The Impact of Other Results on Us
How many times have you seen graphics on a poker training site and felt bad?
This has happened to me so much that I can't explain. Especially when everything goes bad, people start to question themselves. When you question yourself and see the results shared by other players, you start to feel even worse. Because people begin to ask themselves. Why am I in this state when these people are getting these results?
But there is something we forgot. Poker is very different from other sports. In other sports, good and bad players can be separated very easily. It takes a really long time to comment on two players in poker. Why? Because there is a concept called variance. That's why you hear from most poker players that short-term results don't make any sense.
What if I told you it's very difficult to compare two players even in the long run?
Player 1 he saw a graphic of one of the students of an educational site on the Internet. He thought how great it would be to take lessons from this site. He also thought about what a bad player he was. Because the results are not like the students on this site.
He has been playing poker for 1 year and has played a total of 500K hands of NL50. Pokertracker shows he is 2bb/100 winner. He wants to improve himself. Because he also wants to be 7.4bb/100 winner. What is the problem here?
Even in 500K hands he can't be sure about his true win rate.
He can be 5bb/100 winner : Probability of running below observed win rate (2.00 BB/100) over 500000 hands with a true win rate of 5.00 BB/100
1.6947%
He can be 4bb/100 winner : Probability of running below observed win rate (2.00 BB/100) over 500000 hands with a true win rate of 4.00 BB/100
7.8650%
He can be 3bb/100 winner : Probability of running below observed win rate (2.00 BB/100) over 500000 hands with a true win rate of 3.00 BB/100
23.9750%
Poker study sites or CFP s usually share the good results of players. That means this player can be in a very big upswing. I don’t want to write it again and again but we can give one extreme example.
Probability of running at or above observed win rate (7.40 BB/100) over 35000 hands with a true win rate of -1.00 BB/100
5.8034%
Our player maybe started to learn and play good poker in the last 100K hands but he hit a very hard downswing. In this case he can double his win rate compared to 2bb/100 in new 100K hands.
Our player can be in a high rake environment which can affect the graph. Let's compare 2 players that have very different winrates.
Player Green: Played with 5bb/100 and gets %20 rakeback. Which means 1.48 bb/100 rakeback. Total win rate will be 6.48 bb/100.
Player Blue: Played with 2bb/100 and gets %50 rakeback. Which means 5 bb/100 rakeback. Total win rate will be 7 bb/100.
As you can see, maybe he has better results, while he mentally affects himself badly because of why I don't have such a graph.
Our player can be a better player even if he has a bad win rate in the long run. So many players do not play poker for a job. So that means they will never be able to play that much to deal with the variance. Even if they play 250K hands with 2bb/100 expected win rate in a year which is not that low they will experience so much variance.
95% confidence interval he will be in
[-2.00 BB/100, 6.00 BB/100]
Let’s imagine two friends playing exactly the same strategy and one of them hit -2bb /100 win rate when the other one hit 6bb /100 win rate. Can you imagine how different the two would feel?
One of them will perhaps see this as a career opportunity and quit their job. The other will think that poker is not the game for him and will stop playing poker.
What can happen if they play 500K hands.
95% confidence interval they will be in
[-0.83 BB/100, 4.83 BB/100]
Hmm ok. What about 750K hands.
95% confidence interval they will be in
[-0.31 BB/100, 4.31 BB/100]
Of course, I am aware that these are extreme examples. But is there any guarantee that you are not one of these extreme examples?
When I had 75 buyin swings, all the other players in my group were winning. When I examined their hands, I realized that they were not doing anything very different from me. In fact, I was sure that I was playing poker more accurately than most. But I couldn't understand why I was in this situation. Players better than me said there weren't too many bugs in my game. I thought they were doing this to keep my motivation high. But later I realized this. The results in poker are not what we think.
Even when we make these calculations and give examples, we are talking about a constant static situation. We are talking about the situations that the player will experience when he plays the whole set of hands with the same winrate. But poker is not like that. Some days we play 1 out of 10, some days we play 10 out of 10.
I want to share with you the biggest lesson I learned for myself last year.
Do not compare your results with anyone in poker. Because making an accurate comparison is impossible in most cases. This will do you more harm than good.