This actually isn't a joke though the subject line may have come across that way.

Everybody talks about making sure you have enough bankroll to ride out the swings.

But what doesn't get mentioned much is having the TIME to ride out the swings. For online players this is less of an issue because you can play so many hands, but for live players, to some extent live players who play full time but CERTAINLY live players who only play occasionally, this can be a HUGE issue.

Case in point - I don't get to play very much during the year because I don't enjoy online poker anymore so I don't play it and have a very busy personal life so I don't get many chances to go to the casino. I just got back from a 6-day vacation in Las Vegas where I planned (and succeeded!) to poker myself to death. I played about 40 hours of poker there.

I didn't prepare myself for the reality that 40 hours is NOTHING. It's NOTHING. Compared to the 4, 5, 6 hours I usually get to play it felt like it would be an eternity, but statistically speaking, it is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. It's approximately 1,000 hands, MAYBE 1,200 hands (I played mostly O8 so for me it was realistically closer to 1,000). A person can be carddead and/or get kicked in the nards by the flop nearly every time they DO get dealt a playable starting hand over a 1,000-hand streak EASILY and it's not even really that improbable.

So, serious question even though it seems like a joke - should having a TIMEROLL be just as important as having a BANKROLL? Or at the very least should people understand that the so-called "SHORT"-term luck factor is exponentially longer than they realize?

I mean I've heard of online players who go on downswings of 100,000 hands. For a player who plays 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year that's TWO ENTIRE YEARS. Someone like me who only gets to play a few times a year may literally NEVER play enough hands to ride out the variance.

Feedback welcome.

How do you move down if you're under timed?

No good live player in normal casino cash games will go on 100k or even 20k hand losing streaks.

I would actually not be surprised if most solid cash players never had a losing stretch of 10k hands over a span of years of play, but would need to actually run some calcs to be certain of that.

Being timerolled is a ridiculous concept - if you don't have the time to play then you should view any sort of "bankroll" you have as an entertainment budget and a maybe slightly better than even chance to make a few bucks over time, not a "bankroll" in the same sense serious players have them.

non pros are exactly that. They are hobbyists and play largely for fun. Most hobbyists are losing players and would need unlimited bankrolls - they would therefore be better off having zero time roll.

also +1 to duncelanas poast

A bankroll is so you have money to play in order to keep making money. If you almost never play, you're not relying on it to make money and so you can just use whatever cash you have lying around. Also it would be stupid to keep a proper bankroll liquid just for the purpose of playing once in a while, you could use that money to get much higher returns than poker.

If external factors can reduce your bankroll, like bills or if you're playing on a loan and will have to return it, then having less time to play will increase your risk of ruin. Of course taking out a loan to play is a questionable idea and a professional should rely on his bankroll to pay bills throughout downswings rather than just having the time to grind through them.

Time constraints shouldn't matter to a non-professional. If you're not taking money out of your bankroll then your RoR won't be affected.

40 hours is a decent amount in live games. The length of a breakeven stretch is defined by:
N₀ = (zσ/u)^2
where u is win-rate, σ is standard deviation and z is the z-score. For an exceptional player in soft live games with a win-rate of 12BB/h and a standard deviation of 80BB/h, it is only about a 17% chance to run break-even or worse over 40 hours.

Online games have much smaller win-rates, so breakeven stretches can be much longer.

Browni, being a simple engineer and not being a stat guy, I had to look up what exactly a z-score is. Seems like it represents the decimal number of standard deviations one player might be better than the mean of a large sample of players, i.e. half a SD, .75 SD, whatever value represents the "how much better than average" a player is.

Presumably a better than break-even player will have a positive z-score, and a great player a larger z-score.

What value would you estimate the z-score of:

* an exceptional player, maybe with an estimated equivalent win-rate of 12 BB/hr, in your example, what z-score did you use? 1+12/80? Or something else?
* a good player, maybe with a win-rate of ?
* a barely winning player, maybe with a win rate of ?

you have limited time to play poker (which everyone has because there's only 24 hours in the day). Just play some cards and set a budget. I wouldn't even focus on making $ at poker or any endeavor. Focus on playing well which comes from preparation and experience.

In other lines of work you might be focused on cleaning that floor well or meeting the needs of that customer who's wanting to buy something.

