Hey everyone,

As I was myself having some questions on the best session setup, I figured I'd make a thread asking how people grind.

So to all my fellow grinders here, how do you play your sessions ?

I'll describe my setup as a "template" if anybody wants to follow the same format (or however you wish to make it) :

Stacked or tiled : I stack all my games in the top center of my screen and I have a few slots on the bottom for the important tables (using Table Ninja)
Continuous games or sets of games : I generally do a set of games and I finish all of them before starting another session
Maximum no. of games at the same time : 18
Maximum no. of games in a single session : 22-25 depending on ABI
Average % of your bankroll you risk per session : 15-20% depending on my bankroll.

Here is my question : What about continuous games sessions ? I've always been afraid of it, because of the fact that there would not be a fixed amount of money to play. Never tried it because of that but my sessions might be better if I would do it.

Any opinion ?

i think if you want to maximize your profit then you should definitely look into playing continuous sessions. If you keep loading games you will play many more games during the time you play which should turn you more profit.

Not sure if it makes sense to calculate how much of your bankroll you risk per session. I typically keep about 300bi's for whatever game i play… you could use less if you don't mind adding back on if you hit a bad downswing. Don't worry about a fixed amount of money simply have a solid bankroll and keep playing.. Only way to make more money is to keep grinding! - Good luck

Yeah i play with about 100-120bi's atm.

What would you recommend the ideal time for a continuous grinding session until taking a break ? Just looking for a ballpark idea to set myself a time goal instead of a money goal.

For me it depends on what games I'm playing, for MTTSNGs I can play a lot long sessions than STTs, because there are built in breaks. I usually play 3-5 hour sessions of MTTSNGs and 2-3 hours when playing games without breaks. It's probably best to increase your session length slowly, and maybe play a bit fewer tables than you usually do when playing continuous sessions for the first time.

Hardest part the first time will be when you are used to being able to focus on final tables very well, but now you're having a lot of early games on the same time. Take this into consideration when deciding how many tables to play.

I was planning on stopping myself at 12 at a time. Do you think this seems reasonable ? I'll try out a 3 hour session tonight to see how it goes.
When you play a continuous session like that, do you play tiled or stacked ?
I've been having quite some success stacked, but I feel that with only 12 games it might be a better idea to tile.

I can't really say what is a good table amount for you. I like to play stacked whenever I play 10 or more tables, and putting important tables into slots. It's personal preference though. I just feel like it makes everything so much less stressful not having to look everywhere all the time.

While I agree that these are solid BR builders, especially because the bounties are spread more evenly among players than place prizes and thus typical downswings must be lower than in $3.50 45-man turbos and $2.50 180-man turbos, and they do have a lot of recreationals, as far as I've observed in the few scheduled PSKOs I've played (tbh, I've never played a >36-man SnG yet), there are several factors theoretically eating into the monthly winrate that I'd take into account.

1. About half as many $11s run at a time as $5s, and there are no higher BI PSKOs except scheduled, so there's little room for moving up if you wish to stick with the format. $5s run somewhat well, but still not as much as 180-man turbos, so PSKOs are going to be the minority in your daily grind if you mass-multitable. Meanwhile, PSKOs require a lot of additional study in order to maximise the ROI. You might as well learn any other niche format like Omaha Hi/Lo 18-man turbos with the same 'success' (well, they sometimes run at the $15 level). If you focus on learning those NLHE formats that run consistently at the $15 level instead, your study will have a bigger longterm effect.

2. As current bounties aren't recorded into hand histories, the only efficient way of reviewing previous play is recording the screen during play and then analysing the video. In so doing, you obviously won't be able to invoke HUD popups, so you have to make the main HUD boxes rather heavy in order to do good reviews. Screen recording usually eats a lot of computer resources, so you won't be able to mass-multitable while recording if you have a weak computer configuration, whereas upgrading the computer would eat into the BR. Leave alone that the videos are going to take much more disk space than databases.

3. Recreationals probably do better in PSKOs than in normal MTSnGs because the PSKO format calls for looser play, especially as a big stack, which they already do without realising how good it is. I guess there are more ATC spots in PSKOs than in other MTSnGs, and recs are less likely to miss them, whereas the existence of ATC shove spots at MTSnG final tables is more counterintuitive to them. Thus regs' edges are probably not as big as you would assume basing on the rec-to-reg ratio.

4. I think a reg can't get a good ROI by using the default MTSnG strategy in PSKOs because place prizes constitute only about the half of the prize pool. The bounty sizes attached to each player, and the bounty-to-stack ratio of each player in particular, as well as the pot odds and fold equity adjusted for both your and opponents' bounties, are extra variables to process, in addition to the stack distribution. It becomes extremely messy at the final table, where the ICM intuition developed at normal MTSnGs is no longer correct because of bounties.

5. As the game is rather unsolved, the optimal VPIP is higher and there are more variables to be processed, I think that each PSKO table takes probably as much effort as two normal MTSnG tables. So I think that, if you achieve a 30% ROI in $5 PSKOs, you still won't have a bigger hourly than if you put the same effort into playing twice more tables of a mix of $2.50/180t, $3.50/45t and possibly $4.50/180 with (correspondingly) 30%/25%/35%+ ROIs.

