What does that have to do with "basic stats"? Stats don't dictate how well or poorly opponents play, unless you're suggesting that 25bb/hour is mathematically impossible, which is patently untrue. Of course maths dictate what a maximum physically possible amount of money to be won is, but that ceiling is nowhere near 25BB/hour.

For instance, if in the game it was always straddled twice to 25, and stacks are 2.5k min max 10k (which in several games was true), having a 125/hour winrate is trivial. So if you don't know that's not the case, how can you say that?

In the period I noted, average stacks were probably around 2k, sometimes 4~ players with 7-8k stacks, and during that period, double straddles were allowed and it's almost always straddled at least once, sometimes twice. The game plays bigger than most American 5/10 games (games are also played more aggro preflop compared to most American games, as any regs who've played internationally can attest).

The thing is, I didn't note that to state possible winrates at 2/5, so any comments about how "it's not really a 2/5 game" is entirely irrelevant. I'm by far not the only one with such a high winrate in those games, and there were at least 3 players who are clearly significantly better than I was in those games playing at the time. Similarly, I don't pretend to be able to replicate these results in a lot of other 2/5 games. My point is that in this exact structure, sometimes the winrate is 35/hour, but sometimes, when the mentioned conditioned are true, it shoots up to very high, and I said this to demonstrate the variance of possible winrates and how it's pointless to go around comparing winrates at "2/5" when everyone's 2/5 can be entirely different, and how because these conditions change over any sample that would be deemed significant (as well as hero's skill), trying to get a big enough sample to know your winrate is pointless.

But of course not, you didn't read what I said and took it as gloating about how big my winrate is and decide to come over and challenge me about it.

I don't know where you play specifically, but of course I'd expect someone who plays in Australia to not think it's possible with your ridiculous rake, time charge, and buyin structures.

Lol how was I supposed to know your "2/5" game plays bigger than most 5/T games? You're effectively playing a 10/25 game... That's a pretty big caveat not to mention when you're having a conversation about 2/5 winrates...

And now you'll own me over semantics by saying oh well it's still technically a 2/5? Right.

It is literally 2/5 blinds, what am I supposed to call it?

I definitely believe you can get better winrates in some (unstraddled even) 1/2 games than in some 2/5 games, am I supposed to call the 1/2 game something else just because the winrate is higher? Should I call a 2/5 game that's very tight, short, and nitty a 1/3 game just because the possible winrate is more akin to a 1/3?

The blinds are defined by how big the blinds are, not by how much you can win from them, in fact that was the entire point, trying to segregate winrate potential based on the blinds is ridiculous. It depends on the game conditions.

Did you read what I said? When was it about possible winrates at 2/5. You made that from thin air. Zero reading comprehension of course.

My point has nothing to do with 2/5 specifically, it can apply to any stakes, my point is about sample size and how it's moot to try conflate games and potential winrates looking solely at the blind levels.

Here's the first time I mentioned 2/5:

Nowhere here did I try to make a statement about 2/5 games in general, I mention 2/5 merely as it's my anecdote for when winrates within the same blind and buyin structure fluctuated and changed wildly based on the player pool. Nowhere have I suggested that 125 is a reasonable winrate to expect at most 2/5 games.

LOL, CAVEAT?

How were you supposed to know? idk, maybe read what I wrote?

I specifically said "you don't know anything about me and the games I play in", to which you LITERALLY said you DON'T NEED TO KNOW ANYTHING to make that statement.

Hey hey hey, wanna, i dunno, take this back? apologise? say "oh I was wrong after all, it actually matters what the games you were in like"?? lol?

Also my game doesn't play like a 10/25, idk where you got that from. 10/25 is uncapped here (and usually), this game is smaller than 5/10 in the UK and isn't a 5/10 game, specifically I said it's bigger than AMERICAN (and Australian) 5/10, but not bigger than european 5/10 or some deeper uncapped 5/10s. I said it double straddle sometimes, but is almost always straddled once, which still makes it smaller than UK 5/10. Good to see you've made no attempts to improve your reading comprehension.

Expectation over the long term. This kind of negated when you say the game changes. It should therefore read "expectation over the short term".

Nah, in fact, by the power vested in me by the almighty poker gods, I hereby require you, whenever you next mention "your" particular 2/5 game, to refer to it as a "2/5/T/25 super deep uncapped" game so we can avoid this confusion in future.

