But how long is your average session?

It makes a difference if you're putting up these solid wins over 8 hours, or 3 hours.

I'd think a "big win" is something where you're making 0.5-1 BI/hr over a couple of hours. (So a 1hr hit & quit wouldn't count).

Re: big wins

I'd have to go back and check but I'm pretty sure the best month I ever had in 2/5, I didn't win over 2 buy ins in a single session. Small wins add up and when you consistency leave up a few hundred dollars one day you tally it up and say "Holy ****"

Re breakeven:

Currently on a 500 stretch. Didn't think it was possible in live poker. I may in fact be a bad player.

Yeah, no doubt lots of things factor into how often you book a big win/loss, including style (nit vs laggy), maximum BI, session length, table dynamics, etc.

GcluelessbigwinnoobG

Ha, sounds like my 2015 (2.63 bb/hr, yo, I'm a winner!).

GamdefinitelyabadplayerG

Yea. These kinds of sessions are very deceptive. A day where you sit for 3 hours at $1/2 and leave up $60 sometimes (often?) *feels* like a waste or "meh" session ... but that $20/hr is actually a pretty respectable WR for those stakes.

Welcome to the club. If it makes you feel better, 2 or 3 big hands going the wrong way can easily nuke your WR for a couple hundred hours.

FWIW, it is pretty bad to start to rationalize it as such.

It creates a mentality to want to walk away to lock up a win regardless whether the table is +EV.

It can also create giraffes.

Look at old dhcg's graphs and you will see that he was few big sessions away from negative WR, and yet he was constantly bragging what his WR was.

I'm not rationalizing anything to "lock up a win". I play my sessions at the times that I have available, and/or are good table conditions if possible, and I leave when I'm out of time or the conditions go to ****.

At that point sometimes the results look or feel disappointing, when in fact they're not.

Oh of course. A couple of big hands, particularly multi-way stack involving hands, can have huge impacts on our WR in both directions. That's why I'm always suspicious of results with small sample sizes, and why I consider 500 hours still small.

FWIW, in 1/2 and 1/3, 12.5% of my sessions are +/-$1000 or more.
5 hour average session.

Not everyone can go and play for unlimited hours. Some of us have reasons for leaving after 3, 4, 5 hours that have nothing to do with poker

Judging from your graphs, you're one of the biggest outliers here. A big win for you is probably 50% higher than everyone else

I'm guessing a lot of it depends on his style, the game's max BI, the typical table dynamics, etc.

I quickly looked at my stats and found 3 $900+ losses, so even I creep over 8% of my sessions are +/- 300bbs. And I play a low variance nit style in a 100bb max BI game.

GcluelessnitnoobG

smh...

When you rationalize $60 win after 3 hour as $20/hr, you start making all sort of rationalization relating to individual sessions.

That also make you more likely to consider leaving with $60 after 3 hours.

None of this has anything to do with whether you have other reasons to leave the table.

I'm doing my annual win rate calculation over the next day or two. Have noted every session but stopped inputting them into my program in about April.

Know it's definitely been my worst year for the past four but hopeful that my recent donkament collect may have me in a slight profit overall

What's to rationalize?

You're playing poker at the times and locations that are available to you. If that means putting up short sessions with small individual wins, so be it. Sometimes it's big wins or big loses too. The point is that a string of sessions that look small individually can actually amount to a higher winrate than many people would initially think, even without any huge session swings.

With only a handful of sessions left in this year, here's a cute little stat of my own:

67% of this years profit have come in 8% of my sessions (where I've booked 5 big wins in 60 sessions).

Not sure if I should be freaked out about that or not. Or whether it totally doesn't matter where/when the money comes from in (to date) a mediocre 6.25 bb/hr over 502 hour year. But it's a little freaky to realize the only difference between this year and my horrendous last year is that last year I didn't book a big win.

Gfreakingout,ha,notreally,whatever,yes?G

I'm with Angrist on this one. Earlier this year I fell into a mindset (in a 1/3 100BB cap game, average session 4 hours on a weeknight) that anything less than $100 (8BB/hr) was a waste of my time. Recognizing that it's still decent money doesn't make me want to quit early and book a small win, it makes me want to return the next night and win some more, even if this session I didn't get sick chipstack photos.

I'm at $202/hr for $5/5 PLO over 16.5 hours YTD.

Sustainable ldo.

FWIW, rationalization varies individually, some may perceive things glass half full, others as glass half empty.

All I was saying that when you start to rationalize things a certain way, it may be possible that you would make less than +EV decisions.

Calm down...

This can get even worse to look at when you go inside each session. Plus 200 for an evening, and since I can remember stacking some clown for 300, that means the rest of the night I dribbled and drooled. This would be cute except I see it all the time. Capped game nit poker boring but pays the bills.

Man I suck, thank god they suck more.

I've seen a lot of discussion of winrates, but very little quantifying variance (or standard deviation) for live games.

I'm a recreational player who likes to take the game seriously. Playing mostly 1-2nl and 1-3nl I have a winrate of about $14/hr over the last 1,100 hours. However, I play a pretty LAGgy style and my standard deviation per hour floats between $175 and $200 per hour. Is this normal, high, way high? Seems high as a 95% confidence interval would be about $28k wide over that same 1,100 hours (back of the envelope so could be off).

Anyone else care to share theirs to help frame where I sit in that spectrum? Thank you.

There's a good discussion of standard deviation ITT, but I don't remember exactly when. Let me do a quick search and I'll add some links.

OK, post search edit... The really good math discussion starts here. As for Sdevs reported ITT, they range from about 55bbs/hr to 120bbs/hr among winners over a decent (700hours-2,000hr) sample size. Yours seems pretty normal to me.

Look at your 95% confidence interval as +/-Xbbs/hr over your observed winrate, and you can compare with those posting in the discussion linked above.

Excellent! Thank you very much!!

2016 was the variance year of hell for me personally. I'm up slightly more YTD than 2015 but on 3x the volume with most of my winnings coming early on at 2/5 and 10/10 followed by an extremely lengthy "breakeven" stretch marred by a horrible downswing in March (at 10/10 and 2/5) and most recently a lengthy slow bleed downward (after dropping stakes post-March for proper BRM) as I continue to play down stakes.

If I had to estimate I think I am running somewhere around >2 SD's below EV but it's so hard to analyze objectively with live poker. But with nearly 3000 hours of live poker under my belt I feel pretty confident categorizing stretches of my career as running "average," "good," "hot," and what I can only classify my last 1750 hours as "worse than you ever thought possible and depressing enough to make you reconsider your life choices."

So yah, hope that cheered you guys up.

Seems way off? I got told I should expect a 200bb+/hr stdev in 1-2-2-5 type games. Although I do think that is too high considering the online equivalent is like 70ish. Definitely not reopening this can of worms though.

Is this big blind or big bet STDV?

My STDV is 167 big bets/hour, and $801/hr