I've probably straddled more times than anyone in this thread and more than any of the rec players. I can straddle whenever the **** I want and for whatever reason I want. When there are 2 people straddling and 6 nits who will never straddle, then I'm probably not going to straddle.

Many players will never straddle and will take advantage of those that do. If you to make it a real good game, rather than straddling $10 at a 2/5 game you convert the game to 2/5/10 or at the very least convert it to a 2/5 with a mandatory $10 straddle. A 3 blind game is vastly superior to 2 blind games, but at the same time I'm not going to put myself at a disadvantage to nits (like many of you in this thread) just because some dipshit rec player wants me to.

Bomb pots are a waste of time. It takes 5+ minutes for a single hand which normally ends in a chop. If you really want to gamble, then do a flip. It saves a hell of a lot of time. If you want to play bomb pots, then go to the ****ing bomb pot table.

Many poker players, both pros and rec try to apply peer pressure to serve their own interests. I'll encourage players to straddle but if they say no then I leave it at that where other players will continue to poke and prod. Same with bomb pots. If a majority of players want to play I sit quietly and let them play. However, if a majority of them don't want to play there will always be some jackass poking and prodding trying to get some recreational player to play a game he may not even know how to play.

This peer pressure bullshit is predatory and it leaves a bad taste in players mouth. It's a cash game and you can literally play however the hell you want in the context of the rules. If you want to buy in short, you can. If you want to buy in super deep, you can. If you want to leave after winning a big pot you can. If you want to open for 10x you can. If you don't want to straddle, you don't have to. If you don't want to change the game stakes, you don't have to. However, if you don't do exactly what your competition wants then they'll whine like babies about it for the next 15 minutes.

The last thing anyone should do is succumb to peer pressure from some low life degenerate piece of **** poker player.

Isn't this how modern societies are built? Pressure the **** out of the people so they can make decisions that benefit the winners even more?

Of all places, a poker table is kind of a funky place to pick as your platform...

Don't hate, congratulate.

/derail

Seriously, that's more than enough on table/seat changing etc.

Edit: done deraul

What is the minimum number of hours of live play needed to determine whether a player is a winning/losing player with a reasonable level of confidence?

I’m going to estimate 200 hours (5000 hands if assuming 25/hour) is enough to be reasonably accurate. For a clear winner/loser, perhaps 80 hours (2000 hands) is enough?

500

Depends on how much you're winning by. Up 5 buyins in 200 hours isn't saying much positive about your skill level. Up 40 buyins would be saying a lot.

It's not that easy to get a reliable confidence interval on your win-rate because of bias.

If you study a little you're probably winning at least a little. 90% of actions that live low stakes players make are mistakes. Some should be appallingly bad if you've studied the game even a little. If you are good enough to constantly identify mistakes your opponents are making which you aren't, and articulate why they're mistakes, then that's a reliable enough indicator that you're a winner.

Good post browni.

Also i would say 200 hours is not nearly enough. 1000 hours is a bare minimum if we are talking a semi serious sample to work with.

Sent fra min SM-G991B via Tapatalk

I've only won 6.83 bb/hr over 5100 hours in my 1/3 NL game, so not a crusher by any means (the more of a crusher you are, perhaps the more a shorter term sample will be more telling), but...

I can't possibly see how lol 80 hour or lol 200 hour stretches can tell you anything with any level of confidence whatsoever. I'm pretty sure every big winner who posts here can dig out multiple samples over these stretch sizes that suggest they are big losers / breakeven at best. Personally, my two biggest downswings both occurred over 80 hour stretches, and both times it flatlined me for over 200 hours. I also just recently pulled myself out of a flatlining stretch of 160 hours (which didn't involve anything remotely close to a downswing).

I've also had a 1013 hour stretch of 12.19 bb/hr (I'm a crusher) immediately followed by a 1307 hour stretch of 3.97 bb/hr (I'm extremely mediocre, at best), a difference of over 3x. Although I certainly haven't logged any 1000 hour stretches as a loser or remotely close to breakeven, so I would guess 1000 hours will give you a good indication if you're a winner versus a loser versus breakevenish (although you won't really have any confidence whatsoever in your actual winrate).

Sample sizes of much less than 1000 hours will be much more susceptible to short term variance. I typically put in 500 - 550 hours per year, with my worst year (not including lol low volume Coronaids years) being 4.5 times worse than my best year (2.63 bb/hr over 582 hours versus 11.83 bb/hr over 568 hours). Although I'm pretty sure I haven't booked a losing or breakevenish 500 stretch anywhere, but I certainly have booked extremely unimpressive ones. So I guess you could argue there's an ~ok chance that a 500 hour sample size may indicate if you are a winner versus loser versus breakevenish, but again the confidence level in the actual winrate will be extremely low (and there's still just that much more a chance it was all extremely good / extremely bad variance).