When people say "2/5" they refer to the average 2/5 which usually plays around 500 cap.

I specifically said the game conditions changed and the expected winrate became much lower, so obviously I didn't mean the winrate would remain 125 if the game conditions shifted.

It's true though, expectation already means your "long run" or "mathematical" EV, so "over the long term" is redundant, but it's clear what I'd meant, I meant that "I would approximately win at that winrate over the long term if those game conditions remained." Kinda funny that you're talking about me picking on semantics.

Maybe in Australia/America. Lots of 2/5 games all over the world have higher caps. Most 2/5 in UK have 2.5k cap or uncapped. Equivalent stakes in lots of places in Asia have higher caps or are uncapped. Where have you played in?

I've 100% played in great 2/5 games which involve deep stacks and straddling where my expected winrate is very very high, likely > 125$/hr. These just don't happen that often

Cliffs: certain games at the same stake level can have different hourly potentials based on various factors

... and trying to compile and look at data without making sure it's reflective of your current game will not help you figure out your winrate.

And more importantly, you should never get a statistically significant sample in live poker before those conditions change significantly.

Most game pools change over time (poker has gotten tougher everywhere gradually), and your game should be improving significantly over any 6 month period also, ESPECIALLY LLSNL players, but honestly this applies to most higher stakes players too ime.

Kind of a dumb question, but I'm curious how others calculate their hours in live play. If you use a session tracker, do you only count the time you're sitting at the table as your hours played in a session, or do you count your hours as the time you sat down until the time you rack up? Basically, do you continue to run the clock while you take breaks or do you pause the timer?

For many this is an insignificant decision, but as a smoker with a bad back I take frequent breaks throughout my sessions. So much so that on average I'm away from the table for 7-9min out of every hour. So given that I'm away from the table for 10-15% of every hour, it definitely effects my hourly rate depending on how I calculate it. Like I said it's a dumb question and as a causal player I'm not terribly concerned about the effect this has on my hourly rate, I'm just curious how others clock breaks when tracking their live sessions.

I note the time I sit down and the time I get up, within about 5 minutes. So 7:13 is 7:15, etc. Don't pause the clock for a bathroom break, will pause for a diner if it's going to be 30 mins or more (but that's rare).


So I've had a wonderful couple of sessions with little more than folding trash hands in LP, marginally good hands in EP, getting ****ed in 80% equity spots, and running into the nuts, YAY!

For the year:
-$773 over 188 hours for a "meh" -$4/hr

Since September:
+$135.50 over 410.4 hours, for a whopping "why am I bothering" $0.33/hr

Sometimes I really hate this ****ing game.

A $500 cap is not standard where I've played. Certainly not in Vegas.

Vegas Rooms without $500 cap: ARIA, Wynn, Caesars Palace, Mandalay Bay, Mirage, Planet Hollywood, Red Rock, Rio (2/3 has $1k cap), South Point, The Orleans, Venetian

Vegas Rooms 2/5 Capped at $500 : Bellagio, MGM Grand

The above is for rooms that at least semi-regularly run 2/5+. Couldn't find info for rooms like Flamingo, although I seem to recall it being greater than $500 too.

"Why am I bothering" is actually a legitimate question that players all too often just brush aside.

Jeezus krist sol. Weather you meant to do it just so you could get someone to bite so you can so how ossumly smart you are or not is up for debate. You left your game conditions vague enough to get someone to call you out. 99.9% of games I have played in have never seen the conditions you talk about (and based on this forum I would say that holds true for most of its participants).

Since BF I have played full time live. I have seen conditions like you mentioned exactly 1 time. It was a 2/5 game in vegas during superbowl weekend. 4 buddies were at the game straddling UTG and frequently blind raising to 20. Yes its a game with 2/5 blinds BUT its not a 2/5 game.

When discussing w/r and w/r potential - if you are waaay outside the box - its prolly a good idea to say "look, my game conditions are a bit unique - and here is why I stomp the living sht outta these games for x"

For example - when I discuss mine I tell people frankly I am nothing special. I worked my ass off and got lucky cuz I hung out with people significantly smarter than I am. I also am very self aware and am able to stay on track and not get entitlement tilt or spew...and if I am starting to I rectify it.

I was a slight loser for the year until my last +3BI+ session. Now I can look at my results and answer the question of why I play. $6.68/hr.

