+1 good advice

It is generally agreed that until you reach 1000 hours, you cant really get an accurate assumption on your winrate. Even then, 1000 hours is only roughly 25,000 hands, which in itself isnt that much either. Online, people would say 100k hands would be a minimum before you could know if you were a winning or losing player. Converting between the two, you would need 4000 hours of live poker to get ~100k sample.

ofc, since this is live, and villians are so much worse I think that is a bit much. A good player can use so many more variables, such as live tells, alongside the generally terrible player pool in order to reduce variance(stddv) and push winrate even higher.

That's why winrates of up to 10bb/hr are attainable at live low stakes, (which at online poker would be some astronomical number like 40bb/100)

Good BR management. I've always followed a 50
buyin rule as well. Playing with less is possible, but its never optimal to play if you are scared money. I see alot of people advising players to use really small BRs like 10-20 buyins and I always shake my head. Sure you can play with a roll that small but you will never be playing optimally, extracting thin value and running huge bluffs in good spots, because you will probably be scared money.

I just had a 560 hour downswing at 5/10 and 2/5-5/5 and I've won over 7bb/hr at the $5 blind level for 4k+ hours. Granted, this downswing was mainly at 5/10, but this stuff can really happen. Variance is way higher at 5/10, too. I've currently won 14/15 sessions at 5/5 and my hourly is still very low for the year. I also had a player who I have a great deal of respect for say he thinks he has run hot for 5k hours.....It takes a lot of humility to say something like that. And it really puts things in perspective. Good luck.

At what point did you start shot taking 2/5 again? I'm assuming your requirements for that are considerably lower. My bankroll is completely separate from life expenses so it's a different ball game. I expect to be in 2/5 shot taking territory before the end of the year. Fingers crossed though. I don't play in a month what most of you play in a week.

I've been playing 1/2 $100 cap for roughly 6 months and usually have 1 or 2 sessions a week. Unfortunately I haven't recorded what I've done and only have an estimation of hours played. I keep all my winnings in a separate account which is now $4995. I peaked at $5125 two weeks ago and experienced a 10 buy in downswing last week. I ran up my roll to 3k in only 2 weeks and have been fluctuating a lot since then. I felt pretty stuck at 4k fluctuating a lot and almost stopped playing for a while. Now i feel pretty good about my progress and feel my game is a lot stronger than what it has been since I started a few months ago. I aim to hit 10k then think about moving up to 1/3.

I've played 1/3 a few times and it felt like a totally different game in the way people approached it and the mentality of the game but there's still a lot of the same leaks happening. About half my roll has come from here although I've spent considerably less time here.

I once played 2/5 after tilting on 1/2 after losing $800 over a week.(lolbad I know) bought in for $400 and cashed out $1500 a couple of hours later. (I ran seriously good whilst only playing premium hands.)

With recording results. Should I estimate what I've already done and merge that with accurate results plugged into some tracker or just start fresh knowing the net figures I've already accomplished?

Glad to see the thread back up and running. I eclipsed the 1000 hour mark while the thread was down so posting my update:

Graph: http://imgur.com/iNyLamu

Results:
1/2: +$20,205; 777 hours; $26.00/hr
1/3: +$6,180; 74 hours; $83.69/hr
2/5: +$6,800; 214 hours; $31.80/hr
Tot: +$33,185; 1065 hours; $31.15/hr

Notes:

This is over a ~16 month period and most of my hours are on weekday nights. I don't get to play during prime weekend hours nearly as much as I wish I could unfortunately.

Around hour 865 is when I moved to primarily 2/5 with some 1/3 and rare 1/2 sprinkled in.

Backstory:

I started shot-taking at 2/5 WAY too early (as early as 165 hours in) and thought I had to play super fancy/bluffy poker to win. I played AWFUL every time I played 2/5, and ran bad as well, so I started off -$6,550 over my first 67.5 hours at 2/5

After a frustrating 400 hours of beating 1/2, but then spewing off my winnings at 2/5 and ending up break even, I took a complete break from anything above 1/2 to really focus on my game. After stringing together a bunch of wins and feeling like I was ready, I started playing primarily 2/5 with some 1/3when the game looks good.

Since then, I am +$13,360 over 144 hours at 2/5 and feeling very comfortable/confident in my games. Obviously a very small sample size, and I have been running very very well, but my game is definitely on another level than what it was before and I have eliminated a lot of leaks I previously had.

In my experience, weeknight hours and what you called "prime weekend hours" are pretty close to the same thing. The casual rec players play after work and on weekends.

Ive got about 500 weekday daytime hours and about 500 weeknight and weekend hours. My win rate on weeknights and weekends is almost double what it is on weekday daytime.

Your results are very very good. Im just throwing that out there for people who want go pro after racking up great part time results so they know its not as easy when you play full time and a lot of your hours are subprime hours. Of course you can always play full time on weeknights and weekends but that sucks balls especially if you have a family.

I wouldn't even call it shot taking. I have no problem playing 2/5 if the lineup looks good. I played a 2/5 session Monday night when I saw a bunch of players I never saw before at the game. My problem is more so, because of the bad run I've been on, I have no idea what my hourly expectation is at 2/5 anymore and because I'm playing for $$$ now I tend to gravitate to the guaranteed printing press of 1/2 and 1/3 while continuing to grind up my BR for some "future" time. I've also been way lazy with traveling to softer 500-600 cap games within driving distance.