Ggoodluck!G

Last night I played with two players who I immediately recognized as winning players based on their demeanors and accents. Within the first 30 minutes my suspicions we're confirmed with them each playing very few hands and never calling a raise preflop.

They did a very poor job of hiding the fact that they are winning players, even though one went as far as to say "It's a good thing I am lucky, because I am not a very good player."

Then another player sat down. This player looked and sounded very fishy even though he was decked out in poker memorabilia. He said he was coming to gamble and seemed to be putting his chips to work. However, he then pulled out his phone and began playing a card game (perhaps Chinese Poker) which immediately qualifies him as a very serious card player, whether a winner or loser, although IME definitely tilts to him being a professional. Unfortunately he was only at my table for a short period of time before transferring (a quick transfer is another sign that he is probably a winning player looking for edges), but I suspect he was also a winning player and had I played a full session with him I would have most likely known for sure.

Sometimes it's difficult to discern within just an orbit who might be good vs just tight, however a bad player will stick out pretty quickly even over the course of just one round.

Like if I see a player open limping the CO I know they're not good.

Or when I see someone call a raise from the bb and open shove a AK2 board.

I think of it more in terms of buyins won/lost rather than hours logged. For me, winning or losing 30 buyins is a strong indication that you are a winning or losing player. If you haven't won or lost 30 buyins, then you haven't played enough to have that statistical certainty whether that's 10 hours, 100 hours, or 1000 hours. Actually, if you go past 1000 hours and you can't win or lose 30 buyins, then that could be a strong indicator you're a breakeven player. I'd have to think about that.

Nothing is ever 100% but I think for 95% or more people who win or lose 30 buyins are not doing so out of luck. They are doing it because they are winning or losing player.

If you play $1/$2, aim to win $6,000.
If you play $1/$3, aim to win $9,000.
If you play $2/$5, aim to win $15,000.
If you play $5/$10, aim to win $30,000.
... and so on.

That will tell the tale.

This makes a lot of sense, actually.

For a losing player to string enough wins to get to +30BI is very unlikely. Vice versa also true.

I would actually say +/- 20BI is also probably enough.

Yeah right. I've seen a fish win 20BIs at 2/5 $500 cap in a single session.

It’s not an assertion with 100% confidence. It’s one that only needs to be reasonably accurate.

There will be exceptions to every rule.

The other day I watched a 4 hour Lodge Stream of a 2-5-10 game, because it featured Doug Polk and there was a reg I had played with before I was curious to see how he played.

After the first 10-15 minutes, it looked as if everyone was solid. Then little by little, I started noticing a growing number of mistakes. By the end of the first hour, I was able to tell you who the two worst players at the table were -besides, ldo, the two best players at the table.

It took me another hour or so to determine that there were a couple of mediocre/bad players who either clicked buttons or just made minor mistakes pre and postflop.

That leaves us with 3 players. I can say with some confidence that one of them was as good or better than the reg I wanted to check out. The other two seemed competent enough, probably regs, maybe even pros, but I need more time to tell you how good they are.

This experience brought back a question I often had when I played 2/5 which is whether it's possible to be a 10bb winner in reg infested games such as the one on stream and such as the ones I was experiencing more and more in late 2019-early 2020 before the pandemic. Even if you take Doug Polk out, I don't think the bad players were bad enough to sustain all 5 regs. Perhaps an underrated part are the quick burners- the players who sit at a table and lose money fast. I am also guessing that the straddles/match the stack structure help increase profits... but still.

I have seen a local legend who once sat down on a Friday afternoon and didn’t leave until Sunday night. On top of that, he drank beer non-stop (except dry hours) for all 3 days.

Cashed out nearly $25,000 in a max buy-in 1/3 game of $300 with $300 betting cap. He basically stacked 80+ players in the 3-day binge.

And yet, he’s literally top of everyone’s list as action whale.

Winning player, ldo.

There are easier ways to convince your wife to let you keep playing poker.

When I got back into poker about 4 years ago, I wondered the same. I had been an online grinder back in those magical pre-Black Friday days, and hung it up not long after BF without really giving live poker much of a shot (really dumb, in retrospect.) I wasn't really satisfied with the stock answers I got, though... usually I have read 1000 to determine if you are a winner, 2000 to get a ballpark of your winrate (which, is also flawed, because your player pool and you yourself + your skills and and a thousand other intangibles are always in a state of flux.)

Fortunately, when I began tracking my results, I opted to build a custom spreadsheet in Google Sheets as opposed to using one of the available smartphone apps. This allowed me the ability to graph a running $/hr or BB/hr for a given # of hours; something that is not available in the poker tracking apps, to my knowledge.

