Only the best home games

You're right that there's a big difference between what you'll find in a home game. Most of the ones I frequent are mostly poker friend based. There's a couple of guys that run games and invite their friends and a pool of other players they're friendly with. All of them have dedicated dealers (even if that's the host). Depending on who shows up on a given night, it might be 5-6 of us bull****ing and playing mixed games along with our normal $1/2. Or it might be more like a typical casino table with 9-10 guys playing more "seriously", while still drinking and relaxing.

The "entertainment" usually happens when there are non-players around and it's more of a party atmosphere (college football is good for this). Maybe it's the friends that I have that sometimes we pay a girl to waitress, that may be an 'off duty' stripper, or just a girl that likes drinking and fun.

That's wandering off topic a bit, but it gets back to my thinking that there's a lot more session to session variability in game conditions, along with resulting EV.

Yup. Totally easy to follow. /s

Are you manually filtering the game types? Seems like it should be possible to do that automatically. It's what I do in Matlab when I run my data. (Along with breaking down locations and other things).

I didn't here, but yeah, I easily could. I filtered on the row numbers instead.

If anyone exports data from Poker Income, all they have to do is sub in the correct row numbers and play around with plotting until they see what ylim should be. They don't need to know R, they can just c/p.

I'd be happy to help anyone who wants it.

All I was saying is that if you have a true winrate of 7bb/hr then an 11bi downswong would be very rare/unlikely. Much more likely is that OP isn't a 7bb/hr winner. Much more likely OP has severe leaks that he doesn't even know he has. I had/have a lot of leaks I didn't even know were/are leaks. Most of my downswings would have been halved or at least reduced dramatically if I didn't play considerably worse during them

@GG of course even "perfect" play you can/will still lose some of the time. Downswings will always happen, I just think people compound the negative variance with ever increasing bad play. No one plays as good when they're losing/on a downswing than vice versa.

@OP variance is a concept that will forever elude the minds of humans because we are incapable of fully comprehending it. Like many others have said, just focus on truly playing your best, identifying leaks, plugging those leaks, and forget the rest.

My guess is that if you play enough hours that it would be very rare for a winning player to not experience a severe downswing.

But, agreed, we all have leaks and should concentrate even harder at playing our best (whatever we feel that is), especially during a downswing so as to not compound things (where entitlement tilt might start creeping in).

GcluelessdownswingnoobG

The way I look at it during my downswings is if I am losing money I need to play better. Finger pointing/ blaming variance/ berating players makes you the fish. Just get better. Study more, play your way out, trust your game. At the end of the day your results are based on your choices 100 percent. Downswings are going to happen but 11 BI @ 1/3 (where you opponents arnt good) is just spewy. I'm sure OP has some massive technical and mental game leaks.

Would be very curious as to how many hours you've logged to come to this conclusion?

Of course spew / technical and mental leaks / etc. aren't going to help, and will definitely be a factor.

But this game has a built in short term variance rollercoaster that you will eventually encounter no matter how badly your opponents play (ex. see my 3.3 BI loss I booked in a mere 2 hours against the table maniac that I documented in the maniac thread at the beginning of the year).

Git'spoker,****willhappen,justdealwithitasbestyouc anG

I think the majority of downswings are at least somewhat compounded by poor play and mistakes. I think it's pretty rare to have a legit downswing that's due entirely to genuine run bad.

Take a break.

bump

Although bad play comes with downswings and good play comes with upswings, variance is being severely underestimated itt.

people are telling you you're not very good at this game which is probably true. but dont take that as a burn because practically every single other low stakes player isn't very good either. tbh you probably ran super hot in the beginning (lots of ways you can run good) and didn't both to calculate that. i think a lot of people pros included only whip out the ev calculator when they lose lol. and of course the obvious not having a clue how crazy the variance can be or how to properly calculate their EV. It also depends on how your player pool is, but most good pros true EV is probably right around 7-8bb/hr... so in other words a big downswing should have been expected and its totally normal in this situation.

Yeah, I was using bb (big blind). I didn't realise people used BB (big bet).. Why use big bet over big blind?


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There's a HUGE difference between a winning player and a 7bb/hr winner. Not even comparable.