Is this ev difference normal after 4k tourneys and 200k hands? (almost 4kk chips difference)


This is the chip graph for $0.50 turbos, maybe the game that I did the most volume:

I've never used the 3rd version of Pokertracker, but the first graph looks very discontinuous. You could never lose 1.8M chips in such a short time span. Are you sure that PT3 actually sums your chip winnings? (In PT4, this can be enabled by ticking the 'Sum Results' option in the 'Overlay Stats' -> 'Configure' dialogue window. I have no idea on how it's done in PT3, but it must be similar.)

Well, I play mtts, must be 40% of all the tourneys and they're included in the first graph, so, yes, I could lose 1.8kk chips in one hand. If I remember correctly, I got 3 FTs in big fields micro MTTs, so there are lots of chips in play...

I've never seen this option in PT3. I think it doesn't have it. But anyways, what does this option do?

Ah OK, never mind, your chip winnings are summed indeed. That's the default option; you need to switch summation off only when you display a graph for a stat like ROI that is an average.

Of course you need to display the chip graph for 180-mans separately, like you did in the second screenshot. Including MTTs makes little sense exactly because you can win or lose too many chips at once and that will make the MTSnG progress less visible.

The chip EV graph drawn for 180-mans only is not very accurate either because you can make correct final table or bubble decisions that are profitable from the ICM viewpoint but unprofitable from the chip EV point of view (such as any-two-card openshoves in the small blind into a shorter stack or tight folds with QQ facing two all-ins).

For this reason, PT4's 'My Currency Net Adjusted' stat calculates the $EV of final table hands basing on the ICM. If you bust before the final table, the adjusted amount won is equal to the actual amount won because there's no reliable way to retrieve from the HH file how many players were remaining in the tourney at the time of the hand.

Nevertheless, the 'Net Adjusted' winnings are a more accurate measure of ability than the chip EV because most of the monetary variance and edges in MTSnGs are in final table play.

PT3 doesn't do such ICM EV calculations, so I recommend to upgrade to PT4.

Imo if the 2nd was mostly 180s it isn't very unusual although I don't have PT and so I am not too sure I am interpreting the graph correctly.
The number of hands seems odd to me. 47790 would only be 1k or less tournies if not filtered for being allin on turn or earlier and far too many if unfiltered. Sadly a gap of 250k chips is all too common in 180s, on the plus side somebody else must have won these chips and in the future it may well be you getting to hold on to the lucky end of the the hands.

Anyway, I have checked on my results and done some calcs on allinEv diffs (I am running bad so this has been the trigger for me to do the research), after nearly 5k of 180s I am about 2.2 million down and this works out as approx a 1 in 40 event.
As so many people are playing 180s, a lot more than 40, there are very many players that will be doing much worse than I am in this respect.
This was for unfiltered by number of players and so included all hands even HU. The value of chips changes drastically as the tournament advances through the FT stages and so nothing much can be said about how financially costly this is. If you filter for say 5 or 6+ players as you then exclude the fight for the top positions and most of the prize pool is still in play hence the value of a chip will be nearer to the tournament start value.

Well, the second graph is for 45 man, not 180 man. If it were 180's, I'd surely think that it is a normal deviation. But for 45 man I think it is a bit too much.

You didn't state how many but it looks like about 1000 games or so.

From my results at 45s I can give you a guestimate but it won't be particularly accurate, and also if not filtered in some way these graphs don't really tell us much. You can be financially very lucky in your allins and still easily look like you aren't on the graph as the HU hands dominate all the others and they aren't actually worth much per chip a-la icm style. If a few HU allin hands don't go your way these are huge in chip difference but not worth much as a chip is only 20% it's value at the start of play.

I've checked on my last 3000 games of 45's and if unfiltered for number of players I get a variance per allin(pre-river) hand hand of ~20,000,000.
This may look big but it is proportional to the average pot squared and this is huge if HU hands are also involved.

So we could use this as a really rough estimate. Playing styles finish distributions etc. would alter it but it is the best estimate I have (This is a bit like saying that full ring cash variance for bb/100 is about 80 ).

In 3000 games I have about 11000 qualifying allins (pre-river with no possible future action), so per 1000 games I expect to see 3667 of these hands.

per 1000 games the variance of these is: 3667 * 20000000 = 73340000000
So the standard deviation of 1000 games is: Sqrt(73340000000) = 270814

The mean you would expect to have is the value of the adjusted figure for 1000 games and approximately 68% of the time I would expect to see the actual to be +/- 1 sd ie, +/- 270814 from this expected value.
Or in other words for every 1000 games played, roughly 15% of the time I would expect to be 270814 below expectation, and 15% of the time 270814 above.

This is all very rough and ready.

There isn't much point to analyzing all the hands as chip values vary greatly depending on where in the tournament you are.
If you avoid looking at the top 5 or 6 spots most of the prize money is still in play and you could say a starting stack is still worth roughly the same value as it had when you bought in, so 1500 chips = ~0.9 * a BI. Well a bit less because some prizes, 5th and 6th here, have been paid out however most of the hands will have been pre prize payouts so more biased to this 0.9 * a BI (the 0.9 as rake is taken out).
So to see a more useful view it is a bit better to filter for number of players, perhaps >= 5

It is still early days for my variance knowledge of these tournament allin points and so I might be completely off but you can't say I didn't try to give people answers.

