Quote:
Originally Posted by Zurich_1
Here is the story of Garrett:
"If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too."
That analogy would be great if he only got into 10 large/all-in hands in his career. But, he's gotten into hundreds of thousands of them.
Do you realize that there are winrate and variance simulators/calculators that are publicly available (people on here use them all the time) where you can calculate the % chance of a longterm winrate being off from its results-value by X amount over Y sample size at Z winrate and W standard deviation?
If someone plays 2,000 hands, and is winning at 10bb/100, it doesn't mean anything. It could extremely easily just be luck over that sample size (ditto in the reverse direction).
If, on the other hand, someone plays a million hands, and is winning at 10bb/100, it is statistically extremely meaningful. If you had 1024 players, NONE of them would be mathematically expected to be winning at 10bb/100 over a million hand sample size if their true winrate was 0bb/100 or lower. The odds would be drastically more severe than that.
You have just enough of an understanding of statistics and probability to understand that if there are a large amount of people, a few of them will get luckier than the rest (within a small/medium sample size) to a "surprising" degree. But, you don't seem to have enough of an understanding of statistics and probability to understand how severe the odds numbers get once the sample size at hand gets extremely large. That's where your analysis crapped out.
If you had been making the argument in regards to a
tournament player, it would've had a much higher chance of being a valid argument, since long-term tournament variance (particularly for a live-tourney player, where it takes even longer to have a legit sample size in that format) can go drastically longer in those, and for someone who got really lucky or unlucky could outweigh even a career/lifetime length of live-tourney sample size.
But, this is cash games. If a guy crushed online for a huge sample size of hands (which he did) and then crushed live for a very big sample size of hands as well (which he did), he's pretty clearly a strongly winning player, and not a breakeven/losing player who just went on a heater for the past 15 years. That's not to say that he couldn't have also run a lot better than the avg
LATB player on big
LATB hands. That's a small enough sample-within-a-sample that he could've. But, on a career level, no, he obviously didn't just get lucky to make millions of dollars playing poker over the giant sample size that he played over more than a decade of play.