First, a simple graph of my BB/hr. Converges to 13.6 BB/hr over 2650 hours. I had some wicked variance in a stretch in the earlier part of that graph, haven't run quite that bad since that time, but definitely have progressively gotten better too which is pretty evident even here.



Ok now, we'll get into the more illuminating graphs that will paint a more complete picture of the variance over this span. These will graph the hourly of the last X # of hours, starting with the first available stretch of that sample. First, we'll do 2000 hours, the typical stock answer to "how many hours do I have to play to know my winrate." For the sake of clarity, note that it will start at hour 2000, so the first data point on the graph is my winrate over the first 2000 hours, and the last data point (at hour ~2650) encompasses my hourly in the most recent 2000 hours (thus excluding the first 650.)



I have certainly improved as I've gained experience, but I also ran hot as hell last year and gradually my particularly bad stretch in the early days is weeded out toward the end, so I would guess this will make its way back to the 13/14 BB/hr range? Obviously gonna depend on a lot of external factors. Let's check out the same graph but for a running BB/hr for the last 1000 hours.



Do I think it is reasonable to expect my winrate to be 18.1BB/hr as it has been for the last 1000 hours? Lolno. I have run very well, and I must say that I have played generally deeper games the later in the results I go... more 5/5 1k cap and 5/10 1000-3000 in the very last 1k hours and mostly 2/5 500 cap in the first, so that is certainly a factor. But realistically, I do expect some rough waters ahead will take that back down to earth some.

Now, let's drill down into some smaller numbers and see just how low a number I will need to put in before I have a breakeven/down stretch over a given span of hours.



It appears my lowest BB/hr for a 500 hour span so far was about 5.6BB/hr, and at the time my total about 8.2BB/hr over ~820 hours. I also spot a local minimum of about 9BB/hr over the last 500 hours at hour ~2070, and at that time my lifetime w/r was somewhere around 12BB/hr. So we can conclude, if nothing else, that it is easy to run 3BB/hr below expectation over a 500 hour sample. Thus, if you are losing less than 3BB/hr over your first 500 hours, and you are studying and improving, you might well be a long-term winner who has been dealing with the bad side of variance. Now, let's cut that back some more check on BB/hr over a running 275 hour sample:



Yahtzee. The largest sample of hours that I have broken even (in BB terms) is 275 hours. Once I put in some study and stopped running so godawful I haven't come close to a breakeven that long, but even there I was winning at a pretty good clip of 8BB/hr, so you can see that 275 hours is a fairly meaningless sample. OK, let's knock it down some more and find some pain!



Now we're talking. Even in the latter part of the graph when running what is ostensibly well above my long term EV, 125 hour breakeven stretches are commonplace. 125 hours is what I figure to be the max a full time grinder can put in per month without eventually going crazy (YMMV.) So yeah, even if you are crushing full time, you will have some breakeven months. Let's dial it down one more time to a weekend warrior / part-timer kind of schedule and see what a running BB/hr of 50 hours looks like:



Yeah, part timers are gonna have a rough time if they expect to win every month, no question about it.

Anyway! I hope some people find this real-world variance analysis useful, I wish I had this kind of information when I was getting into the live poker streets. Before anyone asks, this is about 95% 5BB and above, and about 99% NLHE (there's a tiny bit of 5/5 mix and 2/2 PLO in there, not enough to make a difference.)

Awesome breakdown Mrage!

And for those asking the question (i.e. "how many hours do I have to play before I know if I'm a winner in the game?"), keep in mind Mrage's giraffes are those someone crushing it (which, if you're asking the question, you likely aren't).

So now have a think of what those short term results could look like for someone who is "only" winning at like 5bb/hr (which is nothing to sneeze, especially if you're playing in a small stacked / high raked game).

And further give a think to what it means to the rec weekend warrior, where those lol meaningless insignificant 50 hour stretches are likely a full month worth of play.

My guess is a huge part of the poker ecosystem is made of up losing players who have fooled themselves into thinking they are winning players based on some lol shortterm run good stretches and have convinced themselves they are simply "running bad" otherwise.

Ggoodluck!G

what app gave you those gifs?

They're not from an app. I opted to build a spreadsheet to track results manually so I wouldn't have to worry about an app becoming unsupported or the like. Plus I knew that doing so would eventually allow me to tease out these kinds of visualizations.

noice! been thinking about using excel myself if i ever get back on the grind but felt that could be silly since everyone uses various apps

spreadsheets til i die

FWIW, poker income allows you to export your data as a csv file and play with them on excel. My guess is most other apps offer a similar feature.