Alright, time for a long overdue update.

Total Statistics:
1067 Sessions in 50 different locations (Casinos, Charity Rooms, and Home Games)
4632.1 Hours (since 7/2/2008)
$28,697 in winnings for an amazing winrate of $6.20/hr.

Of that 912 sessions have been $1/2NLHE:
4093.5 Hours
$31,716 in winnings for a $7.75/hr rate.

Giraffe time:

Overall winnings:

The majority of the "other games" are $1/2 PLO or RxR, with a few tournaments and $2/5 or $1/3 sessions in there. My conclusion is that I probably shouldn't play PLO, or otherwise get better/luckier at it.

The $1/2 is a pretty even mix of $200 and $300 cap, mostly buying in for the cap, give or take a bit. But one thing that jumps out here is the level of 'noise' in the overall result. There are plenty of $1-2k fluctuations through the whole thing. So a 10BI $2000 BR can get destroyed in no time.


Winrate for $1/2 NLHE:

The "trailing" values are calculated by looking at each session and finding all sessions within the previous 100 or 500 hours, binning them up and calculating a WR. I think this pretty clearly shows the lack of value in a 100 hour sample, and highlights that even a 500 hour sample (close to a year for a rec player) is still subject to a lot of variability. The overall looks at the winrate at that point considering *all* previous sessions.




Weighted standard deviation ($1/2 only):

Formula came from Bip! to convert from session results to overall results, with the same methods for trailing calculations as above. I'm not sure what this tells us, but can give some insight into the variability of a standard deviation from a small sample.



Session Results ($1/2 only):

Here we have the actual distribution of session win/losses. They follow a mostly normal distribution, with a lot on both sides of $0. What's kind of interesting here is the spikes on the negative side corresponding to even $100 increments. That's from getting stacked and leaving down some multiple of a buy in. If I was topping off as I went I bet those wouldn't exist as heavily. Meh.



For more recent results over the last 1000 hours:

Over the last 1000 hours I've put up $10,245 in NLHE wins for a $10.23/hr winrate, or $14.52/hr over the last 500. Not too bad.
The problem is when including the other structures I've been dabbling in recently things drop off a good bit to $7.26/hr and $6.63/hr over the last 1000 and 500 hours.



Now for a few of the more interesting results, splitting results based on location.
I play in 3 types of games:

1) Brick and mortar casinos with pretty typical LLSNL players (seem the same everywhere I travel)

2) local "charity rooms" in MI. These are run by independent suppliers who split the rake with local charities. They're all over the place and are often located in local bars or bowling alleys, so they have a *LOT* of regulars that stop by after work on their way home.

3) Home games. Even smaller player pool. More booze. More Gamble. More likely to run PLO.


The Casino and Charity samples are big enough for me to think it's pretty clear that the charity games are better. This agrees with the general "feel" of sitting at the table too. Looks like home games are a waste so far .

But I started out playing almost entirely in Casinos, then added more Charity and eventually home games. So I'd expect that some of the difference between the locations might just be me getting better. So here's all three interleaved with the same X-axis:

From hours 2000 to maybe 3000 both were flat and I had a combination of runbad and some tilt keeping both flat. Then in the last 1000 hours or so the Charity results are much better than the Casino results. I think a big part of that is game conditions.


Not really sure what the conclusion of all this would be, but hopefully it's helpful or illuminating in some way.

(If the images aren't showing, they should be at http://imgur.com/a/7N2uD )

Do I read that graph correctly that you have no +$1000 sessions at 1/2 NL in all that time?

grunching but I have several hundred 1/2 sessions at this point and only one >$1000 win in all of them, maybe I'm just bad but I think there is a lot of variance in having those happen

It's all in play style and game selection. Rocks think +1k sessions = deck punches you in the face. Turbo lose styles (Maniacal LAGS, stations) and anyone who plays in crazy games, will see 500bb days not infrequently.

Also, stereotypical slow day games can be nicely profitable as you slowly beat up on OMC, but OMCs just aren't blasting off enough $$ to make 500bb without a smoking hot deck (those games are won without showdown, exploiting MUBS, at least for me)
Play during Tourbament weeks and more than one person at a table will have 500bb+in a 100bb cap game


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Yeah I find that interesting as well.

in the 145 sessions / 780 hours that I played at 1/2 I had eight >$1k winning session (one +$2k session) and two >$1k losing sessions. I wonder how much of it is run good vs playstyle - very surprised that you would have 0 in 4k hours.