Whoop, glad to see the thread back up and running!

Congrats to spike and dizzy for really solid impressive results.

I'll be posting my results over 3000 hours of 1/3 NL in about 23 hours worth of playing time (a few weeks), which I'm guessing will show either (a) I sucks at poker or (b) 1000 hours don't mean ****.

Ginb4busto!G

I guess I meant shot taking from a bank roll standpoint.


I think there is merit to being content to crush 1/3 if you are unsure of your game at 2/5. I'll be making the jump as fast as possible because it is so unknown for me. The small amount I've played has led me to believe that playing at the right time is simply the same game with richer whales and a couple more solid players sprinkled in. I salivate just thinking about it. I could be break even though. Who knows!

This is since the beginning of last year. I had to move it over after my phone died so that is the straight line right at the beginning. This sample is split between about 700 hours of 1/2 500 hours of 2/5 and 200 hours of 5/T+. First graph is NL only second graph is with PLO included. Think I probably have more swings than most players on here, I play pretty laggy and have had two decent down swings. I probably have run above average overall though. The decent sized 1/2 sample was purely because of a lack of available games while I was in college, haven't played it since I graduated at the end of the spring.

I'm going to wade into this thread and probably eventually read the entire thing and summarize the useful information.

For now, I have a question. Does anyone have a spreadsheet using the formula for calculating standard deviation for live poker sessions of varying length as described by Mason Malmuth in Gambling Theory and Other Topics? I currently enter my results into Google Sheets, use LibreOffice for anything more complicated, and have no access to Excel, but could figure out what to do if given Excel formulas.

Besides date, session length, game structure, and w/l what stats do people track?


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Start and end times. Duration is fine for a raw winrate, but being able to search or filter by time of day is handy. It's hard to get a large enough sample to say for sure, but when you go back and review sessions it can point to times when you're playing tired or whatever.

I make notes of big hands, general table conditions, and how I felt like I played.

I track start time/end time.

I track breaks too. I won't track if I am running to the bathroom for a minute and miss a hand or 2, but if I get up and walk away for more than 5 minutes, I track it.

Location.
I also keep notes on any 1 or 2 big hands that massively affected my winrate for the day. (Typically any pot >150bb or so)

I also keep track of other costs associated with the poker venue that are not associated with my home casino.
I.e. it takes me 5 minutes to get to the closest casino to me, but I go somewhere an hour away, I want to know about that time since it's directly affecting my effective winrate.

I also keep a separate column for any money won/lost on anything non poker. Might be free rolls, prop betting at the table (red/black) high hand bonuses, slot $ drawings. This is all going into my poker roll, but isn't part of my poker skill.



But in the end it's like anything else, it all depends what information you deem important, what you plan to do with it, and how much you time you want to put into it.

I like time of day being tracked. Not sure how I'd deal w big pot hands, but I like the thought behind it.

My addition was keeping track of how much I bought in for. Eg +300 on 12 hr sesh at 1/3 means something diff if I bought in for 400 or I bought in for 1000 (I always top off), from a volatility standpoint, at least


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My spreadsheet is Date, Day, Location, Number of Tables for games I play, Blind Structure/ Buy-In Structure, Time Start/ Finish, Session Length, Buy In Amount/ Add on Amount, Cash Out, Session Gross Dollar Amount, Session Gross in Big Blinds

Currently just enter everything into my phone app, but considering copying everything to an excel doc as well so I can play with filtering of hours more easily since my app only allows me to graph by session and not by hours. I have gotten dreadfully lazy on my note taking.

The COTM on off table work has some pretty good ideas from Mpethy.

For me it's just a "notes" section. Like a few I have are
"Won a lol 350bb ai pot with AA vs 66."
"Hero'd a spewy tilting reg with A high for 150bb into 50bb otr"
"Bottom set loses to tptk for 210bb each otf"
Like that sort of **** will still be showing a noticeable effect 1k hours later on my winrate.

But I don't track it from any sort math stand point.

I haven't read that book, but I'm guessing I'm using the same formula as he is because it's supposed to do the same thing. The following LaTeX code is shamelessly stolen from a nice post by BruceZ:



where
X_i is the amount won in the ith session (dollars or bb)
T_i is the duration of the ith session (hours or hands)
µ is the win rate per unit time ($/hr, bb/hand, etc.)
N is the number of sessions

This is how I represent the formula in Excel:

=SQRT(SUM((A2:A200-B2:B200*E200)^2/B2:B200)/COUNT(A2:A200))

A is my session result column, B is my session length column, E is my win-rate column, so E200 represents my win-rate.

Press "ctrl+shift+enter" when confirming to convert it to an array formula.

Day of week, start and end time, buy in size, category of win/loss (>2BI, >1BI, >1BI). Would also track location if it differed.

Can you link the COTM you are referring to?
Also, what app?

If you go to the stickies there is a link to all COTM in the "best of" thread

COTM: Off Table Analysis

https://r.tapatalk.com/shareLink?url...1&share_type=t