$ come after all this and you shouldn't really be worried about $ if your doing your job correctly because there's profit in any line of toil. whether you can make profit at poker comes down to luck and skill but that's the same in any business. the real question is are you lucky enough and skilled enough at poker? results will show themselves.

i was like wtf is this post about lol . time is irrelevant as far as bankroll , if your getting less hands an hour in then your losing less buy ins an hour as well.( its all relative) so you shouldnt be able to punt your roll as fast either. theoretically .

so you shouldnt be focused on how many hands your getting in but rather focused on how many BB/100 you can get out of those hands.

so think of how soft live poker is where you can play less hands and yet win more money.

also side note imo GTO will never work in a live setting , no one would ever ****ing live long enough to get past the variance.

Uhh, being a hobbyist myself, thus having decided to post less and leave the poker stuff to the more qualified, so to speak, I'm once again compelled to come out of retirement.

I understand where op is coming from. I think?

What happens to someone like op and myself is, we tend to think that we are probably better than we actually are. Hey, we're on this forum, am I right?

So, if we go on a losing streak, which is inevitable, it seems to last infinitely, because we play so much less than a pro or semi pro.
A losing streak of a pro over a span of 1k hands will last a week but for us , the same volume of hands could be a losing streak of months.

So, What is op's point? I'm not exactly sure but from the fact that a normal losing streak for a half way decent hobbyist can be devastating to his confidence as a poker player?

I'm pretty far from an expert, too. Everything I've learned is from self study or helping my wife with her math homework.

z-score is just a term to denote the number of standard deviations from the mean that a data point is in a normal distribution. It represents and can be converted to a probability by using a chart (google z-tables, in this case we are considering the probability of running breakeven or worse, so we want the left tail probability given our z-score). When I say a player with a 12 BB/h win-rate and an 80BB/h standard deviation has a 17% probability of breaking even or worse over 40 hours, I had inputted the known variables, u = 12, σ = 80 and N₀ = 40 and solved for z to get -.95, looked the value up in a table to see that it corresponds with a 17% probability.

If we were looking at a distribution of player win-rates then the z-score could represent player ability, but that's not what we're looking at. We're looking at the expected distribution of the length of a breakeven stretch for a player whose bankroll expects to grow 12 BB/h with a standard deviation of 80 BB/h.

With apologies for the delay in responding, the point I was trying to make is that if you're the type of player who simply can't put in a ton of volume, then you have to accept and BE PREPARED FOR the possibility that you may not be able to play enough hands to ride out the bad luck. Bad luck can easily last hundreds if not thousands of hands.

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I think the lesson here is that to be anything but a casual player you need to be able to dedicate the bulk of your time into poker. Otherwise you have to be remarkably lucky or good (better to be lucky in this case). Just learn from your cold streaks and accept them as hobby expenses.

A hobbyist with a marginal winrate can't guarantee having enough time to grind out losses live, that's true. However winrates are higher than online so a solid winner who is at the tables a lot is going come out OK every month.

This is why as a recreational player, even if you're certain you're going to be a winner in a game, you don't go into games relying on winning over any given stretch of time.

Dal's been around BQ a while so I'm sure he remembers me but basically, I stopped playing for a living, didn't play for a couple of years but when coming back, despite being very confident I'd still beat at least upper microstakes, I started at 2NL - because I knew starting on a significant downswing would significantly reduce my volume if I did it at higher stakes. If you ever feel like you have to play as a rec, there's an issue. That's why 'timerolling' isn't really a thing. Even as a winning rec, you have a budget, not a bankroll, since you shouldn't be playing stakes where losing is an issue for you. Therefore, riding out variance also isn't a concept you should be applying IMO.

Thanks for this post.

Ive gone to Vegas for a week at a time. I have probably done this around 10 times. Playing 1/3 I would end up profiting each time. I assumed I was just always running good to never have a downswing. Did you mean bb? Idk if a 24bb/h is achievable.

Welcome back.

Better get your head round zero rakeback, hudless sites and/or dodgy unregulated cowboy outfits then

I'd have thought a rich lawyer would have been better of playing live

I'm aware that in fixed limit, BB denotes "Big Bets," and bb denotes "big blinds." Big bets are almost always 2x the big blind (I've seen games where this isn't the case). In no limit I've always thought both acronyms meant "big blinds," so I can use either one. I think 12 big blinds per hour is achievable in some games/stakes, but it was just an example.

You remember that you COACHED me for awhile, right? Good to hear from you, hope you're done with university and all is well. You were one of the true milestones in my poker development.

Ah. I come from a FL background so I’m used to it meaning big bet.

I'd forgotten that, sorry!

Hope all is well!

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