With a 21bb/100 true winrate (consistently) and 80bb/100 stdev your chances of a 1000+bb downswing are very low. Go plug in the numbers if you don't believe me. Maybe the 1/3 games are very crazy and no where near 80bb/100 stdev but I doubt it.

+1

GcluelessvariancenoobG

Maybe we should all switch to Bb or bB instead.

I thought it was pretty clear that for a limit game we talked about big bets, and for a no limit or PL game we were talking about big blinds, regardless of the abbreviation.

Yeah, I guess having never played limit, I've just used the capitalisations interchangeably. It can be mostly worked out through context except for here where they were talking about winrate in a NL thread and using BB.


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Wasn't clear to me what your win rate was in light of this back and forth. When you said 17 bb/hr, does that mean you're winning $85/hour in 5/10 (assuming you were winning at the same rate in each game) or $170/hour. The former is still an incredible win rate that you should really be proud of, but the latter seems almost unheard of.

That's fair enough, and of course the closer you are on the scale to breakevenish than to crusher then the more likely you are to go on big downswings.

Still, it's not like a 7 bb/hr winner going on a 11 BI downswing is outside the realm of possibility; it's quite doable.

GcluelessdownswingnoobG

Downswings can be very different as well. Getting it all in preflop being an 80% favorite and losing is different from getting it all in preflop and being on the other end (KK vs AA) and is different from making a bad play on multiple streets. I usually give myself a break if it was something unavoidable, which I personally have had a hard time doing running KK into AA 3 times in 2 days, but they were still my actions and decisions that led to the outcome. I think the biggest realization I've made recently is how smallish $50-$100 pots add up in both directions and making proper decisions preflop can be the difference between booking a loss or booking a win. I know that's a pretty generic statement but the old me would never miss a chance to raise with say KQo in MP regardless of table history or action and while most people would consider that standard there are times that it's a losing or break even play.

Amen to that. Two sessions ago I made 3 (THREE!) terrible postflop decisions in THE SAME HAND (I mean, lol, I'm too embarrassed to even give a HH). It cost me dearly, and was the difference between a good session and a poor one. It's tough to be a consistent winner if you are constantly blowing one big hand per session, and you have to be honest with yourself about it (i.e. even if you aced every other decision for the session, these big lone mistakes will sink you).

GcluelesspoordecisionnoobG

$102.5/hr at 5/10. I think $170/hr is possible at 5/10 fwiw (I know i'm not capable of that high of that high of a winrate currently). I would be really surprised if any of the east coast regs I play with are anywhere near that high. But I logged a good amount of 5/10 hours @ Commerce with a savage reg there. I wouldn't be shocked if his winrate was higher.... granted overall winrates should typically be higher there due to the amount of action the games have. Anyways I'm sure there are a handful that crush at that rate.

Live winrates are tricky and I think generally too many players are overly obsessed with it, myself included. It's really hard to play enough hands and by the time you do play a lot, the game conditions could have changed drastically. Also, you can pretty easily be on the wrong side of say, 5 coolers when 200bb effective in a row, thats a 1,000bb downswing doesn't mean you suck. And vice versa... doesn't mean you're a stud.

Downswing should be measured in BB's rather than "BI's" since people buy-in for different amounts. Assuming OP is talking about 100 BB buy-ins as opposed to 150-200 BB's than a 1100 BB downswing looks pretty mellow to me.

Variance calculators are a helpful tool to look at things in the theoretical world but nothing about poker is "static" unless you are playing with the same 8 villains in the same seating arrangements day after day who never improve their game. Since we all know this doesn't actually happen in the real world I find variance calculators fairly pointless.

And this is why winrates could also be seen as a fairly useless metric when attempting to accurately predict the future.

GimoG

I think BB is Big Blinds bb is big bets. Or pokertracker big blinds, but they have abandoned it as well.

This really resonates with me. A month or two ago I made a terrible, terrible decision to try to bluff an old man who (unsurprisingly) had flopped a boat. Gave away $900 in one hand, which knocked almost $3/hour off of my 2016 win rate. Also too embarrassed to post the hand, suffice to say I had an OK spot to bluff on flop but stubbornly continued on the turn and river when I should've known I was never getting a fold.