This happened here in maryland. Last year the games were really juicy but the player pool went broke. Its a very cannabilistic game because you can lose a lot in a hurry and some of the people just never folded pre. Now the four card game is close to dead. All the fish are playing 5 card, which obv is a big game that u better be rolled for.

The thing is, edge is huge in 5card bc ppl have no clue how to rank starting hands

Lol i love that feeling when you finally start running hot or normal again after a long losing or b/e streak. Its a different kind of thrill than just winning 70% of sessions consistently

I see lots of strategy lines posted here by what I assume are good players, like a good amount of double barrelling scare cards, bluff check raising draws on the turn and things like that. I see it all the time when Im playing. I see guys doing it in real time at my tables. Things that I consider unnecessary plays causing chips to be spewed everywhere even though I know they are winners long term.

These same players post about long losing streaks and crazy variance and how 1000-2000 hrs is insignificant. Its hard for me to believe that you guys don't see that these things are related.

Keep those super aggro plays to an absolute minimum and your variance will decrease and your consistency as it relates to win rates will increase.

Huge +1. And i could have added many more aspects+ to elaborate on the aspects Mike mentions here.

As a single example i cant count all the 10-12 hour sessions i have been sitting there just folding hour after hour being totally carddead, executing patience at it finest. Only to stack a guy late at night when he is doing just _one_ big mistake and i take his 150 BB stack, and by that booking another long session with 10-12 BB hour winrate.

Winning poker longterm combined with aiming to lower the variance as much as possible is usually boring as f----,that is the reality.

Good aggression decreases variance.

Though I will agree that most aggression recommended in these forums is not good.

Good aggression very well may decrease overall variance, but even good aggression can lead to huge losing streaks if you run into the top of peoples range over and over again. The same streak of running into big hands would be a much smaller losing streak if you weren't double and triple barrelling over and over.

When I run into the tops of people ranges over and over as I did very recently, I lose 6-7 buy ins. Not 13-20+ buy ins.

And Yes, a lot of the aggressive lines posted are crap in real life.

The Ultimate Grinder Leader Board

Back in the on line days of poker a site called PTR had the ultimate grinder leader board. If you won the most $ at yer stake you got an UGL badge. I personally never won one. I had a pal who was a stone cold killer that won 2 consecutive. He was an absolute beast.

In live cash games its really tough to have one of these cuz lol people make sht up. This past month I have personally witnessed a new ultimate grinder born in the 2/5 1k cap realm. I have played a lot of poker and know a lot of pros...and have never seen a combo as impressive as this. These are not my results but the hours are bravo verified and I have seen the fat stax o cash

warning this is obscene

350 hours in one month? Kill me please.

Mike - I warned you that the numbers are obscene

Would spc be ok with sharing some high level aspects of how she approaches the game? Not looking to out specifics but i mean does she try to be as solid of a tag as she can be? Does she lag it up when deep? Light 3 bet ever? Or just straightforward face up value? Big sizing? Small sizing? Stfu ava?

its definitely related. also i dont think 1-2k hours is "insignificant", thats ridiculous. i just dont think you can look at your winrate after a 1k-hour sample and be like hmm ok thats my true winrate and im gonna plan my life around this number. but its still significant and can offer you some insight.

in addition to crazy long losing streaks, ive also had runs where i go +50k in 300 hours or crazy long hot streaks like a full year/~2k hours of running at 15bb/hr even though my overall winrate usually settles in like 25% lower.

being spewy and running hot at the same time is like the best thrill in poker

I'm about a recreational year away from 4000 hours in my 1/3 NL game, and (unless things change drastically over the next ~500 hours) I'm pretty sure I'm on target for the first 2000 hours to be twice as profitable as the last 2000 hours were. So you can probably guess what I think of lol 1000 hour sample sizes.

Course, it will take me 8.5 years to reach 4000 hours in my game. Obviously, conditions change over that time.

GconditionsistheonlythingthatmattersG

+1

Ghint:guyscheckitdownagainsthercuzshe'sagirl?G

I don't grind so this is over a year and a half, but I'm at $41,199 over 472 hours for ~$89 an hour, almost all 2/5 1k cap. Sun running is real. If I limit myself to a month, my June this year was $9827 over 33 hours for ~$300 an hour, all 2/5 1k cap.

Good luck getting people to stop looking at their results, even if their sample sizes are small
I need to go back and convert the confidence interval math into hours the next time I look at mine.

I've heard this said at the table as a joke and there's some practical truth in it "hookers don't take sklansky bucks". So a big part of the smaller sample analysis comes back to cashflow management more than win rate.

It's a weird feeling when you look in your fire safe and all of a sudden you're up a bunch of buy ins after running "meh" for a while. Once you can accept that bad stretches happen without it tilting you you can actually exploit it if your player pool is small and they think you're "unlucky". Wouldn't try anything fancy in a big room though.


I'm going to add a 1000 hour trailing calc the next time I look at my data to see what it looks like. Doubt it'll be anything groundbreaking.

I'd disagree that they're "just noise". They're enough so start seeing trends and make some inferences. I think they're enough to tell you that you're *probably* playing well if you're winning. I'd just say that there's still some uncertainty in what the true answer is. (I really need to pull those equations.)

