My std deviation is 103bb/hr for last 800hr and I'm probably like 10x more loose. Haha

I've been playing for a while now, but just recently started getting serious and tracking my results.

I'm using Poker Journal to keep track of my stats.

I play $5/$5 NL pretty much exclusively.

After 6 sessions of record keeping here's where I'm at:

Won: $2,909
St. Dev.: $588.59
Hours: 38:45
$/hour: $75.07

Obviously this is a very small sample size and doesn't mean much yet, but I'd like to begin tracking the probability I'm a winning player as I play. I'm aware of all the normal caveats (player pool changes, etc.), but I'm curious how it changes over time.

Can anyone recommend a tool for calculating this? I don't think Poker Journal does it, or if it does I missed it.

A tool that calculates whether or not you're a winning player? Not sure if I understand what you're asking.

If you record your sessions, you'll know whether or not you're winning in the long run...

I've seen people mention that their true win rate is $15 to $50 with a 95% confidence (that's just an example).

I want to track how likely/unlikely my results are due to variance.

At 40 hours, 100% of it could be variance.

Yes, I know 40 hours is nothing, but this is something I'd like to track going forward.

I have had 40 hour stretch in which I lost 10 BI's, and one I won 17.

Get my drift?

I'm not even sure if you're reading my posts.

I read them, and I don't think you know what you're asking.

Just grind it out

I think this is what you're looking for:

http://www.castrovalva.com/~la/win.htm

Yes, thank you.

Warning, this is tl;dr

Yes what you are referring to is using the Central Limit Theorem and confidence intervals to estimate your "population mean", population here being your lifetime hours and mean being you average hourly over said time.

It is an interesting concept and surprised I hadn't thought of tinkering with this before, as I had this crammed into me for 4 years and still today am using forecasting tools for sample populations like everyday at work.

For a 95% confidence level we would use the equation:



Where x bar is your sample mean ($75), Sx is the standard deviation ($588), and n is the number of periods (40 hours). 1.96 is the z score for a 95% confidence level.

When you do the equation for your current figures you get

$75+(1.96($588)) / 40^.5 = $257.22

and

$75-(1.96($588)) / 40^.5 = -$107.22

A way to read this is that I am 95% confident that your hourly over the next sample of hours will fall somewhere between $257 and -$107. You can play around with the formula if you put it in excel and quickly see what goes into a consistent and believable performance over time. A lower SD, higher mean w/r, and larger sample will all sway your confidence intervals farther into the positive range.

I see many on this forum and elsewhere say that live poker is lol sample size and you will never fully understand your true winrate or that you need thousands of hours. They constantly refer to the 100,000 hand rule for online poker which would be about 3,000 hours live.

This is flawed thinking, and the CLT is one concept to show us why. We can easily use smaller sets of data to forecast future performance. I would have a good feel of a player over 300 hours, confident feel at 600 hours, and solid/willing to back at 900 hours. Standard deviation is key, it is quite possible that it is still erratic at 300 hours, and then my analysis would simply be, we need more hours. But one would still be able to get a "feel" by looking at the mean w/r and sd.

But the "lol you need like 100K hands to have anything meaningful" is not applicable to live play as I've said. For several reasons. The main one being that results are much closer to following a near perfect guassian distribution (normal distribution, bell curve) over time. I would say (and from some quick google searches I can see this topic discussed/theorized) that in live poker the sd and mean w/r are all that is holy, and thus we don't necessarily need a sample set that follows a guassian distribution in the immediate sense.

Furthermore, live bb/100 is significantly higher than online. This means that our sample can be smaller with a wider window, and it would still be in the positive. For example, your $75/hr is about 49bb/100 which is ludicrous. Live we are able to achieve such w/r (yours is obviously inflated, but still) because of the "unperfect" (or horrid) play. Online is a much more "perfect" distribution, in the sense that many of the players are solid, playing by mathematics and set rules, using equity calcs and so on to make every single mind numbing decision. This greatly evens out the slice of the pie available for even solid online pros, and thus a 2bb/100 to 5bb/100 is solid. Because they are competing in a more "perfect" or "normal" or "guassian" distribution, their bb/100 is quite thin, and bc of this, they need a consistent sd and a huge sample to prove that they are winning players. Live, with its ludicrous w/r, can have even a high sd (not too high obv), and still forecast to the solid positive range of a bell curve bc of the huge amount of give we have in our mean w/r over time.

I can play with this some more this weekend and may post some findings from my last 100 hour sample if I'm not too lazy.

Interesting stuff. It had been a while since I took statistics, so I forgot how to apply the CLT. I think I will build an Excel sheet to manage this, even though that ap on the website is available.

By the way, I accidentally mentioned my session standard deviation. My hourly standard deviation is actually $250.

Having a pretty good run at 2/5 and 5/5 NL so far in 2013:



Sessions: 49
Winning sessions: 30
Hourly: $57.57

Volume was crap due to working night shifts/girlfriend issues. Should be higher in the coming months.

Yea I almost asked, but figured even that Sx was reasonable in a 40 hour time period. Not too familiar with the apps but from what I've seen it seems they focus on session Sx and not hourly, but yes we'd want to be comparing by hour or even by x/100.

I love tracking via excel, it literally takes 10 seconds to enter your session data into a working spreadsheet...and then you have more ability/flexibility in looking at your data. This will just be one more calc to add

sup fellas, first time posting here.

jw what is the longest breakeven stretch you had live?

Vague questions will get vague answers.

200 hours because I sucked.

I still do, but not as much.

the moral is reviewing your play will tell you what you need to know a lot faster than reviewing your results

when I moved up to 5/10 and crush you make so much an hour that laziness kicks in and in turn my volume declined.

blah its just so easy to print monies at 5/10, you just gotta put the volume and effort in yo

Lol easy to print money when you have money ldo.

Takes money to make money, you not doing nothing special DHCG, 5/10 is not some magical level. People are still terrible at that level.

Quit hating on dhcg.

We already know his background, no need to keep dwelling on it.

I'm not hating on him. He comes in here like "easy to print monies at 5/10" like he doing something special.

That is all.

Is a winrate north of $40 still possible in Vegas 2-5 games for the top 20% or so of players (all players)?

Still runnin good at my 1/2 game.
I'm pretty convinced I play in the best 1/2 game ever.