Quote:
Originally Posted by JB Clark
Ok so you need 100,000 hands to be within 1 sigma (what Ive been told) so you can be 95% confident after 3300 hrs that your true win rate is represented by that sample size. So 500 hours is a hefty chunk. If you cant win after 500 hours you might not be a winning player.
The thing is, this is all misleading because if you have a high win rate you can assume you will ALWAYS show a profit after 500 hours. If you played an infinity of hands and chose any random sample of 500 consecutive hours, the chances that any of them are BE are not very high. Thats like 2- 3 months of not making money.
I'm only responding to this post because I feel a moral imperative to correct such blatant misinformation in a thread that is probably viewed by a lot of well-intended newbies. (I guess also to showoff my knowledge and stroke my e-peen and get that sweet sweet internet cred but whatever)
This post is ridiculous, and the fact that from the first sentence you reveal you have 0 clue what you're talking about should be a huge red flag that should prompt people to ignore what you're saying.
A) You'd need a very low standard deviation to achieve a 95% confidence interval after just 100,000 hands. What numbers are you using for standard deviation? Keep in mind your raw winrate -- aka bb/100 or expected bb/100 -- has nothing to do with the width of a confidence interval. (Note: It can be argued that a high winrate player can be more likely to have a lower std dev bb/100, but that's a different topic that was discussed a few pages ago)
I'd contend you're using extremely unreasonable numbers to obtain your conclusion. FWIW I've played over 5k hours of mid/high stakes live and have seen the revolving door of poker first hand. I've seen guys assume 50bb/100 winrates with 50bb/100 standard deviation (or at least their glistening confidence implied this sort of delusion) and a few months later I'll see them with a nub stack at 2/5.
Human beings are naturally self-deluding; some anthropolgoists argue it's actually advantageous from an evolutionary perspective for a species to be self-deluding. This combined with the overload of greed and results oriented thinking you find in the poker world causes a lot of poker players to be abnormally delusional. I think you're squarely in this group. I mean, you led off an argument by admitting you had to outsource the foundation of your argument to an apparent moron and nevertheless proceeded to spout off ridiculous claims that apply to and condescend a large number of people.
B) High winrate players can certainly have losing 500 hour samples. This is hardly debatable. I personally know pretty much all the biggest winners at the biggest games in my area and we all have 500+ hour breakevens or losses. Maybe if game conditions were ALWAYS perfect (e.g. you never played in a mediocre game for 6 hours before the game got good) and you were ALWAYS playing your A game it could be possible, but once more I think your assertions are founded on flimsy and absurdly optimistic assumptions.
Some might people run a little good and fade 500+ hour breakevens for a while, or even their whole career if they're lucky enough. I have a 3500 hour period with no 500+ hour breakevens myself. But in the long run, it will happen to all of us.
"I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men"
Last edited by gangip; 08-04-2017 at 03:29 PM.
Reason: I'm an idiot