Hi 2p2, this is my sample of 13k games

I play mostly tournaments and my avg buyin is $20

Excluding rake my graph is this:


With rake becomes this:


What does it really mean?

Im trying to improve and the first step is self-awareness

Am I a bad player? This sample is enough to ensure that?

The fact that I am winner pre-rake means something?

I want to hear your thoughts

Thank you

It means you're a slightly above average player which isn't good enough to win after rake. Also sample size is an issue as it always will be with mtts. Though 13k games is pretty decent.

At -3% roi which is roughly your result, using 500 man field sizes and 81 paid, this is what the variance calculator spits out:

99.7% of all simulated samples where within this interval. The second row shows to which ROI those profits correspond. Albeit rather unlikely, 3 out of 1000 players will experience a run better or worse than that. $-47,430 - $36,435 (997 out of 1000 samples)
-17% - 13% ROI

And of course you have different buyins, different field sizes, different field qualities etc making the variance even bigger. Plus you probably don't play the same way you did when you started your 13k sample, and neither did your competition. Even the optimistic top end 13% ROI isn't huge for a 20 ABI though, so there's probably a good bit of room for improvement.

Drop down in stakes, avg bi of 20 is quite high for someone who cant beat the game after rake. Also, you should have thought about what to change like 8k tournament ago. As you say, self-awareness is key. Better late then never

Drop down dude and game select more often. I can't be sure but if your playing all the big $22 with thousands of players its prob not going to be good for your ROI longterm. Try playing on party poker where the players are soft. I would also stick to low $2-$5 bounty builders/freezeouts on stars where the players are not very good and your ROI will improve. Theres quite a big difference in skill level between people that play at $20 av buy in and those that play $5 and below. You need to find and play a lot more smaller field mtts as well. Party poker will be good for this.

8k tournaments ago I was break even and had just won some tournaments, as you can see on graph

I see, thank you a lot for your help

Even on the optimistic side I would not be a huge winner so theres clearly something wrong with my game

what I noticed is that I dont play good on end games with deep stacks, I always get owned by other regular players

I play good early and middle game but end game costs me a lot of money, I can feel that Im not playing well

On MTTs this is a disaster of course

I will try playing more turbos and hypers so end game is not deep and see if it gets better

Thank you a lot for your help

That is great and all but being BE after 5k MTTs is not something you want either and after having that big downswing, you must have thought you are doing something wrong.

What I think I see is that you go for bigger BI after a win. Keep your BI capped, dont punt it off when you banked value. you can ofc. reward yourself with a shot/bigger tournament after a win, but be smart with this --> soft sunday mtts/ site allocation

turbos and hypers are not going to help your ROI

You should probably try to beat games including the rake, since it does in fact exist. Probably lower staked games.

If you aren't beating the rake, you aren't beating the game.


They help my ROI. It depends if you are good at them.

Instead, why don't you try to improve your end game?

Unless you're a losing player or just absolutely godawful at stacks >30bb, this just cannot be true. Paying the same rake and having much fewer hands to realise your edge it just doesn't help your ROI.

lol betgo

again

You are generally playing worse players in turbos and short stack is a different game. I am not sure about ROI, but I make a bigger profit per time expended. You can't tell someone who is slightly losing that he will not win playing turbos without knowing anything about his game.

Agree with Betgo here, assuming that a player cannot be as profitable or more profitable in turbo's is incorrect.

Seems like snobbery about deep stack play, like from cash games players. My strength is short stack play and tournament strategy. When someone says playing turbos won't improve your ROI, he means it won't improve his ROI.

It reminds me of Annie Duke saying don't play tournaments, as they are bad for your profit level. She meant they are bad for her profit level, and that of some other old school limit mixed games pros who don't know how to play tournaments.

We really have no way of knowing whether it will improve his short stack strategy or not without seeing him play. His short stack play would need to be significantly better then his deep stack for him to be more profitable. I know very few losing players that are suddenly winning at a much higher rate at turbos (over a big sample)

Please don't make a metaphor or do anything else that links me with Annie Duke, regardless of whether it holds any truth.

What I said was not meant as snobbery, I was just stating a fact that you have to be an overall losing player or be -EV at deepstack to have a higher ROI in turbo's. In a 15min structure you're probably going to see as many shove/fold spots on average per tournament as you are in a 5min structure. Maybe a bit less, maybe a bit more, not sure. $/hour is a different matter entirely and could easily be in the favor of turbo's, of course. But in 2017 there aren't many turbo's that are huge value at >30$ even on sundays so I don't know how relevant the point is. You can't really fill a sunday with 100$+ turbo's.

But yeah, deepstack play is more about understanding, and <20bb stack is more about memorization. I'm more impressed by understanding than memorization, but they're both skills you can be good at. I can give any person a chart or an app and if they know the rules of poker they can push/fold very well with 5 minutes of explanation. I'd need to coach someone for months-years to get them to the same level of deepstack play, and I probably make more mistakes in deepstack poker than the person with a push/fold app at shortstacking does.

I'm trying not to be an ******* and I realise I sometimes/often come across as arrogant and/or condescending. But let me explain it the way I see it: the reason you get picked at on this forum is because most things I read from you about poker strategy come across as either super obvious, superficial or semi-wrong to completely wrong. And then you get proven wrong and are super stubborn about it. Which in turn makes any starting point from anyone replying to you a bit agitated instead of neutral. Oh and poker players are a toxic bunch, myself included, that's not your fault

If you think short stack play is about memorization, then you obviously don't understand short stack play.

There is a video author who does great MTT videos on RIO. He did a turbo video, and it was obvious he didn't understand short stack play. People pointed out he had a losing record in turbos. The Upswing MTT class is pretty poor in its short stack play content. Polk didn't create it, but he makes basic short stack mistakes in his MTT videos.

Funny how this is stated so often, yet every player I've been in regular contact with has been helpful/honest/fun to hang out with. I probably just run very good

or you have good/bad people in poker as in any other profession granted, the negative aspects of people in poker take the spotlight more often

So what is it about if not remembering ranges for different situations that others have solved mathematically? Of course there is some wiggle room for exploitable play sometimes, but most of the time you're just gonna shove as close to nash as you can remember.

@chipporn poker players are probably not particularly worse on average than people in other fields, I've just been reading suggestion threads a lot which seems to bring out the worst in everyone

Short stack play is not just pushbot and call. You are playing 10-30xBB more in turbos. Playing this stack depth is tricky, and cannot be handled totally by memorization. I posted something earlier from a Polk video, where he appeared to make a basic error 3-bet/folding TT against a CO raise.

It also helps if you understand the reasons for things rather than rote memorize them. There are adjustments and adaptations to situations. For example how players are playing and ICM issues. Granted you can memorize Nash values and memorize ICM values, but it helps to have a feel for what is going on and the reasons for the values.