Yes I can: because you cannot say if it is variance or player base improvement, and he doesn't know. If he knew what his variance was, there wouldn't be any argument here. If he knew, he would be saying: guys, my variance is this. But I am way out of range here, what is going on? Nobody can decide what it is because for startes, HE doesn't know.

You are inferring the fact that he doesn't know from the fact that he hasn't told us. Whilst you're at liberty to infer what you wish it does not make your argument convincing. I'm basing my assumption that he has some understanding of variance on the fact that he has stated he's played hundreds of thousands of hands over the course of a year at ipoker.

He may have been well aware of his variance and rolled to handle it but as things changed he allowed himself to get into a monetarily dangerous situation.

I've already said that his money management is obviously poor but we cannot say one way or the other if it that has been highlighted variance or some other factor without further information.

In any event, playing on a malware infested computer is asking for trouble. Try downloading a program called malawarebytes on someone else's computer, put it on a flashdrive and install it that way. Should fix your problem.

Or, as has been suggested, just reformat your computer and reinstall everything. You DON't want to be playing poker on a compromised computer! Just asking for trouble. You don't know if there are backdoors installed that will let someone gain access to your system and empty your account.

This.

+ a lot.

com'on! After reading all of his posts, and the reaction he showed to the others responses, I can confidently infer that he has no idea what his variance is.

S.
(not because he hasn't told us, but because of ALL what he told us)

Oh, and after all that probably want to change all your passwords...

EDIT: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/48...echnical-help/ is a great forum for asking these types of questions. They've helped me out considerably a couple times!

Wow, I didn't think my initial post would lead to this response/backlash.

I can't keep up with all the new posts in order to reply to each one individually any more.

A few people seem to be making assumptions about my scenario or what I should be doing or should have done. I felt I could make more money playing poker than in any other job I could get, so decided to make my living from it. I was successful for a year and a half, but unfortunately I had a lot of previous debts to pay off, so wasn't able to put as much of my winnings aside for a rainy day as I would have liked. That's what has led to this I suppose.

In terms of the competition getting stronger, there are probably more decent players on iPoker, but I do all I can to avoid these players. I play as many of my games as possible against as bad a level of player as I can find. I could sit here and quote to you on a daily basis the utter nonsense plays I witness on that site. Some of them have to be seen to be believed.

I don't think I'm a world-beater, but I also see so many plays that I know are bad and I'm capable of beating. So, after a year, when this isn't happening, I'm getting more and more concerned.

With regards to my computer, I'm not good with computers, as long as my poker works I'm happy. The virus or whatever has been removed and normally I'd be worried about them taking my money but there's really nothing there for them to take at the moment, so it isn't much of a concern.

I appreciate the help and advice being offered, thanks.

I might as well be honest with you argentina. I didn't really know 'variance' was something you could quantify and say 'my variance is this.'

Can you explain to me, (without biting my head off) an example of how you would do this ?

If what you told us is accurate and you have played hundreds of thousands of hands over eighteen months winning at a reasonable rate then variance is very unlikely to be your problem.

That is more applicable to people who come here and claim to be winning players on the basis of their results over 5000 (or indeed anything under around 100k) hands.

To give you an idea (and I've checked the figures this time ), to play 500,000 hands over 2 years playing one table at 100 hands per hour you would need to play for nearly seven hours a day every day.

I don't really understand how you can claim to be a professional poker player yet have no money for Pokertracker and "really nothing" in your poker account. This isn't meant to be a derogatory question but are you living with your parents, with no serious bills to pay and poker is just your current source of income because you don't want to get a "real" job?

As the saying goes, poker is the hardest wasy to make an easy living, and sadly the Crypto days are long gone.

Well, I suppose it would be a good exercise for me to try to explain it to you...so, why not? Poker is such a lonely business :/ I will try not to bit your head off with my answer. I will assume that you don't know anything about variance, so I will explain the whole process:

Let's say you play about the same number of hands every day. You always play the same level (if not, you can divide how much money you made/lost in a day by looking at the amount of BB instead of the amount of $). You make a table where you list how much money you made/lost each day. You can calculate how much money you are earning on average: you add all the money for each day and you divide it for the number of days. There you have your average return per day, AR. Does that mean that you are going to make that amount tomorrow when you play your usual game? No, it doesn't, you know that by experience. You want to know what to expect though, and how confident you can be in making/losing a certain amount (so you can plan ahead). So you do the following: you look at how much each particular day differs from that average. You do that by substracting your return in a particular day from this average. You will now have a table like this:

date | amount won/lost | difference d

day1 X1 d1 (= X1 - AR)
day2 X2 d2 (= X2 - AR)
.
.
.
day N XN dN (=XN - AR)