Well, first of all, it depends on your average winning rate. A 5BB per hour winner is less likely to have big paydays than a 10BB winner.

It also depends on how long you sit at a table. If your average session is 4 hours, it's less likely than if your average session is 8 hours.

Last but not least, it's your playing style and your opponents' playing styles.

Angrist, what is your average session time and have you looked at all into correlation between session length and win/loss total?

Worst single session loss is -$800, with a few $750's in there too.

For some reason I'd limited that plot analysis to +-$800 and I don't know why. I have 5 sessions of >$1000 at $1/2, and one in PLO, with another handful between $800 and $900. They're almost entirely longer than 4 hours, with a couple 7's in there.


4632.1 hours and 1067 sessions is an average of 4.34 hours per session. But it's not a normal distribution and there are a lot more shorter sessions in there. I play a lot after work in the Charity rooms, which close at 1:30-2am. So if I get there at 9 or 10 I'm done in 3-4 hours or less.

Here's some session distribution stuff:

(I think these are all NLHE only)

Winrate and session winnings don't seem to correlate at all to session length. Short sessions have an insane amount of winrate noise.

This discussion made me curious as to my biggest losing session, as i had no idea really before crawling through results

biggest losing session is... $500. it's like that's some sort of stop loss or something obviously I have lost more than that in a day or short period before but not dumping it all to one table!

also, to correct myself from before, apparently I've had 3 +1k or more sessions, I don't think I can remember a single hand from any of the other 2, I only remember the one because i cashed over just over 2k from a 1/2 table which was obv notable

needs to happen again soon

Always thought Angrist's giraffes are the most impressive ones posted in here due to amazing number of tracked hours vs a relatively smallish winrate (I say that with love dude, seriously, way to stick with it!).

Looks like you had a grotesque breakeven stretch of about ~1500 hours from 1500 to 3000? That would sink most players emotionally, and yet it looks like you've really bounced back in your last 1000 hours (again, that might be more impressive than most things we've seen posted here).

Regarding big wins, looks like you're only averaging 4.3 hour sessions, so I'm sure that plays into it. Coming into this year, I had gone 13 months without posting a 300bb win (averaging ~8 hours per session). This year I've posted 4 of these big sessions (3 of them 400bb+) out of 45 sessions, making up 70% of my winnings this year. I don't read anything into it all all, just random short term run good, imo.

Gthanksforpostingthegiraffes!G

I am a bit of an obsessive compulsive about recording stuff. The 2-3 sessions that got erased from my log due to a crash really bothered me.

Yea, 1500 to 3000 on that graph was relatively break even and pretty disgusting. Some of the non-$1/2 games also made the downswing at 2000 worse. Parts of that were incredibly frustrating as for large stretches I would play well to chip up and then get crushed by variance in big pots, then the other days when I played poorly really hurt. So there's a split between knowing I was making good decisions most of the time and actually winning to show it.

Another issue was life. Right around hour 2800 on the NLHE graph I finished my PhD and defended. I didn't realize it at the time but I think that entire year or two leading up to it was just too mentally taxing overall and killed my rate.

Like I replied above, there are a few big wins in there that I somehow left off that figure when I set the bin limits. But a large part of their scarcity is just the session length. I haven't had one in like 2 years as I've been playing more shorter sessions.


I think I'm a pretty good representation of a "good" regular rec player, without being a "crusher". There are a lot of strategy reasons for that that I could get into, but that's for another thread. The big takeaway that I have from playing this much is that I'm *extremely* skeptical of winrate results. I can cut a 500 hour segment out that show me crushing the game at +$20/hr, or a bunch at +$15/hr. So even those "big" samples are problematic, never mind the value of 100 hours.

Clearly your StnDev is a big factor in how different your results can be when you break them into segments.

I have 1200 hrs played and the results from my first and 2nd 600 hour segments are within 4% of each other. My StnDev is 51BB/hr. People with Stn Dev of 100BB/hr+ will obviously have much swingier results even in large blocks of time.

Amen to that.

I recently posted my 3000 hours giraffe. The 1000 hour segment breakdowns were 9.65 bb/hr vs 9.24 bb/hr (poker obviously ez and I will no doubt crush forever) vs 4.58 bb/hr (um, wtf?).

