My inclination is that this is more or less correct. However I would like to calculate long term risk adjusted win rates for each and compare. 2 problems as I see it tho:

1) True Long term in PLO is how long?
2) The game is still very much in its initial growth phase amongst the mass rec player pool so presumably will get tougher before long term is even realized


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I've played in many 1/3/5 and 2/5 PLO games that have seen me have a winrate of near ~$100/hr over 300+ hr samples. These games all had whales that were either proven not sustainable or I know are on their last legs. In PLO you just can't save people from themselves. The player pools in most places just aren't large enough for the game. Like, it helps when you have whales dropping 5 figures in a night and six figures in a year but most places just don't have this.

As you've said, you can get in a 1/2 PLO game where you have $4k pots. If you're in a medium sized city where the PLO runs half the nights when the whales are playing, good luck even playing the 2/5 (or god forbid just 1/2) game the other nights after losing two $4k pots the night before (spoiler alert: it sucks!)

Fwiw I'd much, much rather play a "tough" NLHE game than a PLO game without whales. I don't want my night and year dictated by showdown value. That's what PLO is.

Convert hours to decimal places. Excel doesn't like working in hours + minutes

Ok, finally made it.

So, here's Hourly Profit by Session Duration.



And here's BB/hr winrate based on 100 and 500 hour increments:



As you can see, last 100 hours are pretty unreliable, whereas last 500 hours are somewhat stable.

I might have missed this, but how many hours do you have?

2400.

Cool!

I'm not sure how much I buy that trendline in the hourly profits figure .... there's so much noise in the data it's hard to say if you really have a peak "winrate efficiency" around 6-8 hours session length. It's enough to say that session length is not *strongly* correlated to winrate at least (for the given sample).

The X axis on your trailing winrate figure is odd ... what is that? Session number?

Either way, it confirms my observations about my own winrate data over 100 hour samples being unreliable and wildly different. Even the 500 hour samples cover a range of 5-15 BB/hr easily.

Impressive overall results though.

Imo no amount of sample size in live poker is reliable. The number everyone talks about is 1K hours and that COULD be enough if you run somewhere close to EV but 500 hour downswings/heaters are way possible which would make a 1K hour sample size way too small.

You need several thousand hours and this has been said a bunch but I'll echo it: even with a 1K hour sample, there's no way you're the same player at hour 1 and hour 1K and it's pretty likely the games have changed some in that time period also.

Depends on how much you play. If you play full time and are playing in the range of 150 hrs a month, the games aren't changing in 6-8 months. Ive been playing pretty much full time for 18 months now and I dont see much change in my games at all. My style has evolved somewhat and Ive seen lots of young guys come and go but for the most part the games are the same.

Good point Mike. I played full time for a little over a year and you can put in 1K hours pretty quickly. I guess my point is that there's a lot of factors that come into play for calculating a true WR and most (if not all) are always changing (atleast at some rate). Making it hard to accumulate a big enough sample size with enough factors being the same. Because even in that year where I played full time, I was changing as a player and plugging leaks and making less mistakes by the end of that year than I was at the beginning without a doubt.

And also like I said, maybe the games I played in (or my style) were higher variance than most, but what I realized while playing full time is that variance plays a large role in winning and losing over a longer period than I ever thought. I still think 2-3K hours might not be enough of a sample size especially if you've had a few big swings in either direction.

You are misinterpreting what i said. Of course its easier to exploit fish in hold em. Equities run so much closer together in omaha. I just said omaha is easier to play because the decisions are easier. A lot of the flops play themselves and the bluff spots are more obvious and blockers matter more. Its easier to identify ranges based on flop texture so Its not as mentally grueling.

Also people play too many or too few hands so its easier to make adjustments.

Looks like sol actually said same thing i did, so i guess norhing i say will be right. Oh well. Omaha gives the fishiest of the fish a fighting chance. That can be a good thing

I agree with all of this. In PLO, even short-handed, it's basically never necessary to make a pure bluff. You can let your cards determine when to bluff and basically just bluff hands that have significant equity or block the nuts (i.e. nut flush blocker or two Ts in your hand on a 987r board). Oddly enough despite the fact that people have more cards, hand reading is usually easier too. You don't have to worry about how to play your AK when you whiff, because in PLO if you whiff you can just fold.