Now you want to know how far (in average) you are from that AR. It doesn't matter if that is below or above AR. You want to know how FAR. You get that by doing (d*d) (which is noted d^2=d*d). That gets rid of the sign. It makes more important the ones that were far from AR, but that is ok. You can now calculate an average of those d^2, so you add them all up and divide it by the number of days. This gives you what is called the variance. If you have some data that is very far from the AR, you get a big number. var = ( d1^2 + d2^2 + ....+ dN^2)/N
If you now take sqt(var), you get what is called the standard deviation (sd = sqrt[( d1^2 + d2^2 + ....+ dN^2)/N]=sqrt(var)) (or 'sigma'). You can look at this quantity as some kind of measure of how far away, on average, your results are from your AR, a measure of distance.
If you assume that your daily returns are normally distributed (i.e., they have a particular bell shape when you plot them
in a histogram form), then in terms of this sigma, you can find the probability of getting a result that is a given distance apart for your AR. For example, if this measurement reflects your true distribution, the probability that tomorrow your return will be 3 sigmas above or below your AR is about 0.3%
(3 in 1000).

Once you understood that, there is something else to consider. Imagine you do this a second year, and a 3rd year, and N years. You will have again, a table for each year you played. In this table you can list

Year1 | ARy1

This is: your average return that year. These amounts, again will not be the same every year. They will have a distribution. The different ARs will hover around your 'true' AR. How spread? The dispersion of the data you measure are related to the spread of your true distribution by

Sigmatrue = Sigmameasured/sqrt(N)

The dispersion of your results for AR (Sigmameasured) is like a margin of error in your estimation.
The more you measure, the higher the N, the smaller the error, the closer your average will be to your true AR. Knowing your sigmaM will give you limits for your trueAR within a certain confidence interval.
So you can say things like: I am 95% sure that my trueAR < measAr + 2*truesigma and trueAR > measAr - 2*truesigma. Voila.


I recommend you read the entry in wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

and in case you don't get to the bottom of the page, check their link to Standard deviation - an explanation without maths. There are many other links to easy explanations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standar...External_links

I didn't check the forums here, but I am sure you will find an infinite number of posts with plenty of info on the subject. It is really fundamental to your livelihood as a poker player, using some of your words. There is a probability forum:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/25/probability/

There is a poker beats, brags, and variance forum (now hopefully you know what variance is)

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54...rags-variance/

And hopefully you now realise how important it is to know your numbers, and in particular to have a software program like PT or HM. Not only this. You can also analyse particular hands. For example, how many times I got aces, I went all in preflop, they called me with 22, and see how many of those times you won and how many you lost, and compare that measured probability of winning with the calculated one.

S.

Awesome post! thx

+1

Nice to see such a constructive and helpful post.

I posted a couple of weeks ago about amazing showdowns in ps sats, and I'm still suprised by the frequency of showdowns where someone catches his miracle card and wins, or someone catches his miracle card and then the other guy catches his miracle card to overtake the first guy etc. Does ne1 play sats on ps, and observe this kind of thing? What perplexes me is the frequency of these occurences, and I want to stress that because I'm well aware that 1,2, 3 or 4 outers do in fact hit; they MUST hit sometimes of course. It just seems to happen more than it should. Recently I had kings against my opponent's jacks, we both shove prflp, and I'm looking good on flp, but then he hits his two outer set on the turn, but i pick up a king high flush draw, and then i take the pot down with my one card flush on the river. Now, this kind of thing is of course bound to happen from time to time. But when it did i was just not suprised at all, I've basically come to expect it. In cash games w/ plenty of rediculously loose callers it simply doesnt seem to happen as often. It happens, but for any given hand I'm generally not expecting it to happen.

It could simply be that shoving in a nl satellite binds a person to showdown, thus increasing the the frequency that people stay to showdown, but in micro stakes cash games ur often getting people sticking around when they shouldn't.

lol, here we go again

But if nobody feels this way about the ps sats then I'll hang it up for a while...

lol
that was fast

Not sure what you want anybody to say. Anybody can come up with some parameters and do a scientific study if they want to. Doubt you'll find many people doing that because what you're talking about is very normal.