GzeroconfidenceinmywinrateG

A lot of people don't play well and shy away from optimum decisions in large pots. Throw in stop losses and stop wins and you see why most people don't have huge wins.

See my above post for how meaningless you may eventually decide this is.

(where my second 1000 hours was within ~4% of my first 1000 hours, but my third 1000 hours was just ~48% of my first 2000 hours, I mean, lolz)

Gornot,timewilltellG

Possibly, only time will tell.

Me: Hi, I am Sol.

Everyone: Hi Sol.

So I was thinking a little bit and confronting some of my poker playing decisions. I've always treated this thread as a half brag thread (sorry, not too sorry), so I think it's only fair I also post about the bad, and not just the good.

So 2015 hadn't been a very good year for me, and in fact 2014 wasn't that great either. I play 1/2-10/25+, most of my volume being 2/5+, but most of my ups and downs, predictably, comes from the higher stakes games.

In early 2015, I won something like 50k playing 2/5 over 400 hours, but lost 70k or so playing 10/25+ over <150 hours due to size of the game. Due to a mixture of bad finances and people owing me money, I made close to no money that year while having a ****ton of rent and expenses (London rent + bills like 3k/month, + I support my spouse and I keep paying for food for my poor friends etc, which, whatever, it's something I like to do). In addition to not making money, it made me super demoralised. I know my bb/100 has been good, and most of my bad results boil down to maybe a dozen pots that I ran bad in, but knowing that does so so little to make me feel better. All I know is I can spend most of a month grinding up a solid 5-6k at 2/5 some 5/10, and then lose all of that in 1 or 2 pots in 10/25, and every moment is kind of living in fear and expectation of being brought back to the start, even though, yes, we should make the best EV play in the moment and not care if we're up or down, but big winning months have become so rare that emotionally I've begun to "need" having a solid winning session or week or month to feel less demoralised, so I started to play weaktight in the bigger games, especially if I am up an deep.

Honestly, that sounds bad, but actually it probably doesn't affect my actual edge that much. I don't think playing tighter in a game where you clearly still have an edge but losing the money could cause to to lose even more EV (by having to quit, or play worse) is necessarily a bad idea. It is obviously suboptimal though.

Since then I decided to focus on playing 2/5 and 5/10 only and not deal with swings and grew my roll back up. I started taking a 50 buyin rule, so I would never buy in to a game with more than 2% of my roll. I did that at about start of the year. I've been talking to a good friend of mine who is a PLO sicko who is having similar bankroll/results issues, which was good and I started advising the same thing, just grind it up, instead of playing high and selling action. Even though 1/2 1/3 2/5 seem like small games, and we're used to big pots, having consistent results is so much better than living on the edge all the time.

Anyway it's been half a year and a bit more since I started the 2% rule. I now have a big enough roll to actually play the higher stakes games deeper and more frequently without much real risk. However, my life has improved so drastically since playing with a smaller % of my networth, and not having many >10k swings anymore, that I'm sort of gun shy about buying in deeper or continue playing in a less soft game when super deep (I do get to 10k stacks fairly often despite buying in shorter) even though I am rolled for it.

Sometimes when you run bad it affects you emotionally, or sometimes you just call it wisdom and say you've learned from it. It's really hard to tell whether wanting to not play higher is wisdom or nittiness. Even though I say I am not rolled to buyin deeper and take losses, it's not like I can't lose 10-15% of my roll in one session at any point if I keep playing the games I play regularly. In fact, it's almost inevitable I'll have a session like that every week or two by my reckoning. 10-15% of one's roll is a pretty significant amount that's hard to not be emotionally affected by.

In the words of my friend:

Disgraceful. So that's kind of where I stand now. I'm happier and have more money than those spewtard god days, and to be honest, I'm not sure why that isn't the most important thing, but the path of least resistance is not always the best path.

(one important issue is poker might not always be so profitable and I might not be able to continue living the way I do if I don't improve my game, attempt to move up all the time, or save up money)

If it helps my friend who called me a salty nit reg is a big losing spewtard himself so I'm not that keen to take his advice on board anyway.

Hi Sol.

I'll raise a pint in shared misery over your semi-recent runbad.

Sounds like you're on the right track by playing in the smaller games with a lower % of your roll at stake. If you don't feel up to playing a 10/25 game with the swings ... just don't. Enjoy the rest of your life with less stress.

