I now have 18 buy ins.

One of the most action intense games I have ever played was PLO8 with the option to play your 5 cards as a pat hand.

Started grinding 2/3 $200 buyin at a local California casino and up approx $4,900 in the past 48 logged hours. This casino rakes $2 preflop regardless of chop, $3 on the flop, and $2 more if it goes to the turn so most would agree it’s unbeatable. I definitely feel the majority players are so bad that you can still milk a solid 10bb+ hourly in these high raked games. I would do things I wouldn’t do in 5/5 games like bet $20-$30 all 3 streets for value and get called all the way by marginal hands.

Nice start!

Gupdateusinanother~1000hoursandseeifyoufeelthesame way,imoG

that is a rough game setup but congrats on the start.

Being up 14 BI's over 50 hours probably means the game is very beatable

Preflop rake is weird though, guess you're rewarded even more for playing TAG.
$7 cap is actually not bad

Just had a crazy evening.

Went to a home game, 6 players in front of me buy in for €1000, I'm like: "uh, I wanted to play for €200"
Almost went back home, but everyone seemed ok with it, some of the €1000 stacks pocketed most of it as well.

Few hours later I'm sitting there with €1400 in front of me, time to go home!

Bankroll is now over €6000, build up from only €3500 at the start of the month.
Playing 1/1 exclusively, except for this game which was 2/2

I've played 9 sessions this month (and this year, since everything just opened up again)
50 hours total, €58.8/h
Only had 1 losing session, probably because I went home early after losing my 1st buy-in

I'm at 90 hours total tracked now, still feeling like a total newbie
45/h though, so pretty happy so far and pretty sure I'm at least a 15-20/h winner over the longer term.

Nice start!

Gupdateusinanother~1000hoursandseeifyoufeelthesame way,imoG

Great results!

They mean literally nothing from a long term standpoint tho, and def do not mean your a 15bb+/hour winner.

I ran a variance calculator based on a previous live sample (a small sample, that is, but it's what I got).

I ran the calculator for approximately a month of play, 8 hours a day.
"Minimum bankroll required for less than 5% risk of ruin" was 394BB.

How does this make sense? 2 Buy ins minimum for playing 6K hands?
Can anyone explain what solid conclusions I can make from this? regarding my next poker trip.
https://ibb.co/LnW2z1k

Seems to me the calculator is pretty straightforward. It tells you that you are going to lose money 2% of the time and that if you want less than 5% chance of going bust, you need 394BB.

A $2k br for a 2/5 game doesn't see much, quite the opposite.

Then I can go play this level with a Bankroll of 4 buy ins and expect to make the said expected winnings (with the deviation of course) without going broke 95% of the times?

What's the point of the 20 buy in rule then?

I think that's his point. It is way too small a BR. The variance calculator seems not to be playing NL. In particular, when looking at the screenshot, it seems to be convinced that you could never have a 1K hand stretch in which you lose more than about 550BBs, which is patently ridiculous.

I'd try a different variance calculator.

Hell, I've lost over 700BBs in a single session in a game in which I'm beating it for about 18 BBs an hour, rather than per 100 hands.

That said, I think your SDev is unrealistically low in that sim. My SDev is about 70BBs an hour, not per hundred.

I suspect it's because in larger sample sizes, you get chance of deeper downswings.

See what the calculator tells you about a sample of 30,000 or 60,000 hands which is a 1000 and 2000 hours.

Converting SDV per hour to per hour and the opposite is the bane of my existence. I know it's been explained before, but is there a simple formula for doing so?

It's in this thread somewhere. bip! wrote it, which should make it easier to search for. I don't remember for sure which abbreviation he used for standard deviation, though.

Oh I get it now. Is there a variance calculator you'd recommend?
Im considering a poker trip this summer (1 month is the duration I have in mind), and given that I have a limited amount of money I'd like to calculate the pros/cons from a financial point of view.

There are dozens of them. If you get three that give the same answers, you can likely trust that their underlying calcs are correct.

That said, where are you getting your WR and SDev numbers? That SDev seems really small for live.

Try pokerdope.

Winrate is from a sample I have from playing daily for a month and a half in the same casino I'm planning to play at this summer. 286 hours, 25 hands an hour on average, so I calculated the bb/100 from that.

I'd use my overall winrate but that would be unrealistic (I live in Israel, where there are no casinos, so I play home games which are ridiculously soft, so my average winrate is higher than the one I have playing in a casino).

the SDev is just the average sdev this calculator suggested, no clue what my actual sdev is.

Therein lies your problem, imo. Variance calculators are generally set up for online, where the SDev is generally much tighter than live. If you search this thread, you'll see that the average SDev for winning live regs reported ITT is about 80-100BBs/hr. That is WAY higher than 70BB/100, though I don't have the time to hunt up the formula and do the math right now.

OK, had enough time to do this search. If you are on the low side of average SDev for live (75BB/hr), you should enter 150BB/100 in the variance calculator.

FWIW: I've found that the low side of STD DEV also coincides with the low side of WR. For those without data of their own, I would not expect that you can win 8-10bb/hr with a STD DEV of 75bb/hr.

My STD DEV over 1500hrs is closer to 120bb/hr, but my win rates are also over the 10bb/hr mark. Interestingly, if you dbl you win rate and standard deviation you also need to roughly dbl your bankroll.

So despite having a significantly higher than usual win rate, my high std dev also requires that I maintain a higher than average bankroll. I would consider 40BI - i.e. 4000bb's to be a minimum level to maintain for myself. If you nit it up with a std dev of 75bb/hr you can get a Risk of Ruin of 5% with about 20BI - that is where the 20BI rule comes from .

Remember though that RoR calculators assume you are NOT withdrawing any $$'s and all winnings are infinitely added to the BR.

This was very helpful. Pokerdope variance calculator does show more realistic results.
Thank you very much!