Alcohol.

I do not add my promo$ to my winrate. I do however track it on the notes app of my phone.

At the Isle you can use your points to play the slot machines, roulette machine and craps machine. Im sure you can easily figure out how to turn the points into cash at about 95% using the roulette machine. I think the exact number is 94%. I wish you could play the BlackJack machines with points but you cant for some reason.

You can also play tournaments at dollar for dollar if you want.

I dont know if this is available in Tampa but there's a Seminole convenience store near The Hard Rock in Hollywood and you can use your points to buy anything in there including gas.

I'm pretty sure they don't have anything like that at the one in Tampa. There's a souvenir shop but it's just junk and overpriced clothing. Sunglasses and watches are the only things remotely convertible to cash but way overpriced.

Can't play any casino games unfortunately. I can buy Hard Rock gift cards...but they can't be used for gambling either, just hotel stays, food and drink, souvenirs, etc. Maybe I could find a secondary market for the gift cards. It's really annoying having to just throw away most of my comp dollars.

Maybe I should just buy drinks for the table...though they might find it suspicious if I'm not drinking.

Regarding session length vs winrate, here's some of my results at 1/3 NL (only listing those with >= 200 hour samples):

Session length (hours): winrate (total hours)

5-6 hours: $19.39 (390 hours)
6-7 hours: $22.41 (1059 hours)
7-8 hours: $7.61 (211 hours)
8-9 hours: $18.56 (202 hours)
9-10 hours: $17.24 (725 hours)
10-11 hours: $18.40 (703 hours)
11-12 hours: $26.65 (430 hours)
12+ hours: $29.47 (211 hours)

Most of these are within a reasonable distance of my overall winrate of $20.59/hr. I pretty much play all my sessions to a set time (so no sticking around to chase losses or sit in a good game, I just leave when the clock ticks X).

And even though my results seem to show me catching a second win when I hit my longest sessions, my guess is that it's mostly meaningless lol sample size per segments noise (and this guess based a lot on WTF happens in my 7-8 hour sample size which is so out of sorts with all my other segments).

GcluelessNLnoobG

As indicated I'm using three apps for the next month or so while I decide and here are my thoughts.
1 - Poker Mate: My original app, I picked 4 years ago because the free version looked ok and I didn't really know what I needed. I eventually bought the full version. It turns out it has a really nice interface and built in custom reports (All Time, This Month, This Year, Last 7 Days, Last 30 days, Last 365, etc, all with breakdowns by categories such as location, stake, day of week, etc) but no standard deviation, no import / export, and no graphs made me want to leave. I e-mailed the dev tho and he says there's a free 3.0 update in the works that will allow for easier future updates.

2 - Poker Bankroll Tracker: To Death's comment above this app DOES have standard deviation and a bunch of nice bells and whistles. I love the odds calculator (that supports ranges). The free version is ad based which is a minor nuisance but not terrible. It's UI is almost over the top for me. All the colors and fanciness is ok I guess but not necessary. The only thing I dont like so far about this app is the session list doesn't include play time, only location, profit, date, and game type. Small but I'm used to seeing this and think it's relevant to see without running a report. The other issue is it's subscription based, $8/year in the US seems fair though.

3 - Poker Income: The layout seems a little clunky but that could be just me getting used to something new. The free version reporting is super weak. The rest is standard I guess. I don't like that it doesn't value the concept of re-buys. If you re-buy it just adds on to the "buy in" and the rebuy details are lost.

No conclusion yet, but I'm leaning on dropping Poker Income next month and I may keep the other two just for the bells and whistles of the tracker. Hand Recorder, Odds Calculator, SD, graphs, all come with the free version. If the PM 3.0 never comes out I'll move to PBT.

Personally, I find it illogical to not include promo money in winrates.

You put money into the promo fund and then are subject to a model that is basically Number_of_Hands_Played + Variance = Promo_Money_Won.

This is not much different than putting money into a pot and being subject to a model that is Poker_Skill_Relative_to_my_Opponents + Variance = Poker_Money_Won.

There is always variance. You don't extract variance out of the money you win from playing pots, so I don't why it makes sense to extract it when putting money into the promo fund. If anything, tracking promo money gives you a BETTER idea of your sustainable poker income because you are accounting for more of the variance that you are subject to, and thus, are closer to capturing all the different effects of variance. This is all related to the law of large numbers and stochastic convergence.

Mods-

Wasn't sure where to post this Q so if there a better spot, please move.

I was luck enough to win 2 high hand promotions during y session yesterday and was wondering how you guys incorporate those wins into your hourly? My gut tells me "not at all" because it isn't like I extracted that value from another player; I was simply in the right seat at the right time to hit gin.

Thoughts/Comments?

Thanks,

Shorn

Including high hands and excluding bad beat jackpot seems reasonable.

You don't.

/thread

I asked this same question in the "winrates" thread.

You should include it in your hourly.

Your hourly is hindered by the extra rake you're paying . In other words, someone playing at the same skill level as you are, in a game without that promotion, is making more per hour than you are.

You even that out by adding the prize money to your hourly.

Yeah, I think that's reasonable. A BBJ win is more of a once in a lifetime kinda thing. I may include a table share BBJ though if I played full time with no plans to stop doing so.

Agreed as well, after reading Mike's comment in the other thread. It's a slippery slope though. I would still argue that the BBJ should be excluded even though you pay for that too. So at what point do you exclude? Clearly a 1/2 or 2/5 player bringing down a 100k+ BBJ will render the rest of your numbers pretty meaningless. Whereas a $500 High hand here or there is more fair compared to the extra rake.

