My stats for 2021 after trying to grind somewhat seriously with month breaks in between. Played about 350 hours of 2/3(+6k), 320 hours of 5/5(+23.5k not including +6.5k in jackpots), and about 15 hours of shot taking @ 5/10(-$8,300 lol)

The reason my account is relatively old whilst being my first year is because I was a high schooler during Black Friday(April 2011) when I was trying to grind .5/.10 on stars, but gave up after accounts were locked.

Started playing 2/3 with a 5k roll and after I made 5k I took a shot at 5/5 which I got absolutely crushed in and lost 10k after 60 hours of play haha. Took a break for 3 months and started grinding 5/5 again with a 10k roll and ran it up to 40k after 300 hours of run good. After having a decent bankroll, I took shots at 5/10 and got crushed like I did the first time I shot took 5/5. Towards the end of the year I hit 2 small table share jackpots and 1 winning hand jackpot for approx $6.6k total so overall winnings are 28k for the year(7 out of 12 months played)

At the start of 2022 I ran pretty well again being up 11k after about 100 hours(which isn't much), but after that I hit the wall hard and went on a 18-19k downswing where I admittedly started playing worse while losing. It’s only been 50 hours of this downswing, but my mental hasn’t been doing well after losing so much in a short amount of time. My style of play is very LAG so the swings are a lot more intense and obviously you need to be on your A game while playing or you end up making too many mistakes that cost you your whole stack.

Im starting to understand how serious and soul crushing variance can be after reading some of your guys’ post that state a downswing can happen for hundreds of hours even to crushers. Going to try and reset mentally and grind for another winning year.
2/3 game is a $200 cap with $7 rake so I realized it was unbeatable past minimum wage unless I was absolutely crushing the game.
5/5 game is a $600 cap
5/10 is a $1500 cap

2021


2022

Do Work Son: Am I understanding that you have about 700ish hours and a total profit of $14k? Not bad at all. Good work.

The most recent downswing though, what stakes was that at? Losing 17K in 50 hours even at 5/T is going to be a symptom of major leaks unless you have some really obviously huge bad beats/coolers. For example, I just went through a 20k downswing at 5/T but was on the losing end of all five AA against KK situations (had AA twice, lost: had KK three times, lost all) I was in and lost 12 flips in a row. Was it perfect play? No. I know I tilted off an extra 2k or so. But I have records of the vast majority of the losses being directly contributable to variance and not poor play.

The reason I say this is that an immerse downswing for such a short time, and I would seriously be evaluating my game before continuing to play those stakes. With such a short sample, it is quite likely you are a moderate to high winner at lower stakes and may need to improve your game to be profitable at 5/T consistently.

Best of luck at the tables!

$14k over 700hrs is quite good. That's more than one would make working at Chipotle, which is the most common measuring stick for professional poker players.

Unfortunately, 700 hrs isn't a significant sample size, so it's not clear whether you actually make as much as a McDonald's employee, or a Chipotle employee, or the seemingly unattainable mountain that all low stake pros aspire to one day climb: making as much as a good poker dealer. Keep on grinding! Best of luck to you sir!

Stocks and crypto are the ultimate casino. You have no choice but to invest though. Holding cash you lost a ton of your purchasing power.

It would be 680 hours in 2021 plus 140 hours for 2022 which is about 820 hours for 14k excluding 6.6k in jackpots. The downswing is a mix of a 5/5 $1000 cap home game and a 5/5/mandatory straddle 10 $800 cap w/ $25 bomb pots that is super swingy with loads of rec players to make it a profitable game. Yeah i've definitely been playing worse and probably donked off 4-5k during the downswing.

Yeah need at least another solid year of poker to see where I stand in my games. I would be doing a lot better if I didnt donk off 10k in 50 hours on my move up to 5/5 and 8k in 15 hours of 5/10. The player pools from 2/3 -> 5/5 -> 5/10 all needed solid adjustments in my game and I still haven't figured out 5/10 since I haven't tried it since.


The same day after my post I did really well and kept stacking the spot in our home game. +$3400 to start off the comeback.. only $13.5k more to go haha

Variance calculations newb here. Can someone help me decipher what this means for me?

it says you input your data incorrectly, there's just no way you're beating the game at 88/100 over 10k hands

i dont input any data it pulls it from my sessions. all sessions have been put in correctly.

This is after about 150 hours so wanted to see how to interpret the variance calculations to see if they are accurate or not

after 150 hours I'm +17k playing 2/5

oh that makes more sense if it's converting bb/hour into bb/100 and this is live

i still think it's garbage in garbage out based on sample size being so small

ie you could wipe out all those winnings in a single orbit and likewise double that in a single orbit, it's unlikely but not impossible

i'd take another look when you have a couple thousand hours and you have some more meaningful sample

do you know what your bb/hour is? i think that's a more relevant metric since each room/dealer/player pool tend to play at their own speeds

ok cool, so I just upgraded to the pro version of the app so i was curious I figured it was a lol sample so no worries

my bb/100 is 22/hour or $110 an hour

well this is absolutely crushing it, probably to an unsustainable level

for reference, i maintained 17/hour for over a year and literally everyone thought i was lying

but you're clearly doing some things correctly, i don't think you could accidentally do that well if you weren't an overall winner

perhaps removing some of your bigger wins could give you a glimpse of what is a more reasonable expectation

thanks

Im sure its not sustainable, although the player pool is laughably bad.....but i would suspect 17/hour would be more like it and one i will gladly take.

