Quote:
It was the observation of a new “line" that has become popular with those responsible for “raked" functions relating to national poker sites that gave us the idea for the study of “asymptotically rakeless" poker.
Somehow twitter has it in its algorithm that I want poker in my feed even though its basically a trigger for me I mean to avoid. So in that sense I'm forced to come across a V Selbsts tweet about the WSOP FT and I'm all too much reminded of the narrative her and other poker stars pros carried and sold to the players:
More specifically I'm thinking of a time when Daniel Negreanu headed a poker stars campaign that tried to convince the players that higher rake was better for the game. The basic idea being there is some subset of players that YOU the reader belongs to, that benefits from 'low rake seeking players' leaving the site for more profitable games.
But even before that I found something strange about the whole poker ecology. For me I played mttsng's full time (low/mid) and a lot of them. 30-40K games a year for a few years playing as many days and hours as I could and upwards of 30 tables on regular. I had some of the volume reasonably possible.
At some point, I wanted to prove to my family it wasn't a gambling addiction so I tried to apply variance calcs to the results and I realized something that I'm not sure many players really understood. You can't just take your actual winrate and apply a probability distribution to it and discern your true expected winrate.
Put another way, just because your winrate is high doesn't mean you are more likely to be a player that wins at a high winrate. (correct me if I am wrong here). I was confused but more so because none of the players would entertain a dialogue on the subject. Then I started to look at all of the winrates of all of the 'top' players in my field. It turns out that there weren't any real consistent year over year winners. Moreover and for example, collin moshman's wife (moshman wrote the book in sng's) wasn't winning much, how does that work?
Some of the top winner's had bad strategy, either observably or noticeably from 2p2 posts or skype chats etc. But what was even more telling and alarming was these top players and coaches didn't understand the limitations of variance observations. And they laughed at the subject. I wonder now if the Overton window has shifted.
I call it moral poker to work together for the greater good of the game, outside of a hand. Variance observations and understanding can be this.
What I had believed that I had discovered in my field was that you cannot reasonably play enough games to ascertain a reasonable confidence in your winrate. I extrapolate some things from this. Players that don't know this are not good coaches to have. Poker sites are aware of this fact and set the games up like this on purpose.
And if its true that my games suffered from this, then mtts suffered worse. If games suffered from this 10 years ago then because of the decreased profitability (from increased average skill) there is even higher variance to face.
Trying to keep this short it will seem like a leap but the reason I think of this reading Selbt's post is it reminds me of the time when all of these 'pro's' who were supposed to be ambassadors of the game were actually profiting off of spreading ignorance about it.
In a game that is clearly tending towards a ceiling of strategy equilibrium her comments make no sense. Just like a commentator saying someone made a good fold because their opponent had a better hand but ignoring range.
I think only the best will agree with me and the rest will laugh.
Is my understanding of variance and the available data wrong?