Warning: this is long winded and likely boring for most people. Read at your own risk.
Quote:
Originally Posted by merryber
how did u do that? how can i find out what is my standard deviation from my PT?
If you use PT2, go to the Session Notes tab. In the upper right corner is a button labeled "More Detail...". Click that. A window will pop up giving more information than they could fit into the main window. At the bottom of this popup window is your standard deviation/hour and standard deviation/100.
I don't know where to find it in PT3 but it's in there somewhere.
Quote:
Originally Posted by merryber
also, i have a related question hope its ok to ask it here:
i just read the post mr.wookie made on moving up limits according to standard deviation and i have trouble understandig this paragraph:
"My personal metric is, for play at a particular level, to know to within two standard errors (about 98% confidence) that I am a winning player. That is, that my win rate is twice or more as big as the uncertainty of my win rate. To compute the uncertainty of your win rate, take your standard deviation per 100 hands, usually about 15 BB/100, and divide it by the square root of the number of hands you’ve played divided by 100 (the number of 100 hand blocks you’ve played). Playing 20,000 hands with this standard deviation will yield an uncertainty in your win rate of 1.06 BB/100. Thus, you’d need a win rate of 2.12 BB/100 to know with 98% confidence that you were a winning player. Depending on your personal level of boldness or paranoia, you may be satisfied with 84% confidence (uncertainty = win rate) or 99.9% confidence (uncertainty = win rate / 3). Of note is that 20,000 hands at a win rate of 2.12 BB/100 will net you 424 BB, which, combined with the 300 BB you started with, gives you a bankroll sufficient to play at twice the current limit."
will some1 be kind enuf to explain to me what is the bold part mean?
ty.
The author is simply talking about how confident you can be that the winrate reported by Poker Tracker (or Holdem Manager, or your own calculations, or whatever) is a true reflection of reality. The formulas he gives really only make one assumption, and that is that win rates for poker players have a "normal" distribution. A normal distribution looks like a bell when it's graphed.
As it turns out, win rates
do have a normal distribution. If you made a graph with the X-axis showing win rate and the Y-axis showing percentage of the population with that win rate, and then you compiled all the win rates of every poker player on the planet, the resulting shape of the curve would look like a bell, with most players clustered around a slightly negative win rate and the curve dropping off rapidly in either direction. There would be a few very bad players showing up on the left and a few very good players on the right. The curve itself could look elongated and tall or short and flat, but it will look like a bell. It's the standard deviation that determines its "flatness".
Now, if you haven't played many hands at a level, you won't be very confident that the PT win rate is a true reflection of your win rate at that level. The more hands you play, the more confident you can be, but there is still a chance that you've been on a downswing or a heater.
How likely is it that your true win rate deviates a "lot" from the PT win rate? Well, that's what the author is showing. If your win rate is a full "standard error" (as calculated by the author) above zero, you can be 84% confident that you really do have a positive win rate. Basically, this means that if you took all players with your win rate and your standard error, you would find that 84% of them have win rates within one "standard error" of the PT win rate, but 16% are either losers who have been on a heater or bigger winners who have been on a downswing.
If your win rate is two standard errors above zero, then you can be 98% sure you're a winning player. If you're a complete paranoid nit and you want to be 99.9% sure you're a winning player before moving up, you'll have to play enough hands to get your standard error down to 1/3 of your win rate. How many hands that will take depends on your actual win rate and your standard deviation, which depends on your style of play, your consistency, the consistency of your table conditions, etc.
If you're a loose aggressive player prone to fits of rage and tilt and you sometimes play drunk while watching porn videos, your variance (standard deviation squared) is going to be extremely high, and it's going to take a lot of hands to determine if you are actually a winner with any confidence. If you are a tight player, can control your emotions, and manage to avoid distractions for the most part, your variance will be lower, and it won't take nearly as long.
Keep in mind, though, that all these formulas really tell you is how confident you can be that your style of play over the course of the hands in your database was a winning style of play when compared to the others in your database. It can't really tell you if you are, right now, a winning player when compared to the current population of poker players. You might have improved, or you might have got in a fight and suffered brain damage in the Poker Skill part of your brain. Or you might have switched sites recently and your new site has fishier (or tougher) players. Or CTS might have come out with a video for microstakes players last week and everybody saw it and understood it but you. Or the U.S. Congress might have decided to regulate poker, and now a million new and clueless players are playing all over the place and your slightly negative win rate is about to ramp up to a hugely positive one.
In other words, things might have changed.
And if you've read this far, you just might be masochistic enough to succeed at this game.
Last edited by Weevil99; 09-01-2008 at 09:00 AM.