Yes, it's 1000 games.
I may say this is the best answer I've ever received in 2p2? Thanks sir.

so I was wandering about this downswing I've been struggling with in 0.50$ 45/90/180-man on Pokerstars.

Here is the graph. I was wandering if someone could tell me if :

a. I'm just on a usual downswing for these games and it will pass.

b. I was really lucky for 200 games when I came back from 1.50$ games and then went back to my "break-even" pattern from the past months and now I'm becoming a losing player through mass-multitabling

c. I'm just a noob and need way more games to even consider this a representative graph. (Just looking for an honest opinion here :P)

d. If my 13% average ROI in those games means anything considering the volume of 1.2k games.



Thanks in advance !

I'm curious about your point B, now mass multitabling. You make it sound like you jumped from 6 to 12, 12 to 24, some major jump like that? Generally you should add just 2-4 tables at a time until you know that you can play yor A game on all of them, not go into robot mode.

Starting with d, this is a very small sample for 180's. A decent rule of thumb when looking at the amount of games needed is that for the same confidence you need 12x the amount of 180's compared to 9 seated STTs.
Usually people think 4 or 5k games of STTs will show your quality so for 180's we need more like 50 to 60k!

For 1.2k games the 90% confidence of your result for 180's will be your roi +/- 22%, even a 70% confidence is +/- 13%.

From this it shows that we can't say much using the results for the other points a and b. This is one of the things that makes 180s hard, each time you try to fix a leak you don't know if it is an improvement from the results until many thousands of games have been played.

If playing 180's you do have to come to terms with large swings happening, don't assume it's just luck but even luck can easily cause them. If you played 10k games at exactly 10% roi you should expect a 500+ swing to happen somewhere in them 10% of the time.

There are other ways to tell how well you are playing than just roi though. Other friends good at 180's, or coaches can assess your game and maybe point out leaks within relatively few games.

H-H submitted to the forums can also help.

Actually when I was at 1.50$ games I was 16-20 tabling. But it went pretty bad, hence why I went back to the 0.50$ games. When I went back to them, I started to cap myself at 12-tabling. Since it went really great, I went up to 16-tabling and 18-tabling. But now I'm going back down to 12-tabling to try to fix most of my leaks.

Hey,

First off thanks for the constructive comment, gives an idea on what I need to be able to evaluate myself.
So if I get what you're saying, a 500+ BI swing is possible ? So my 90 BI swing doesn't mean that much ?

My big problem is that I don't have any friends into poker the way I am so it's pretty hard to discuss it with anyone. Although I was thinking about getting an hour or two of coaching for Mentality135 to try fixing my main leaks soon.

If you are still learning I think it is often better to try to play a few less tables and concentrate carefully on them to learn faster. Sometimes as a learning exercise just try for 3 or 4 tables to try to see if you can spot player tendencies then see if you can exploit them. Later when multi-tabling a bit heavier you should find these spots easier to notice. It can be hard to see the wood for the tree's when playing under m-t pressure.

90BI's isn't a very great swing and how often swings happen depends on your roi. It is early days for you so you do have to be careful and study.

I did a few probability graphs for 180's to show how likely swings are with 5,10,20 or 40% rois and they can be found here:
http://www.deucescracked.com/blogs/b...ability-Graphs
for 90's, 45.s etc. you can find them through this link page:
http://www.deucescracked.com/blogs/b...ability-Graphs

Hello

New to the site and I am at work so I have been unable to do any digging.

I am looking into playing 18 man SnG on Stars aiming for about 200 a month maybe more as I don't have the time between work, girlfriend, football, golf, dog and playing live. What kind of bankroll would I need for $15 18 mans ?

I am only going to be playing 4 tables at a time and playing for about 2 hours a night maybe 3 hours if I can

in b4 lockdown. Guess the best answer is: it depends.

From the $15s the skill of players goes up significantly. So don't know your own skill or aim for %ROI. If you want to take a more aggressive approach and don't mind the reload, 50bi could be ok.

I guess a 70-100bi is "normal". I have practically the same volume (a bit higher) and multitabling (mostly because of ~same reasons) and am playing 7's w 13% ROI over a decent sample and am taking 75bi for 7's w shots on 15's to improve upmoving.

Thanks for the reply. I have never really played online as I have mainly played live but personal circumstances have changed so I will have more free time to play online. More like 30 hours thinking about it. Just wanted to see what the general bankroll was. Looking at getting some staking atm and have been offered some by friends on the live circuit but would rather get something going online.

Learn to 10+ table if you want to play sngos online. The rest depends on your roi, and habillity to reload.

Hey guys, can u give me some information about micro stakes mtsng.

What ROI can be achievable at $1 45-man reg and $1 180-man reg on PokerStars? Like if u consider yourself best player in the field.

And what about average duration of thoose games?

I appreciate any piece of information or even thoughts about it.