Did I say that you can fund a bankroll that way? No, you are mistaken. I said you can keep tips low to prevent damage to your bankroll. You (most likely) wouldn't be spending those tips if you were not in the cardroom. So it makes perfect sense to be aware of them, track them, and try to prevent them from damaging your roll.

I have yet to see a reply to the issue of tips that takes the scale into account. We are talking about *a lot* of hours here - this isn't just playing poker on your buddy's wedding trip. Those tips are a significant part of your approach as a business when you play a lot of hours.

Youre an idiot if you think lowering your tips is going to boost your bankroll.

I just don't think you understand the scale behind this. My task to you is to put pen to paper and make your case for how tips don't matter for a player doing 120 hours a month for 6 months. If you can show that a player tipping $2/hour is making wise financial decisions then you're the man. That's just 2 bottles of Fiji every hour right? Show your work . . .

Shocked that this thread is getting sidetracked by tips. What if you were keeping all expenses like gas/transportation, meals ect.? Personally, I take expenses into account when I'm going to play. Most of the time of I'm going to play a tounament I'll do it when I'm driving home from work and happen to be driving by a casino instead of making a special trip to keep expenses down. This increases ROI, I didn't have to think of this when I was playing mostly online.

Sent from my SM-G900V using 2+2 Forums

Sure and those are good points. There's certainly something to be said for playing online. Reduced rake (in theory!) no transport costs, etc. I agree that all costs should be taken into account for everything. I just don't think that most people, like sherry, understand the scale of playing multiple hours a day, multiple days a week, multiple weeks a month, etc etc.

2$ an hour is effecting your bankroll huh.

Some people play more than 50 hours a year.

Its laughable that you think how many hours you play has anything to do with how much you should tip an hour.

I think his point was more the long term considerations/implications of tipping over say 1200 hours on the net.

Personally I just ignore tips+rake+jackpot/promotional rake all as costs of game then say I hit some promotional bonus$, that would just be factored into the session to be divided across the hourly.

My point is that op should focus on plugging leaks in his game rather than penny pinching on tips essentially taking money out of the pockets of the dealers.

The kid went from complaining about tips to becoming the hero of waitresses everywhere . Slow your roll, Caesar Chavez . . .

If you don't see tips as a potential leak then there's very little I can do to help you. I've already invited you to make your case for your math and I'm still waiting . . .

WAIT: I knew the name rang a bell. This is the same kid that slow-rolled the forum for a year, got ripped a new one at 5-10 and then was embarassed to post his results. So I guess him de-railing my thread is payback for making a Famous Jameis joke

Keep focusing on saving those 1$ tips, cracking jokes on others contributing to 2+2 rather than improving and refining your game. Unfortunately youll be grinding micros in 20 years wondering why you never broke through and youll think WAIT... That guy with the 5-10 nl thread back in 2014 predicted this would happen.

at least he played more than 3 hands

Enough of a derail! I'm finally enjoying my Sunday evening at home and it's time for a comprehensive update from the last few days.

THURSDAY
In retrospect, Thursday was a very expensive day. I took all of Thursday off because I knew I would be in lock-down for the next couple of days working on my PSU exam. I cancelled all clients and got a good night's rest and had a really positive outlook. Unfortunately:
Phamous Heads Up Event: BRICK - It was a long match but I had a kill-shot with AKs against JJ and I didn't improve. That stunk, I really thought I had him at that point.
Aria 1PM Daily: BRICK - My 99 with a flush draw didn't improve post-flop.
Wynn 1/3: -$245 - I had a good run going until my top 2-pair ran into a set.
Even though I completely ran bad, I still had a positive outlook on my game. Don't get me wrong, it was a ROUGH day, but every day above ground is a good day.

FRIDAY
Nothing but PSU. I put together some really, really good answers for my exam. I was on-point with my software calcs (I'm a master with Minitab!) and graphs and I think I did really well. I didn't leave the house at all on Friday. It was nothing but regression analysis from morning until night - FAWK YEAH, STATISTICS!

