25 hands/h which some people are apparently getting is really slow. They must not be playing with auto-shufflers. How many hands/h do you get and what happens if you convert your statistics to 25 hands/h? If I convert my win-rate/SD in a 25-100BB 1|2 game from 40 hands/h to 25 hands/h I have 9BB/70BB per hour respectively (from 14/90)

I've just lost 600bb (3 BI's) in a single session, first time I lose in that game too.
How often does this happen when you're a solid winner in your games?

Still getting used to the ups and downs of live poker.
Would be nice to know what to expect, or at least some guidelines.

I'm a very solid TAG player. Very patient, but not afraid to get all the money in when those good spots come by.

i have 1700+ hours and 467 sessions (i constitute a session as anytime i continually play a stake, so if i play 1/3 then switch to 2/5, that would be 2 sessions in the same day)



i've lost 400bb 7 times. here is a scatter plot. x axis is hours, y axis is BBs



i can also note i've rebought into games for 600bbs only 2x (my normal 2/5 game is 1k cap, so it's really 3 BIs). usually, if i lose 2 BI (400BB) i call it a day though

3 buyin losses happens all the time. Nothing out of the ordinary.

If the games is good and you book big wins, youre gonna see some solid losses too when variance works against you.

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johnny seems to be saying that 3 BI losses don't really happen all that often, but then again they can't happen if you quit after 2 BI's

I'm not worried at all about losing the 3 BI's, just wondering how often this happens.

I won 1400bb on Thursday, lost 350bb on Friday and then lost another 600bb on Sunday.
Just a bit crazy for me, especially since I'm not used to handling amounts of money this large.
They're the lowest live games available and I have a decent bankroll so, just gotta get used to it.

Both games where I lost were extremely soft, several players calling literally anything pre with almost any hand.
Just didn't hit much and didn't get many big pairs, my smaller pairs lost a lot of flips.

I stand if I lose 2.5 buy ins (500bb). I've had 2 sessions where I've lost $2000+ at 2/5, and 2 sessions where I've lost 2k+ at 5/0 PLO. Over 347 sessions

It is a common occurrence. And I beat the games at a pretty good clip.

ETA: not common, but not out of the ordinary.

4-5 buyins in a session is normal. So is losing 2-4 sessions in a row. So you should always be ready to lose 20 buyins and then you need to make sure you have enough left over to grind if you do lose 20buyins.

This is why you need a 50 buyin roll

I once heard someone make the point that "big wins are insurance against big losses", and that really stuck with me. Your 1400 BB winning session allows you to lose 350 BB and 600 BB the next two sessions and still profit an average of 150 BB/session.

Really depends on both your style of play and the type of game you play in, imo.

I'm pretty sure I've only had a 600bb+ / $1800+ *downswing* just 3 times in my ~5000 hours of 1/3 NL. In 627 sessions, I've recorded just 2 losing sessions over $1000 (worst being $1200 / 400bb which was mostly terrible play on my part).

But I have a very nitty style in a game that mostly plays relatively smallish.

GcluelessNLnoobG

Losing sessions are the price you pay so that people come back and give you monster wins.

Once you’re a winning player your losses are irrelevant(assuming brm) as you’ll always win it back

Seems perfectly normal to me in what can happen in a soft/wild livegame, even to a player beating the game at a good clip.

It may be the case that you made som mistakes or -EV plays along the way too as i dont know your game well enough- but it for sure doesent need to be the case. You could have played perfectly fine, and this kind of swings will still happen.

Yeah, and because of that supernitty scared of variance playing style i find it not that useful because you arent booking many big wins either with that super nitty style. You are likely passing on lots of spots wich are contributing to that lower variance wich will establish itself in both small amount of big losses, as well as small amounts of big wins. Most players on this board wants to maxmize their winrate, and with that added variance comes with it. Its inevitable.

Like sure, if all i wanted to do is to make sure i didnt went into a losing streak i could play only AA/KK/QQ and setmine with small PP. Its like manipulating variance,and i would very likely had a bunch of breakevenish sessions with very very few large swings.