Your results over 150 hours mean absolutely nothing. Congrats on the winnings though.

Yup thanks . And I’m aware it means not much. I wanted insight how to interpret the variance numbers

150 hours is nothing. If you suck out against the correct 2 or 3 stacks in that timeframe, and just generally don’t do anything stupid the rest of the time your win rate will be through the roof.

Ok so idk the software you're using but I'm gonna assume they run simulations, maybe 20 maybe 100 idk. So you input your winrate and variance stats then ask it to simulate what that looks like over 10,000 hands, the variance calculator then runs that simulation multiple times, let's say 20 times. The green line represents the best result of those simulations (10409 bbs) while the red line represents the worst result (8113 bbs). There's prob a button or a setting somewhere that'll show you all simulations on the graph and not just the best and worst. The white line represents your EV and isn't actually a simulation, you're "supposed" to win 8752 bbs.

The min bankroll for ROR is how large your bankroll needs to be for your risk of ruin (ROR) to be under 5%. In this case, it's 1.13 stacks or 113 bb's, which means a bankroll of 113 bbs should be enough to lower your chance of going busto to under 5%. That should prob clue you in to the fact that you've been running very good over this sample size, and the variance calculator doesn't really have any way of accounting for that. (although I think some have inputs for perceived and actual winrates?)

Awesome! Thank you thank you

This was exactly what I was looking for. I’m well aware that 150 hours is sooooo small. But that wasn’t the point of the question. The numbers shown are actually arbitrary to my question

Thanks again!


So my $15,000 bankroll should be sufficient?

I use the same app and the variance calcs don't seem like something that works well imo.

Since you're only putting in cash in/cash out it doesn't see all the ups and downs during the session. So if you've won the vast majority of sessions (I'm guessing you've won like 90%+ of them) combined with a small sample you get these types of numbers that aren't actually representative of the amount of variance in poker.

Long story short the standard deviation per hour is not accurate so all the numbers it gives you aren't accurate either

I do input updates throughout each session. But don’t know if it takes that into account. Along with rebuys etc.

Yes I’m in the mid 80’s for win rate

Its been about a year since this conversation. Gas has gone up almost 50%, rents have increased, vegas hotels are more expensive. I am curious how this has impacted 1/2 and 1/3 casino grinders.

What is bankroll for cash game grinding.
Not a super big distance, maybe 7 days or something
Let's say I want to play NL200

You want to play 1/2 for 7 days?

I’d say probably 1-1.5 max buy ins per day, but that could vary wildly depending on your style of play.

I’m going to Vegas in a couple months and will probably bring 10-15 BIs for my main game for 6 days of playing, but I also have a tendency to play higher than my main game sometimes.

$2k most places for 1/2 should be plenty

Here is my spreadsheet for 2022. I keep very careful notes on buy in/cash out but the fees are likely to be off by a dollar or two here and there. The issue on the fees is that here in Texas we have to pay a membership fee to belong to the club, plus we pay hourly for the time we play. I buy my memberships by the month, so I try to spread them out across the visits in that month. Also, there are frequently discounts on the hourly rates which I don't really pay attention to.

Anyway, I have two questions:

1. Do you have advice on what better I could do for record keeping. Is there something else I should be tracking or is there some way to learn more from this data?

2. I've been crushing these games for better than 30 BBs/hour, which should be impossible. Admittedly, this is Texas, which means that a 2/5 game is really a 2/5/10 most of the time, and 1/2 is usually 1/2/5 and not uncommonly 1/2/5/10, but still, I shouldn't be able to beat the games this badly. I know that this is still a smallish sample, but it is starting to reach statistically significant.

Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions!



All the $1/$2 games are $300 max buy in. Most of them include a $5 ante double-board bomb pot once per circuit and on every dealer change. This is significant because these are frequently multiple all-in affairs which means the losers are buying in again and bringing a lot more money flowing around the table.

The $2/$5 games are match-the-stack and I have generally bought in for about $1000 initially, which is usually in the middle of the pack in stack size. They also have the same bomb pot schedule, with a $10 ante.

The confidence intervals on your data are still through the roof at 100 hours. To the point that some people will tell you that it is meaningless, not statistically valuable at all.

I would say that's a bit of an over-statement, and that you are at least pretty clearly beating the game. That said, even in wild Texas, I doubt that your current WR is sustainable.