Maybe try to *act* happier and look spewier at the table. Will keep the PLO monkeys thinking your more action than you are and not a nit.

I've always been surprised at how cavalier some people have been in their bankroll management. Some suggest anything as low as 10 buyins, but I often hear 20- 25 buy ins thrown around for going pro, which seems too low.

Because 10 buying downswings are massively common as a crusher, there's a chance that if you run bad from the start, you can lose almost 50% of your roll. There's no gurantee that you are a crusher, especially at a higher level, so you can easily go on a downswing that wipes out your roll until you need to move down.

The ones that want to move up too fast seem to be the type that get deluded with lottery winner mentality. They seem to think they have a good chance to get rich by playing poker, which is a big mistake.

If you start to view poker as a boringish type job, where you have a chance to make decent money, but not big money, and enjoy the freedom the game provides you, then you have a much better mindset for playing as a pro.

Thanks guys.

The thing is, at this point, I am buying in <1% of my roll already. I think the decision to shift to 2% was a good one, but now my roll has grown to the point where I should be buying in deeper and it'd be safe, but I've been so happy with not having big swings that I'm a little bit gun shy to "move up" so to speak also.

I do think that a more aggressive BRM is reasonable if the losses would not affect you as much. Even though it depends on the person, losing 10k is generally more impactful for most people than losing 1k, even if they are both the same % of your networth, just because the amount equates to more in terms of material goods and experiences you can buy. Illogical? Probably, but I think it's true. For people who can replenish their roll, I think playing with a more aggressive BRM is reasonable, and also for people who play in games with higher bb/100. The games I play in are profitable, but the bb/100 is lower.

I do think 10 BRM is not good for most people, but I think taking calculated shots when the game is extremely good can be good.

The thing with the BRM is it's better to take a % brm instead of a # brm, or like, use an adjuting one. That is to say, you can't just play 5/10 with 20k, but you can if you move down once you have less than 20k. It's always possible to move down, and as long as you're disciplined about it it can be okay to be a bit more aggressive.

The thing for me is that I did have a lot of expenses. For someone without expenses, or has an alternate income, I think it's okay to be a little aggressive. 25 BIs is okay. Not for going pro, though I think. For moving up sure, but only if moving down still allows you to make your rent and expenses.

Everyone should have different expectations. I mostly don't play 1/2 holdem, but I've still put in 250 hours in it while waiting for other games and ~10% of my sessions have been +1k or more. It's just a brag, nothing for anyone to model themselves after.

The best thing is to know how good you are, how good the rest of the players at your table and in your local pool.

Nice post Sol.

Is your 2/5 NL game uncapped or have a large BI? 50K over 400 hours is $125/hr = 25 bb/hr, which seems unreal to me, at least in a 100bb max BI game (if the game plays deep, might be a different story?). Course, there are others who have also boasted similar monster rates being possible, so I'm not saying totally impossible (I'm a nit who probably is incapable of seeing what's possible due to being stuck in my ways). I'm sure you have enough hours under your belt to know what's sustainable for you and what's not, and that of course 400 hours is lolz sample size (I'm assuming you have some pretty dreadful 400 hour sample sizes as well playing a no doubt high variance style?).

Sounds like your new method has been fine to both your bottom line and your mental health. Sacrificing a little poker EV at the expense of a happier life seems like a no-brainer to me.

Ggoodluck!G

If the London games play like say, Florida or Alberta I have no problems seeing people crushing 2/5 or 5/10 for ~20bb/hr. You just have to play where there is a steady stream of people with lots of money. London seems to fit he bill here.

I don't even thnk he's sacrificing poker ev, the mental health aspect makes it +ev, clearly.

I do think my hourly at the PLO game is higher than if I played other games, but only because the mid stakes hold'em has been really bad lately. If it were linear, I'd play lower (say 5/10 or 2/5 PLO) all day every day. Right now the 5/10 is always 5/10/25, with 5k+ stacks from most players, while the next biggest game is a 2/5 with about 1k average stacks, tight players, and not much in between.

The 2/5 game is 2.5k buyin, but lately the game's been really bad. If I could play only 2/5 PLO I would do that.

My hourly at 2/5 NL in the games when I grinded them was probably 80~, but I ran good so I had more. Nowadays it's probably like 50 since it's much tougher, maybe less. The bigger games probably give me 150+ hourly. If the hourly was remotely similar I'd only play the bigger game when it's super soft.

No.