SATURDAY
Some of you know my buddy Todd from Poker Church. He's a good guy and a morning person like me. Both of us are regs at the Mandalay Bay 10AM tourney. So I invited him to have breakfast with me at 8AM and we did the buffet at MB. I was surprised at the price but the cashier gave me a nice locals discount, so that was very cool of her. We had a great time at breakfast.

The bad news is that I bricked two buy-ins at that tournament. I will admit that I didn't play my best and was a little disappointed in myself. The good news is that Todd took down the whole thing. So I was very happy for him, he deserved to win.

After I sweated Todd, I rushed back home to review my exam. I always print my exams and re-check all of my calculations by hand. It's a tedious, but necessary process. Even though I think this stuff is fun, it's still a grad level course so the graders pay attention to every single detail in your answer. I was satisfied with my answers and submitted my exam. PSU was now done!

Todd was feeling good after his tourney win and also had a freeroll ticket into the nightly tourney at the Stratosphere. So we both went down there and jumped in. Man, that's a REALLY good tournament. It's only $55 for a starting stack of 8500 at 25/50 blinds and there's never an ante. PLUS there's free pizza during the first break. What more could you want in a tourney? Even though neither of us did well (another BRICK for me!) we had a great time and were impressed by the structure. We decided that we would definitely be back for this tourney sometime in the future.

SUNDAY
I bricked the MB tournament again. I got it in with a flush draw that didn't improve. I would usually rebuy into the tournament, but, not going to lie, my bankroll has taken a hit this weekend. It's been a rough going since Thursday.

I finished off my Sunday with another meeting of Poker Church with members from 2p2. I'm humbled by the fact that people are coming and contributing and having a good time, all from a small idea to just get people talking about poker. I thank all of you for showing up and I encourage anyone reading this to come by - it's be a load of really good discussion and I think we're all learning quite a bit.

The last few days have not been kind to my roll. Going forward, I'm going to continue with my APT training, I'm auditioning a new coach on the 25th and I've also opened an online account (that's NOT on WSOP!) and have started to play online to get a better feel for the pace of the game. So, my outlook remains strong in spite of the current rough waters.

Playing golf this morning. Sun is shining, grey goose flowing! #hardknocklife

I love reading the other ongoing reports on this board. I'm trying to be more visual and descriptive in my postings. And while I'm not a baller with pictures of a hot girl to post (looking in wheydacheese's general direction . . .), I do have STATISTICS . . . so I have that going for me . . .

It's a quiet Tuesday to myself and I've been tinkering with some data that I found. For those of you keeping score at home, in addition to this crazy Vegas poker life, I'm also a grad student in Applied Statistics at Penn State. This is the kind of crap I do when I'm at home and don't feel like going out.

Here's a question for all of you:

What do you think is a better indicator of gaming revenue for Las Vegas? Is it the number of convention visitors with their expense accounts and business-oriented visits? Or is it a random set of airline passengers from various parts of the world, including 'Murica (!!!)?

I can derive this answer with statistical models and some data from the Las Vegas Convention Authority.

Here's gaming revenues vis-a-vis convention visitors going back to 2001:


The Red Line represents the model for the data while the Blue Dots represent the actual data, as it happened.

That's an OK model. The data points are rather scattered - I'd like to see them all a little close to the red line - and I'm not liking the R-Squared value. The R-Squared helps you understand how many of your data points are accounted for by the model that you have developed. An R-Squared of 100% tells you that have found the perfect model - you can account for all the data. So a low number like 27.9% isn't necessarily impressive.

What does the airline passenger model look like? Here's the graph, also going back to 2001:

As before, the Red Line represents the model for the data while the Blue Dots represent the actual data, as it happened.

Isn't she a beauty? Sexy, amiright? This graph tells us that airline passengers in a given year are a pretty strong indicator of gaming revenues for the year. Once again, note the R-Squared value - 95.9% That means that the given model can account for almost 96% of the actual data. That's very impressive and lends credence to this model.

So that leaves us with the model of:
Gaming Revenue = -1.41Billion + 256.3(Airline Passengers)

If you've taken any sort of Algebra/Calculus/etc, you'll recognize that as the formula for linear slope with an intercept; the same concept is used for linear regression in statistics.

