the table for greater than that then it's going to be profitable. At 2/5 it is doable but depends on the skill level of your opponents.

While factoring in the rake on the hands we are going to win is part of the story, I don't think it's the full story. I think you also have to factor in that when you stack your opponent, he'll typically have far less chips in his stack (due to rake obliterating his stack over the session) than in a normal raked game, so it's difficult to get a handle on how to compare your normal raked game winrate to this game.

i.e. You can't just go, ok, my winrate in a normally raked game at this table is X, so now I just have to figure out if the extra rake I'm paying on my ~2 pots an hour will leave me > 0, cuz your winrate at this table (even factoring in the extra rake on your won pots) ain't gonna be X due to your stacking situations being a lot less profitable.

GhavingdifficultyexplainingmyselfG

Nope, just a bunch of nits with a few spewy MAWG thrown in for yucks.

CONTENT ALERT
Discussion as to distribution of poker w/l is interesting; certainly not normal. I want it to be a Weibull, since that's my favorite!

Agreed - you are in a race with the rake.

(and the faster the rake runs, the harder he is to beat)

I am saying that there are likely fat tails, making averages more meaningless. You can easily do nothing for 10 hours then win/lose 300bb in 2 hours, and that's not statistically limited.


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i think we might be talking two different things. im talking about the distribution of your observed average hourly profit. you seem to be talking about the distribution of hourly profit. they are different things, right?

as to the distribution of w/l, for individual hands i think the beta distribution is a natural choice of model. so i would venture a guess that modeling W/L as a markov process where each innovation is a beta-distribution scaled to an interval of [-1, 1] * effective_stack_size would work pretty well.

wow... that's actually a extremely legit suggestion.

Imo it's a bit silly when people try to change their standard deviation and even a little bit silly to track it for some live games. Pretty much everyone agrees that if you take a player from one game and drop him in a different game that the player's win rate is likely to change, but everyone kind of assumes that standard deviation among all holdem games is going to be similar.

This is especially not true for different buy in structures and games that often run short handed but also true for different player pools. Some buy in structures and blind structures for holdem are so different that they are practically different games and they certainly require different strategies. Same for different player pools.

It's a neat stat to know and if yours is wildly off then you can draw some conclusions from that (maybe) but its usefulness doesn't go much further than that... for me at least. I would certainly never make it my goal to try to change the number. That would just be a byproduct of changing my game for other reasons and if the stat changed enough for me to think that it was my game that changed it and not the million other factors at play then I'd say "oh that's neat" and not do much else.

I personally just try and play my personal best whatever that is. Dont really give a rats ass about sd. I do care about my hourly...but its not the end all. Fact is most people who are winnars would be best served putting down all the apps, quit the mental masturbation, and stop worrying/caring about things they really have zero control over and cranking out some quality hours.

done preachin

Kindof.

I care about analyzing hourly profit/loss ranges because we assume they have predictive bearing on the future.

NL poker is specifically harder because you can win/lose a stack on every hand, but usually don't. Further, the games can change and odds can change, making standard deviation matter less because I think the distribution in deeper play in non-Gaussian. I think we under-rate how quickly a player used to a lower vol session rate can be upped in SDev via game change (Brag: I take it as a point of pride to up the vol in any live game I play that I am remotely rolled for).

I also think that most our stats do a bad job explaining how we connect with flops--its set/set or nuts/v near nuts on wet board or w/e at 100BB--all the money goes in and someone wins. Thats 0 skill, very volatile, and subject of way too many LLSNL posts/thinking (and are crappy posts). However, "I nailed my gutter/baby flush on the turn when I bet flop, and the V stacked off with one pair in a mediocre spot"

Preach on Squiddy, preach on.

I intellectually enjoy considering the theories behind Vol in poker.
But agreed that most players would be best spent, logging their sessions, and then spending their time analyzing and working on their game off table. And then getting back to the tables.
Reasons I regret leaving poker fulltime? Because I liked playing 24/7/365. And thinking about it, and doing more about it.