I completely agree about how 500 hour samples can have heaters and downswings. Along with the game and personal changes. It's hard to fathom until you've seen it with your own eyes and in your own results though. Unfortunately it's all we have and we just need to view all results through the lens of sample size.

I think I'm repeating myself here, but I don't buy the simple idea that equities are closer together in PLO than they are in NLHE. Preflop that may be the case as it's so hard to completely dominate another hand. But postflop and especially post turn there are too many spots that I see players getting their money in drawing completely dead, or getting freerolled by a hand they're currently chopping with.

hell yea it is

guys put their money in close to dead in NLHE all the time too OTT and OTR. they also get punished much harder for being weak/passive than they do in PLO.

What was your longest downswing/breakeven stretch duke? I remember you posting but im horrible with the search function

Sure the second happens quite frequently but the first statement is just not realistic. There are spots that simply by the nature of a 4 card vs. a 2 card game that equities run much much closer together.

A more frequent all in on the flop scenario in PLO is set vs. combo draw of some sort. Happens every way more frequently than freeroll spots IME.

Maybe it's just my games but I don't see too many late hand NLHE spots where people get *lots* of money in smashed. It happens, but it seems like people have 20-35% pretty often. Or at least they're against a *range* that they have equity against.

The flop example in PLO is fair as that is a decently common and close situation.

I think the threshold is more the turn in PLO were people get smashed equity-wise. That's also why I hate playing in games with $5 bring ins or other preflop insanity that shortens the hand so that you can't pot the turn without a $1k stack to start the hand. I see a lot of SD vs sucker SD situations in my game where the low end is drawing to 3 outs to win, 6ish to chop and a bunch to lose outright, moreso than the set vs. combo draw spot. At least based on hands that get shown.

lol, 20-35% IS smashed

Also, NLHE is a lot more about value betting as opposed to equity comparisons.

There are plenty of spots where 30% equity is enough to make a call correct. But when I say "smashed" in PLO, I mean "you have one out to win" smashed.

We're getting off topic here. So to tie this in some way to the winrate discussion ... if it takes us easily 500 hours or more to see a semi stable winrate from a NLHE game, I doubt that my observations of PLO for roughly that time are going to be statistically significant, especially based on what I'm *watching* people do rather than recording hard data on their actions. :shrug:

just this past may i did -$7k in 2 weeks / 82 hours

that was part of a longer -$6k in 350 hours (2 months) at 2/5

and that downswing was a longer part of 650 hours winning 6 bucks an hour aka breakeven

that was late winter/spring of 2017. nothing bad happened to me in 2016 but in 2015 i did another 650 hour stretch at like $12/hr at 2/5

but my biggest and most tilting downswing in total buy ins was like 6-7 months into me playing poker, i lost like 21 buy ins ($8.5k total) at a mix of 1/3 and 2/5 in like 100 hours. this was spring 2014, **** i was like 21 years old i wanted to hang myself

Most people just refuse to believe a winning player (for a good clip) could ever break even for over 500 hours until it happens to them. I know I didn't believe it until it happened to me. Put one of those stretches into a sample size of even 3K hours and the results still won't reflect your EV earned (unless you have a similar stretch of winning 2x your true WR). That's pretty much why I say there is no sample size in live poker really big enough to come to any conclusions. Better to just review your play each session and make sure you're always making theoretical dollars.

For additional info (1/3)

Since beginning tracking in April 2015

First 500 4/1/15 to 5/12/16 $20/hr (strictly Fri & Sat nights)
Second 500 5/13/16 to 12/4/16 $45/hr (sick heater, but playing more am and weekday games)
Third 500 12/5/16 to 5/1/17 $16/hr (includes brutal $4k downswing & little to no prime time hours)
Remaining 285ish hours 5/2/17 to current $26/hr

It seems unlikely I'll get back to the coveted $30/hr by 2,000 hours.

Thanks for sharing. Coming off of a 500 hour stretch myself. Pretty surreal considering my first 1k hours of sun run, but i had actually just come to accept it. Then i went on a pretty sick heater april-june and was like "oh sh*t i can win again"

Hoping it continues.

I agree and have posted similar thoughts over the last year. I'm closing in on 4000 hours and believe 1000 hour samples are just noise. Maybe 10,000 hours would give an accurate representation but I have a feeling the "long-term" is longer than a lifetime at live poker.