I have found it useful over the last 20 years of participating in internet chat sites to never challenge any claim made, especially when it has no material effect on my life. If someone wants to claim they make 25BB/hr, good for them.

It only impacts the players that are at his table. If true, the smart ones at the table will either stop playing against him or work harder to get better. If not, they will know he's a bull****ter and take advantage of that. Either way, stating a high win rate is a good way to make sure that you won't have it in the future.

As David Sklansky said years ago, the best player at the table is the one that nobody pays attention to and at the end of the night people wonder, "how did he get all those chips?"

It's pretty obvious that this statement went way over everyone's head.

This statement is false any way you cut it, but even more-so when you consider the context of Sol Reader's post. A more proper response would have been:

"The highest winrate I've heard of over a decent sample is X bbs/hr. Can you please elaborate as to how you can expect to make 25bbs/hr in a 2/5 game? Is this an uncapped game? Are players betting blind a lot? Because this really doesn't make sense to me."

....as clearly it didn't since what Sol Reader was posting cleared the top of everyone's head by about a mile.

Perhaps X would be equal to 10 since that is a nice round number that people like to use ITT, or perhaps 15 since that is a number many players have claimed. Although, if you had read this entire thread I would expect you to say 20 since 20 bbs/hr is the highest winrate I know of that has been posted by a credible poster ITT.

Yea, I somehow put up almost $7k last year even with being pretty flat for a couple of long stretches. Just need a little winning run to get it back.

Think MGM is 1k now.

I contest the idea that winrates approaching 100 at 2/5 are super rare, but whatever.

If you prefer, change my statement to "I've played in games where my expectation is 75/hr, but 3 months later the games got much worse and I'm probably breaking even at best". Same point. You don't have to focus on my brag or gloating if you don't wanna.

Also, I already stated my 2/5 winrate over entire sample is probably 70~, which is just 15bbs. That's not really that ridiculous and not a huge brag, why are people saying I am.

I'm just stating this average over large sample is in actuality split between games where's it's 6bb/hair and games where it's 25bb/hour (and I'm saying this is likely similar to some degree to most people, though deeper buyin caps generally lead to higher variations of expected winrate).

The takeaway is just that game selection is huge, and the same structure can allow for huge variance in winrate, and using your winrate in one 2/5 game to predict your winrate in another 2/5 is not super useful, especially if you've changed your poker strategies (which you should).

Also another point. My winrate at 2/5 decreased over last 3 years, despite being a MUCH better player. Games just got tougher, everyone got better. I have no doubt if you put me back in a 1.5-2k cap 2/5 game in 2015 I'd get 25bb/100 fairly easily now, and most of you would see huge increases in winrates too.

Fact is games getting tougher year by year affects your winrate a lot, so even if you have a 3k hours sample of a certain stake, you have no certainty it's reflective of your current winrate just because the games could've gotten much tougher, and it depends a lot if you've improved more or the field (factoring diminishing returns).

That's to say, I think I've improved less materially than the field, thus my winrates have dropped (partly due to diminishing returns if studying poker). Idk why people think I'm trying to brag here, I'm just warning people to be careful to think just because you've won a certain amount last x hands it doesn't really assure you or even really tells you much of your future winrate.

I think trying to compare WR's by comparing game structures of the same "blinds" is much too vague and not a true predictor of similar conditions. It's likely a lot more useful online where basically all the games are more or less when they have the the same blind structure (aside from the nosebleeds which only run when there's a whale)

For example, let's say you state your 10knl WR online. Well, what's that really mean if you only play 10knl when Bill Perkins is playing? Comparative to another reg who grinds all hours of the day.

Just like how it means very little to state WR's of a 500 cap 2/5 game on the weekdays compared to a 2/5 game with a 2k cap played on the weekends with a lot of drunk fish.

My 2/5 sample would probably be better described as a 5/10 sample given game conditions (and lots of straddles).... but my 5/10 sample has a lot of game conditions that might better be described as a 10/20 sample, where the hell do we draw the line? Differentiating portions of our WR's as blinds vs game conditions seems like more trouble than its worth, especially when it's generally accepted that "WR" means very little since the games change so much over time.

No. You should probably be thinking in terms of 1/100 x average stack size instead. That's more important than the blinds.

So question. When shot taking, how do you know when to stop shot taking and when to move up to that stake?

Just curious.