We can distill the slope value of $256.30 and infer that the average airline passenger contributes almost $260 to the overall gaming revenue. Does that indicate the average gambling budget? Maybe. I think this number is pretty close to the numbers you see reported. This type of analysis is how they find out what the average person spends on X. $260 is somewhere in the region of what you hear about for gambling - I think the numbers are close to $400 but that's also because they include visitors that come by car.

Within the next year(-ish) my plan for my professional life is to modify the focus of my consulting business. I want to get more into the Data Science side of consulting and work with agencies/companies with information just like the above. No more traveling to client sites, no more code monkey stuff - I'll work remotely from my full home office in Vegas, crunching numbers all day on my iMac and stacking tourists at night A man has to have goals!

...makes my brain hurt and stirs memories of school...fps...fold pre next time, as played fold. haha jk.

I like this part!
:

Not to stats geek this up, but I think it's likely that both of those are probably pretty good measures of the economy overall. So, I'd be hesitant to start talking about tourists directly spending their gambling dollars as being underlying the correlation.

I'd be curious what would happen if you partialed out some economic indicators and looked at the unique variance accounted for by number of airline passengers.

Be careful here, you're making too many extrapolations. This isn't about the economy overall, that was never my posit. My response variable is clear in both - I'm isolating for *gaming revenue* and I'm treating these as independent predictors.

So you can't jump to conclusions about the economy, that's not the response variable here. That's a dangerous and irresponsible use of statistics.

Plus, if you really want to stat it up, then you should know that the p-value for the convention delegates was 0.061 while the p-value for the airline passengers was 0.01. A hearty handshake and a $1 Aria chip to the first 2p2 that can explain why that's important :-)

My point is that you're pointing out a correlation between A and B. I'm not disputing that A and B are strongly correlated. I'm saying that it's possible that the reason the correlation exists is because of C.

That possibility makes the statement:

problematic from a correlation doesn't equal causation perspective. Your high R^2 means that you can predict with a high degree of confidence that gambling revenue will increase by $260 for each passenger who arrives. Assuming that the passenger arriving has any direct effect on gambling revenue is going beyond what correlational designs allow you to conclude.

You're confusing correlation with regression. This is not an exercise in correlation, it's regression statistics. The predictor coefficient *does* let you make inferences about the effect on the response. That's the whole point of regression analysis :-)

You're making a common mistake and want the data to mean something that it doesn't. You have to approach it with the scientific method. I've isolated two variables and it has resulted in a regression model. I didn't include the charts but I did check the p-values and I also plotted the residuals. You have a regression between two variables that produce a solid model that would pass formal hypothesis testing through all reasonable testing thresholds.

Sure there can be other predictor variables. But would they all result in a linear model? No. Would the R-Squared be higher that 95%? Not likely.

It's all so clear now

NICE! It's just that kind of research data that contributes to our life on earth. FAWK YEAH, STATISTICS!

When you try to lead a blessed life, one of the benefits is that you have to be prepared for good things to happen!

I've had a long history with the Roman Empire. I was brought on to help them with their NJ launch of WSOP and others. That was a year ago and I'm still there!

They had told me that my budget had been adjusted and Oct 31 was going to be my last day. No problem. That's the nature of being the hired gun. I'm ok with that. As one of my old contacts put it, guys like me parachute in and shoot our way out! I really only do short contracts anyways.

Today there were some changes I didn't know were coming and my contract has once again been extended. It's a blessing. At the rates I bill, that's a few stacks of high society that just dropped into my lap out of nowhere.

They're going to want more hours out of me and that's ok. It means that I need to adjust my poker schedule a bit. So Poker Church will continue but I might have to switch to playing nights instead. Maybe focus on the 7pm Aria for a while?

I'm going to bill and play poker like a madman for the rest of the year and then put myself into semi retirement in 2015, which is not to be confused with my kinda-retirement of 2014 :-)

In the words of the modern philosopher, Ice Cube, "I didn't have to use my AK . . . Today was a good day"