For a rec player you're never getting a long term answer for true winrate. If you were putting in 2k hours / yr as a full time pro maybe you'd have something with some good confidence with less game changes underlying your data as the collection rate is so much higher than a "normal" player. Can't see that being a sustainable lifestyle for too long though if you wanted to put in any off table studying and also have a life.

When you say 5 card you mean Big O? Get dealt 5, play 2? I saw that on the board when I was in DC this spring and thought "that's weird in a casino". I can see that being like Hi-Lo where it's impossible for a whale to imagine that any hand is bad enough to fold.

I could probably count on my fingers how many times I've double barrel bluffed scare cards, bluff check raised the turn, or many of those crazy ago lines in the last 3 months. Some might even call me a nit (I exploit the **** out of them when they do), and I still see significant variance in my results. The issue has a lot to do with sample size beyond what you think of as "style". (If anything many of the "un-orthodox" lines I've seen you post are more spewy/high variance or luck boxy. Unless there's just a giant selection bias there.)

I don't think I've ever said that 1000 hours is insignificant. 100 hours is completely worthless. 500 hours can be breakeven. Without running numbers I'd say that 1000 hours probably has a factor of 2-3 potential error. It's enough to say if you're probably a winning player, but not enough to point at a win rate and say "I make $20 BB/hr, so you should be able to easily too".


What about those times when you wait patiently for 10 hours, get it in against the fish, and get 4 outerer on the river? Or go AA v KK preflop and he gets his 20%? You're tying your entire session result to the outcome of 1 hand, which (I think) increases overall variance.

Although I will say that those sessions where you play $1/2 for 4 hours, feel like nothing significant happened, and walk away up $80 *feel* weird or like a waste of time. But that's actually a pretty good win rate for that game.

Ahha! You posted this while I was typing, but it's in line with what I was thinking about 1000 hour samples giving you maybe a factor of 2 or 3 error on your win rate number.

You get in about what? 500 hours a year or so?

Big O does get spread in MD but he's talking about 5 Card Hi Only

Are those not the same thing?

Big O is hi/lo with 5 cards, 5 card PLO is just hi

Yeah, probably close to ~550 hours/year the last few years.

The one thing I'm also guessing/realizing in my pool is that many of the regs put in *far* more hours than I do in a year since it looks like (from what I can tell) this is kinda their only form of recreation / social. I mean, it's likely I'm not even winning on an experience metric any more against many of my opponents.

GcluelessgameconditionsnoobG

Angrist - I will post my 4000 hour graph when I cross that bridge.

- My first 1100 hours I ran at $45-50/hr (and at least half of those hours were spent at 1/2).

- My second 1150 hours were breakeven and a completely hellish never ending nightmare.

- My subsequent 1200+ hours have been >$20/hr, though the first 450 hours in that stretch were barely in the black and fit in better with the previous 1150 hour sample as that was a more or less prolonged 1500 hour break even stretch.

As you can see, I really place no stock in the 1000 hour samples and freely admit variance is probably the biggest factor in determining your win rate/success. Two identical 2/5 players with the same solid fundamentals could end up $100,000 apart at the end of a year playing full-time (ie: Player A had a breakeven year playing solid poker but running bad, not getting into profitable situations etc. Player B had a $100,000 year playing solid poker, stumbling into profitable opportunity after profitable opportunity, constantly fading outs in the big pots, hitting his big draws in big pots, etc.).

The longer I play the more I come around to the idea of poker as a career being complete madness. It is impossible to create a projected income budget because poker is extraordinarily ridiculous. Poker is the ultimate side hustle, but I think trying to find meaning in sample sizes the average player accrues in 1-5 years is a fool's errand.

Course the problem is that we all look at all of this thru our own lens, typically basing our conclusions on our own results. I'd have a much difference response to Johnny's quote above at 2000 hours than I likely will at 4000 hours. But there will be those sitting at 4000 hours who are where I was at 2000 hours and wondering what all the fuss is about.

Ggoodlucktousall,imoG

That terminology differs from what I've heard around here in MI. Although it's extremely rare that I see either spread.

I'll be interested to see (I always like seeing more data). It sounds like a really rough time of it in the middle. Even with my experience with my own winrate that would make me question if I was even a winning player, or if I was tilting it off during that stretch due to the mental fatigue of being beaten down for a year+. Although being somewhere between breakeven and +10BB/hr is a lot more encouraging than being somewhere between -10BB/hr and +5BB/hr for those kinds of samples.

Completely agree with the idea that poker as a career is a complete crap shoot. The uncertainty in your results from year to year make planning impossible. It's like being a day trader almost.

My view of poker is that it's best as a hobby. I find the study of the game and the situational math challenging and interesting from a strategy perspective, both at the table and via books. Beyond that the act of getting out of the house and away from my computers to sit at a table with a wide swatch of humanity a nice change from dealing with engineers all the time. From playing poker I've got a buddy that flips cars, one that sells diamonds, a couple of lawyers, a chef, a couple of dope/pill dealers, know a guy that we're convinced is actually both a pimp and a gigolo, a a bunch of others. (A lot of of +lifeEV there.) I can have fun, relax a bit, and win enough money to cover my other hobbies + a little extra fun when things are going well.

This is also my exact take on the most +lifeEV way to view poker as well; as an entertaining fun get-out-of-the-house possibly-even-make-some-side-$$ hobby.

GbuteachtotheirownG

Ive gotten my money in with 2% equity in 300-400bb pots 4 times in the last three months.

Second set is tough to fold.

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