Only just seen this doozy.

Ignoring the advice of most of 2+2 is one thing, but rejecting out of hand about a century's worth of established mathematics for no particular reason whatsoever? Come on man...

No, it's much more than that. It tells you the likelihood that a particular result would occur randomly. When you find a bonafide result set that is more than 4 or 5 standard deviations from the mean, you can start getting suspicious. When that number gets much higher than that, then you can start calling it proof of something not random happening.

The discovery of the Higgs boson particle at CERN last year, for example. It was tentatively announced when the predicted decay products were detected at a rate five standard deviations above the mean background level. (Over a sample size of trillions of particle collisions.) The probability of that happening purely by chance is one in 3.5 million.

/derail

Now that's all well and good... BUT HE WAS FAVOURITE!!1!

Are you perhaps related to Monteroy?


Yes, but so boring.

Druggie.

Sketchy 1st post alert (not a troll).

Is anybody really convinced that ol poker is anything but a business?

Subject to trend and cluster monitoring to ensure peak traffic (rake/buy-in) is achieved at all times.

I've been playing since 2004 1st 6 years a complete degen cash moron. Last few years, binked a few (after realizing pkr involved skill + thinking) MTT's. More of a pot-shotter than a grinder.

So I'm sure you crushers have some collated data sets, but are they really showing true expectation given a random player/given starting values etc or are they skewed.

Little tipsy and on a train, so gonna close this or with what I said above- online poker is a business maximising profit for the site, this and a fair game of poker probably conflicts more than you'd care to admit.

he's a bad man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY6_3Y7OOo8

...says the flying dutchman

So, if downswing or brake even stretch may easily last 500K hands, that explains a lot, but according to that, poker is unfortunately nothing more than pure gambling like any other casino game unless you are playing millions hands per year. 500K hands is for very hard working professional live player a 10 years of constant playing period and for others, less volume of played hands players that could be lifetime - career quota and therefore luck would have the main impact on their overall success, which brings us that human life is too short (at least for live poker) depending on variation and so poker becomes some kind of advanced "lotto or bingo" game and should be treated that way. If somehow the cards were reshuffled (with the same players in the game) we would now get completly different winners (big names and stars) in poker world (that would be true for tournaments anyway, but thats another story, so please lets stick to a cash Holdem games).
I would really like to hear some expert explanation on this?

Thank you in advance!

The higher your winrate, the lower your your probability of a lengthy downswing or breakeven stretch.

There's some examples in Verneer's "Building a Bankroll". Over 40,000 hands (with a standard deviation of 55) a 2bb/100 winner has an 80% chance of a 7-buyin downswing. For an 8bb/100 winner there's the same probability of just a 4.5-downswing.

If you are an average player (to even slightly above average), your statement above is very true. It takes a signficant edge over your opponents, and lots of hands, to overcome the huge luck component built in to the design of NLHE poker. This ain't chess.

Which is one reason this thread exists, as riggies think they are playing chess.

Simple maths. Look it up. Bernoulli trials and the law of great numbers.

Say you have a fair coin and throw 25 heads in a row. Is that possible? Right, it is. What's the chance that there is another heads? Right, 1/2. When are you entitled to be even in throws? Right, never. Because the coin has no ****ing memory, you know?

Take a dime instead of a fair coin. You win whenever you throw a number that is not a six. You throw ten sixes in a row. Is that possible? Right, it is. What's the chance you throw a six again? Right, 1/6. Are you entitled to throw enough non-sixes to reach the expected value in the future? Right, you are not. Because the dime has no ****ing memory, you know?

Now take poker hands instead of a fair coin. Repeat the process. You had a downswing. Is that possible? Right, it is. Does this mean you are entitled to get lucky in the future? Right, it does not: the probability of another downswing is exactly as big as before. Are you entitled to ever reach your true ev? Right, you are not. Because the cards have no ****ing memory, you know?

The relative deviation from the mean will get smaller the more often you throw the coin/throw the dime/play a poker hand though, but there is no guarantee that you live long enough to ever get "back" to your expected value. Also, the absolute deviation (e.g. money lost) might grow greater without contradicting the law of great numbers.

Expert enough for you?

Nope.

If you find the link between seeing a system correctly and the results one derives from that system "boring," then you have bigger problems than being a bad poker player.

Much, much bigger.

All the best.

Lol After spewing this nonsense , how can you ever preach " It's Variance " Have you ever heard of a contradiction in terms you phony baloney joke...

Oh hi Freddie! Apropos, contradiction...

I'm sure you wouldn't ignore me on purpose, would you? It's just that my posts got lost in that pointless convo with pp66, isn't it?

I assumed 380 all-in hands and that each were for 100 BB's. He is down 750 BB's, which isn't possible with all all-in hands being for 100 BB's. So I made it 800 BB's.

If each of the all-in's are flips, the SD is 9.7 all-ins, or 970 BB's. As the average all-in becomes further from a flip, assuming he had 80% equity each time for example, he's still within an SD, which is 7.8 all-in's or 780 BB's. The p-values for doing this bad or worse is 20% for p = 0.5 and 15% for p = 0.8.

If there are more all-ins, or the average all-in pot becomes worth less, the p-values go up. This could be done with a full hand history with a more complex binomial distribution and normal approximation, but like I said, it's worth noting that the distance between the all-in and green lines have been constant for 15k hands. That's exactly what you would expect.