Also, I could care less if somebody flops a set and then a backdoor flush comes. Bottom line.... when the money gets in, does a hand hold up approximately as much as it should.

fuego, just say why u think i observe this. if ur not sure then theres not much to say really

Well, I'm a cash game player, but I have taken weeks at a time playing sngs just for something different. The key difference is, in tournaments the blinds force all kinds of hands to get all in with each other. Most of the time it's no worse than an 80/20, more often 60/40. If you play a lot of those things you statistically SHOULD be seeing dozens of bad beats a day. That doesn't surprise me at all. Now, if you want to take it a step further like you are and want to look at the odds AFTER the flop comes even though the money got in before that, you're just going to make yourself even more paranoid because you're looking at stuff that isn't even relevant at all. There are so many different variations of how 5 cards can fall it's ridiculous. Odds change on every card with straight draws, flush draws, overcards hitting, etc. Your brain can't possibly calculate all the possibilities. Yet your perception probably tells you something different when you're looking at the hand using your 20/20 hindsight.

A guy gets in with a gutshot and an overcard to your pair, and perhaps also has a backdoor flush draw. It's so common to see the backdoor flush draw hit and scream "what are the odds of that?" while completely ignoring the fact that there were two other ways you could've lost the hand that make up an even larger percentage.

It's enough to make your head explode, but yet it's the nature of the game. I think a lot of people fail to grasp a lot of this.

14cobster,

how often has this thing happened?

how often should it happen?

Really?

I couldn't.

oops, pwned

Hello everyone, I've been down the road of bad beats for months now and been doing some research on the site and with tiltware llc. this letter that I'm going to post for you is written by a software engineer that helped develop tiltware. And its counter parts, Its the truth written in blood. I am not going to post any names or am I for any reason going to give up my source, So don't ASK!
with hopes that they might see that the truth is now out of the box, maybe we can see change ( but probably not...LOL)

Enjoy!


The letter is as followed :

xxxx xxxxxxx

Their are many folk out there arguing about if online poker is rigged or not…I would like to help put this to rest by stating that it is rigged in many different ways. I helped write some of the software for Tiltware LLC…while working on the fulltilt site some of the other programmers and I were asked to install programming into the software that would recognize certain players and provide them with unbeatable hands. We were also asked to develop software that would provide what they called the”maximum opportunity to bet” which meant that the deals are rigged to deal out a lot of good starting hands to a lot of players so that the most betting possible would take place on every deal. The deal would then provide a monster flop in which at least two players would be all in before the river.(ever wonder why nobody ever misses the flop online…because then no one would bet and that is not what fulltilt wants) This keeps the tourneys fast paced and exciting which players love. Fulltilt loves this too, the faster you lose the faster they can make more money off you by having enter another tourney.
There is also another way fulltilt cheats you out of cash with their own personal players. These players are called house players and are full time employees of the Fulltilt company. If you check some names and their online wins vs. loss records you will often find them with records that are simply unreal. I have seen some of these folks who win over 50 straight sessions without a loss…how can this be possible unless they are working on the inside. They come and go and change their names often but they play in the site with the full advantage of being able to see all the cards in play and in the deck.
Another programming trick we wrote into the software at fulltilt is the levels trick…this trick takes place when a tournament has been running after the first break. The computer recognizes the different size of each players chip stack and begins to deal out hands in which a small stack will shove all in and a large stack will have a better hand to call with. Have you ever wondered why you get pocket QQs with 1500 chips and the guy next to you gets pocket KKs and he has 10,000 chips? The answer is simple the site is programmed to get you to play as much as possible. So we programmed the site to eliminate the small stack as quickly as possible so that they can go enter another tourney asap. The site is even programmed to adjust the flop for big stacks so that even if the big stack calls your hand with nothing he will end up beating your good made hand by the river. Often times the site will deal you back to back hands with the same cards but maybe different colors or suits..this “glitch” is a sign that the computer is adjusting the shuffle to start eliminating small stacks and allow the tourney to finish quicker.
The sooner a tournament is done the faster fulltilt can have you back at another table spending more money…it is to this sites best interested to eliminate you from tables as fast as possible. There is no one to regulate how the company manipulates the software to their own advantage. There is no one to monitor how the company pays out its players and employees. Simply put, giving some offshore account your hard earned cash is simply insane. Thinking that these people aren't cheating you out of your money is crazy, the site has many layers of hidden programming all set up to take full advantage of all types of players from novice to expert.
the main reason i wrote this Letter is to expose the fraud that takes place at online gaming site's known as Fulltilt poker I was fired three months ago from the company that helped write the software..yes I am bitter and mad, But I do feel everyone should have the right to know how bad fulltilt is and how the site is engineered for them to make maximum profits.

Sincerly,

xxxxx xxxxxxxxxx