Here's (almost) 1k hours since I started playing regularly again (almost) a year ago, 10/19/15. Dunno what to glean from it but at least I made 5 figs:

2/5 and 3/5 are like that in most weekday afternoons.

Slow pony here. I'm not really sure what you mean by this. What quantity are you measuring exactly and what future quantity does it help to predict?


Maybe we should just let the thread go on and just leave it. Could always take this offline if you are interested. You know where to find me (Romantic Fantasy section of Barnes&Noble).

Small sample size but that $1 tip is likely -EV.

Very nice. Mostly 1/2 (1/1)?

Looks like you were really crushing until the downswing. What happened there? Great recovery tho!

I believe bestbet in jax has all straight blind games: 2/2, 5/5, etc.

Congrats!

Is that some sick 5.5K downswing in what I'm assuming is 1/2NL? Gross!

ETA: Also looks like a 9K upswing in like 50 hours, cripes! Is this 100bb BI max at 1/2 NL? If so, my guess is you play a highly volatile style, but that's just a guess based on this giraffe. Although the last 150 hours look a little more reasonable.

ETA: Ha, just realized those are sessions at the bottom, not hours. Still, a 5.5K downswing at 1/2 NL is massive, as is a 9K upswing over 150 hours.

Ggoodluck!G

So yeah it's about 900 hours of 1/2 and 40 hours of 1/3 (-800). IIRC the last 4 1/3 sessions have ended with me getting rivered for a $700+ pot. HS guys talk about swing pots when shottaking and those are mine for the time being.

The 1/2 is 150bb max but my typical buyin strat is start with 110bb and 50bb in pocket, and then plop the 50bb on after I play a couple hands (assuming I don't win those hands).

Downswing sucked, but as mentioned the preceding upswing was pretty sick.

Downswing was exacerbated by poor play/lifetilt in addition to running colder, I am pretty sure I'd be at 10bb/hr still if I could find the fold button correctly more often.

I do play a volatile style because my poker background is all SNG/MTTSNG/MTT, never played cash online. Don't believe I've ever open limped in these 1k hours, and I'm not a habitual utg straddler but I do put it on more often than a lot of players.

Probably the worst mistake I made is not taking shots at 2/5 towards the top of that peak. Cash bankroll peaked around $7k and at that point I kinda lost my seriousness about 1/2 and spewed badly. Obviously the downswing would have been extra brutal at 2/5 but I believe the DS was mostly my fault not the deck, so results would have been interesting. Maybe should have made 1/3 my primary game around then but I dislike Shoe Baltimore and that's the only local 1/3 game.

I've had a $5k downswing at $1/2. It's almost never completely just run-bad as you know, but it doesn't take many of those "swing pots" to make it deep. -$300 vs +$600 in a big multi-way pot can make or break your month/week.

$1k drops are pretty common just in a handful of hours too. But you'll also have a +$1k wins over the course of a single weekend. When I squint at my graph the noise in session to session results is pretty close to a $1k width.

My experience as a cash player watching tournament players sit at the table is that the good ones can win a lot, the marginal/poor ones are absolutely *awful*, and they all have a lot more swingyness to their games.

I wouldn't really worry about the difference between $1/2 and $1/3 too much. If the $1/2 game is a better room and decent action, your WR should be pretty close or maybe even better than a marginal $1/3 game. What I've seen is that the open raises and stack sizes are often similar enough that they play effectively the same.

Jeez a 25buyin downswing is pretty serious. Im not saying it is impossible, but a downswing that big likely could indicate mistakes/tilt or other factors. Unless the 1/2 game you guys are playing in is 200bb or table stakes.

ive had a 10k downswing at 1/3. It happens.

yeah I acknowledged a lot of it was due to poor play caused by non-poker lifetilt in my initial reply. Not that I didn't have some KK vs. AA and villains making their flushes in that stretch but certainly not for -2500bb