2017 started off rough, but going good lately

2017 is off to a solid if unspectacular start. 3 of my 4 losing sessions are on the second night of playing back to back. 4 of my 5 winners are 200+BBs.




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i echo recent sentiments about Fridays in Q1 2017

Poker ROI vs S&P500 return is such a silly stat. Not grinding S&P500 hours everyday.

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What app is that?

Bad last few sessions in March, but still an ok month. Majority at 2/5 with a little 1/2 mixed in.

March = $3163 over 162 hours (3.89 bb's/hr)

2017 to date = $11700 over 385 hours (6.09 bb's/hr)

Yesterday I finally got back to 20BI. 20 BI exactly. Now I'm going to take a 2 BI shot at 10/20.

how many live hours is enough to gauge your true win rate at your relative stake? 10,000? 5000? I know after 2000 hours, you should
be able to tell if you are a winning player. I wanted some educated opinions on this... like if you play 1500 hours per year (which is about 40,000 hands) if you factor in variance, how many hours would you need to actually find out your true win rate/hourly? If you are playing at your local casino at your usual stake. Thanks!

You just need to know your standard deviation per hour, and then you can come up with a confidence interval. Typical NLHE standard deviation is 50-100 BB per hour.

68% of the time, your actual results fall within one standard deviation of your true win rate, and 95% of the time, your actual results fall within two standard deviations.

So say your actual win rate is 5 BB/hour and standard deviation is 75 BB/hour. After 100 hours of play you can be 95% confident that your true win rate is a minimum of (5*100-75*2*sqrt(100))/100 = -10 BB/hour and a maximum of (5*100+75*2*sqrt(100))/100 = 20 BB/hour.

After 1000 hours if your historical win rate is still 5 BB/hour you can be 95% confident that your true expected win rate is between 0.26 and 9.74 BB/hour.

You'll never know your true WR and it's not worth wasting time thinking about. Conditions change every time you play. If you measure your results over 1000 hour increments you will likely find enormous variation between samples.

To the guy above - observed WR does not equal actual WR.

Whats your definition of enormous? If you play 1000 hrs of 2/5 at $38/hr and another 1000 at $32/hr would you call that enormous? On a percentage basis it could be considered pretty big, but I would say that's fairly normal. I would also say you can probably be fairly confidant your real win rate is somewhere in the mid $30s. That's good enough to plan a budget have some expectation of how much money you will have coming in. That's as close as youre gonna get to a true win rate. If your spread between 1000 hr intervals is bigger than that, you probably play a very high variance game and should tweak a few things.

OTTH, how many players here even have 2+ 1000 hr intervals?

"To the guy above - observed WR does not equal actual WR."
Very interesting, what exactly do you mean? Not being sarcastic, don't understand why.

is 1000 the minimum for drawing conclusions? I'm only getting in about 400 hours a year

No one will "know" their winrate, as observed results will always be the result of more or less statistical variance. The more hours you have though, the closer your observed results are likely to be to your statistical expected winrate.

Based on studies in this thread, even for those with lower standard deviation per hour, it's hard to be 95% confident that you're even a winning player with less than 500 hours. In other words, your margin of error plus or minus (which you figure with the formula below) is usually wider than observed winrate up until about then.

At about 1000 hours, the margin of error (at least for an average winning player) gets to be small enough that one can actually speak somewhat meaningfully about winrate, rather than just "I'm pretty sure I'm a winning player."

At 2000 hours you have a very nice statistical sample, but by then both the game and your play will likely have changed enough that the things that happened 2000 hours ago don't really tell you much about today's expectation.

Scroll back a few pages.

There are a few around. GG has some pretty different samples, I've posted graphs that'll make your heart sink when you think about sample size too.

For a fun example of how meaningless your winrate *might* be, see my post#18419 from a couple of pages back.

Gthebestplayerinmygame...ohwait,theworstplayer...o hwait,nope,thebest...theworst?G

My results would certainly argue against anything in bold, and I'm guessing I probably play the nittiest low variance style of anyone here.

GcluelessNLnoobG

Saturdays are least profitable where I play because weekdays is where the punters with no jobs play, and weekends is where the better semi-pros play. Big games also don't run.

I personally think game conditions change dramatically over 2 year periods or less, which is how much time it takes to get the big sample needed even if you did play a lot of hours (which may be unreasonable). Online you can put in tons of hours without changing your strategy dramatically but if you manage to play 1000 hours of poker without making fundamental shifts in your game, then I feel like you're making a mistake in how you learn poker, not to mention even then your EV will change because the game conditions will change.

Statistics and results aren't useless, but I don't think it's healthy to be obsessive around it at all. It's better to focus on playing well, and analyze your play through means other than results.

I know most people can't relate to huge jumps in stakes, because I play from 1/2 up to 25/50/100/200 stakes, but if it helps, I had a breakeven year 2014, like entire year, break even (made money because I sold action at the highest stakes where I'd lost). In 2015, I had a month where I won more than I had the entire year, and also had a month where I'd lost more than my entire year (before considering action selling).

To me, it seems really moot to think about results too much. I've played 2/5 games where my expectation over long term (not because of one or two fish, but because of a few bad regfish) is probably 125/hour, but then after 3 months, the game changed dramatically, and my hourly dropped to like 30 or something.

In america where the playing pool is larger and more stable I imagine there is less deviation but ultimately I feel like all this hand wringing is procrastination from what's really important which is figuring out the basic skills, both in playing poker and estimating edge via intuition.

I would always trust an experienced, unbiased, and smart poker player's estimation of winrate over results. Now that's not saying I think poker players are by any means GOOD at estimating their edge, but I think it's better than looking at results.

I'm sorry but no one's long-term EV is 25bb/hour in a game full of "regfish" at 2/5.

I'm "sorry" but you probably don't know anything about me or the game I play in to make statements like this.

Are you saying you played 1/2 and worked your way up to 100/200 or you play currently along with those high stakes?

I think he's saying he plays whatever game looks to be the most profitable and when playing the higher (highest) stakes he sells action.

Either way, good couple posts Sol regarding thought processes and what we should be focusing on.

Concurrently. Not very often, and total hours this year is very low, but I would never say no to a chance to make money and warm up/practice poker related skillsets while I am waiting for games.

My main game is 2/5/10 and 5/10/25. It very rarely goes up to 200.

Thing is, I probably have an hourly of 30-40 at 1/2. It seems ridiculous to see that as beneath playing when some of the 5/10 games I play in give hourlies of 50 or less, but with much greater swings.

Ok, i c. That makes more sense.