And congrats Shorn, sounds like you were due!

Table share can still be a lot. Shorn has a separate thread on this. Where to draw the line is still up in the air IMO. If you're paying $4/hr in extra rake HHs seem fair, but there could even be some sticky spots there. One local casino here used to have thousand dollar thursdays with hourly $1000 HHs. At $4/hr one of those HHs wont break even for 6 months for the casual 500hr/yr player. Furthermore, at another casino each HH win enters you into a drawing for a $5k additional prize that would inflate your numbers unfairly IMO. So do we just artificially draw the line at $500 or 6 months worth of hours worth?

It's not that slippery of a slope really. As you said, once a BBJ is in the numbers, they don't mean anything. The slope ends here....

"Hey my win rate is 500BB's per hour!"

"is there a BBJ in that number?"

"yeah"

"**** you"

Disagree, some of the HH promotions reach the 1k, 2k, 5k levels which are MAJOR outliers to a LLSNL player's sessions. Rare to hit but still could ruin your stats.
1 - I sat at a table with a guy that hit back to back royals in back to back 1hr HH periods for $500 each, and there was an additional HH running jackpot that paid close to $2k on top of that. Obviously this is literally unbelievable but it's all HH money +3k in one hour. Kills your numbers.
2 - Even a $1000 HH (they exist) takes 250/hrs to break even which for many rec players is half a year (based on paying an extra $4/hr in rake estimated).
3 - Some HH promotions include additional prize drawings up to $5k. Could turn a loser into a winner for the year for some LLSNLs.

Personally, I add it in. When you have AA vs. KK, or set over set, there is not much extraction as hands simply play themselves out.

With re to BBJ, I would add in $1 * total number of hours you have logged. If you won $50k, and have logged 2k hours, I would add $2k to winnings. Your hourly goes up a buck.

Disclaimer: Have never won a BBJ.

I have two columns in my spreadsheet: the main one just totals the regular wins/losses excluding promos / BBJs / etc., and the second one includes the promos / BBJs / etc.

Even though you are sorta due a percentage of your promo / BBJs / etc. wins due to having paid for them, depending on how big they are / over what time period they come they could throw your winrate drastically outta wack.

G$25.04/hrwinneratlive2/4Limit,forrealG

First, I would say this is probably not right mathematically. It really doesn't skew things that bad.

If we're talking about hourly win-rates, then folks can just ****-off if we're not talking about a reasonable sample size. And I don't think that even 2,000 hours is a reasonable sample size

Side note: The sample size problem is why I've never bothered to track my hourly. I"ve considered it, as evidenced by recent posts, but in the end I just say "none of this matters until I hit 5k hours, and that will be years from now. by then, none of my current results should even be relevant".

So let's say you win $20/hour over a 2,000 hour sample. That's $40K. If you scooped a rare $5K prize during that time, then you're average only bumps up to $22.50 per hour. Not a huge swing. Just over 1BB/hour.

"ruin" is kind of a strong word, no?

Hi all,

I feel kind of underwhelmed with my poker results this year so far.

This year I have played 252 hours and profited a total of $1,044 playing 1/3 and some 1/2. winrate winning about $4.14/hour.

Looking at this kind of as a break even stretch.

Lifetime I have played 529 hours and won a net profit of $3,814 or $7.21 an hour

I went on a huge upswing though in vegas and won ike 3 in 5 nights in December

I don't think any of those scenarios inflate your numbers unfairly if you play full time and don't plan to stop doing so. I play part time, very part time post-kid, and I would only include your run-of-the-mill high hands and whatnot. But that's most of the promos in my room as my room killed the BBJ.

I think a lot of this comes down to denial of how much luck can be involved in poker incomes, especially live. Is Cynn going to not include his Main Event bink in his numbers just because he binked? Now, on monetary scale, of course it's different, but wouldn't we all track our results in a given cash game session even if we got 1-outed 10 hands straight? Those are some ****ing long odds too, but we'd still track the results of those odds playing out.

I just think trying to exert all of this control over our observed winrates misses the point, which is that, ultimately, we're measuring a random variable and so randomness should generally not be viewed as some scourge. It's just a thing that happens. I get not including insane **** like losing a bad beat jackpot hand, but everyday promo **** should certainly be included imo.

Given your 529 hour sample, you're probably winning somewhere between $0 and $15 an hour, but it's still small enough that if you can generate an objective intuition about your skill set, then I'd rather trust that than the actual results.

+1. I like this logic.

No, ruin is not strong from my perspective. We are all aware of the sample size paradox, by the time we have enough hands / hours logged the conditions of your game, the casino, others have changed so much that it's still not that meaningful for right "now". Those of us who DO track would still like to have an "idea" on a yearly basis how our numbers are trending (which is why I've also been interested in SD and 95% conf, I know it's still not completely accurate but again this is to get an "idea" not a precise measure). I suppose we are both correct. But from my perspective a yearly basis would mean 500 hours instead of 2,000 hours. So for me, in your example it's the difference between $20/hr and 30/hr, which is huge, and the 5k ruins it IMO. Although 2.50/hr is nothing to sneeze at if your playing 1/2... it doesn't ruin things but it's 1.5BB/hr...

From a tax standpoint, you're better off not including your table winnings with your jackpots.