Also: if the swings is getting to you and you find it hard to cope, its a good idea to set a stoploss that Ranma does. Getting up from the game after you lost a certain amount.

Nobody is answering the question, "how likely is this going to happen?"

In the games that I play in, the RMS deviation for an hour's play is something on the order of 60 big blinds.

Suppose your win rate is 10 bb/hour. and you play a five-hour session. Your expected win is going to be 50 bb, and the RMS deviation of that win is going to be sqrt(5) * 60 = 112 bb.

A 300bb loss is going to be 350bb below expectation, and 350/112 is 3.1. Thus, such a loss is going to be a little more than a 3-sigma event. and as such should be happening something on the order of once in a thousand sessions.

Does this seem absurdly small to you? Three things could be going on. First, you may not be a 10bb/hour player. If your win rate is smaller, the likelihood of a loss goes up.

Second, your variance may be larger than mine. The greater the variance (and its corresponding RMS deviation), the smaller the number of sigmas a -350bb result will be.

Third, the wins and losses at poker might not be normally distributed. The tails could be surprisingly fat, because of internal correlations in results between hands of a session. You may or may not play better when you are winning, but it is reasonably likely that you play worse when you are losing, and so your losses compound in losing sessions.

Played cards for the 1st time in Vegas. $2/$5 NL at Aria, CP, and Encore over 4 days.

Hours: 27.16
Profit: $1,925
BB/Hr: 14.2

Plan to return for a WSOP event in Oct.

Yeah, that's very low. Especially for the kind of no-foldem game Yeodan's describing. 100BB SDev is much more likely.

FWIW, I once lost 750BBs in one session of a very similar homegame, and my winrate over all the hours I played in that game (not a huge number, literally about 350) was 17BB/hr.

Yeah, with a 100bb hourly deviation, a 300bb loss for a 10bb/hour winner is more like a 1.6-sigma event, which happens a *lot* more than 1% of the time.

I think it's also pretty clear that poker session results aren't normally distributed, and big wins/losses both happen more than they would on a normal distribution. The main reason IMO being that game conditions aren't constant. Maybe your game is pretty tame on the 5 weekdays but you're playing with maniacs half the time on weekends that shoot your session variance through the roof, making bigger than normal wins/losses possible.

Once in a thousand sessions seems like pretty far fetched. I havent met one single longterm winning player in my life who have a 3 buyin losing session once in thousand sessions. That number have pretty much nothing to do with reality in my opinion. If the games are good, 3 buyin losing sessions happens all the time to winning players if they take the spots they are supposed to.

When I played live, I had a win rate of just under 9bb/hrs ~5 years and ~8,000 hours or ~2,500 sessions (I counted morning and night as different sessions).

I had 23 times where I lost more than 3 Buy Ins (150bb each) of those 7 times where I lost 4+ Buy Ins, 3 times where 6+ Buy Ins.

Maybe I just played in really high variance games (or maybe I slung chips around too much lol), but there's little chance the once in 1000 is correct imo.

Yeah, there is just no way that number is correct or attached to reality.

Let's not even talk about all the times that I was down 3 4, 5+ buy ins and stuck around to make a comeback. If the table had broke, that number would be higher.

Which is also something the math can't account for. Even if it would be random if we stuck around for the exact same 4hr per session people get up early when they are pissed or the game gets worse, or they get a booty call, or they pass our drunk at the table, want to lock up a win, etc etc.

I also don’t get how you can estimate your hourly SD if you’re not logging your stack throughout the session (eg every hour). For example, does the Poker Income app scale your observed session SD by sqrt(session length) to estimate hourly SD? I have no clue. That would also be tricky, because your sessions aren’t all the same length. I’m sure there’s a simple solution but I haven’t figured it out.

I don't know if that how that app does it, but that's how folks have traditionally estimated it ITT, with the additional step of averaging their session length.