If somebody comes out of the woodwork with <5% or even <1% p-value of their all-in variance, then that is significantly tainted by selection bias. Even his posting has selection bias, though even that bias wasn't enough to ensure a significant finding.

Not really but thank you anyway. First of all I dont know why anger, arogance, sarcasm, cynicism and all that acting of God in your reply but that is something you should solve on your own (or not, your choice sure, just please dont drag me in to your personal problems and lets all try to stick to the theme or just please ignore my post(s) and skip it).

Thanks other guys for kind replys as well, but must say Im not asking so much about theory and math in here. Im quite familiar with it and I understand general principles of it. Im aware of that IT IS mathematical (and tho in "practice" as well) possible that I throw a head of a coin billion times in a row at a huuuu...uuuge sample, therefor this to happen in my life time is veeeee...eery unlikely, so yes, I know Im not entitled to actually anything.
I would just like to get some opinions, "practical thoughts" from winning poker players - experts (like they are any other yeah:P based on their experiences and knowledge, not so much theoretical "by the book" explanations. And I would like to say, Im not trying to suggest or judge anything, Im just curious:
- is 500K hands "downswing" so common that every "average" winning poker player should expect "one" now and there in his poker career?
- if yes, than is it possible (but sure not necesary) that (at least) live cash game players like Ivey, Doyle, Ungar, Harman, are just huge luckers?
- furthermore is it, or how common it is that "2 tables" (<- playing aprox. 1K hands per day) winning online holdem players will struggle with such a "unhappy" stretch almost 3 years (a bit more or less, depending on their level of skill sure)?
- if so much luck is really involved in this game is it worth to play it (beatable?) unless you grind 150K hands per month?

Thank you!

Oke, busted (-:

Hey Mixer, I had the same problems as you and came here also to get some feeedback. Some guys around here are actually nice and some have problems with their ego and need to pick and laugh at someone to make themselves feel better. But well, that is there problem. I really recommend you to read 'The poker mindset'. This book is more than awesome for anyone who has difficulties with the mental aspects of poker. I strongly recommend to read every chapter of it and than think again about the questions you just asked in your posts.

they adjusted the program as they detected the anomally ( Me Winning) So I quit, lost interest in combating crooks. Its more fun with play money , watching them let you win with ridiculous hands to sucker a deposit . The other question is just silly
live is not rigged they take their rake only and the rest is up to the players. If this was the case online , I would not be on the play money table . By the way ,I made a decent dent in my losses before they adjusted the program to completely crush me with any hand... good luck Boabinan

Franxic, hanging around here with all these irrational riggies is clearly not good for your mental health. I would suggest to take a break for a few weeks.

I will say it's hard to tell how much of that 300k downswing is variance vs. bad play. Did CMAR try to go up in stakes, for example, and as long as play was break-even stayed there? One reason I don't like the CotW on all-in EV is that all-in EV is the only stone cold, 100% indicator of luck there is. Maybe it's something like 2% of luck which includes stuff like running into top of ranges, but dismissing it because it only explains 2% is like dismissing temperature in a weather report because it doesn't also have wind chill. The temperature is still more information than you had before. It would help with that graph. If all-in EV was much higher over that span, than you would know for sure luck was one part, although a lower or similar all-in EV wouldn't tell you much of anything.

35 hands per hour in live play seems the norm in live play, so that's 35,000 hands if poker was a job with 2,000 hours a year. So this is a downswing over "9 years" of live poker play. Sure, live play is a lot softer, but I have a hard time seeing variance lasting that long.

Well, after writing this, break even over 300k hands with Veneer's numbers of 2/5/8 bb/100 and SD of 55 bb/100, I got 2.3% probability of break-even for 2 and essentially zero for win rates of 5 and 8. So it is possible, but even for a very low win rate, it is on the extreme low end of variance.

While that's what I expected you to say, I have to say I'm a bit disappointed - yould can certainly do better than that. I was eagerly awaiting more enjoyable story, not just a one-liner.

edit: Like, involving the shills and forum owners who forwarded your ID to the site owners because they couldn't allow you openly claiming to exploit the system, let alone revealing specific details which iirc you got into at one point (obviously they couldn't just have banned you as that'd have been too obvious), or the botters having hacked your machine and spying your holecards (didn't I warn you?), PS getting an extra server to counter-equalize especially you, etc... meh, what a pity. You could have made for a really great read... but maybe it's not too late.


I don't get this though. As I understand it, your point was that if the players lost too quickly online they'd get discouraged and would eventually give up on online poker. How doesn't this happen live? Also, everyone knows rake is much higher IRL, which should even add up to the fish getting bled dry (ie. given the same negative winrate vs the sharks as online, the effective winrate should be even worse than online due to the higher rake). So according to your theory, live poker should either long be dead, or sharks like yourself should be banned from live casinos because you discourage the fish. Which point am I missing?

As the online poker sites use pros to attract customers so Live sites love sharks. When you are on a final table its like you are a celebrity , people watch and drink more beer so they actually encourage Sharks like myself to attend. The game is slower and less hands so the fish do not notice the losses as they are less per week. Online even with equalization to keep them in the game they lose at faster pace than live.
Playing online is more like being at a roulette table when its all said and done we know the winner. Live , you can walk out the door with your winnings knowing the deal was at least real . you would be surprized how many fish feel fine with this ..