What's this mean? goo play/good luck?

Work has been ver very slow. Not making any dough so devoting much more time to playing. I have a very small bankroll. So for the last 2 months I've played anywhere from 20-60 hours per week. I live in the SF bay area. I will drive from one place to another looking for the good games. I switch from holdem, to stud, to stud hi-lo, to omaha very well. But I stick to small limit. I'm most comfortable @ 6-12. But I'll play 3-6 if I have too. 4-8 on the stud/omaha side, and 9-18 if the game is right and I'm willing to risk a little more.


I have greatly tightened up in the blinds the last year while playing more buttons , but still willing to muck them on rags. I take my smoke breaks in middle position. Often. I guess I basically see my starters 5 out of 9 hands per round every 2-3 rounds. Yes I need to quit smoking but not for poker reasons.


Well I have been a bad boy not recording this year. I had a bad run last April and didnt want to look at it to be honest. My point being my guesstimate is I've been winning 80-90% of my sessions.


I've been leaving when tired.Leaving when game changes. And leaving when I pick up anywhere from 1-3 racks usually. Last thursday though, I was waiting for a 6-12 game, the 9-18 looked lousy, and the 3-6 had $2000 in chips on the table. So I sat down along side a prop friend of mine.


I bought 600 as I figured I wouldnt play much and I'd build a castle. It was art! My prop friend is a judge @ BARGE and said I woulda won.


Well I won 4 racks after 8 hours and left. Went to another place and got another rack & a half, went home.


Sunday. Same thing. win 1 1/2 racks, leave,stop another place, win 1 1/2 racks, tired leave.


I play very tight buy BAY AREA standards and just a smidgen loose by LV standards. I usually just wait for opportunities.

Now I have been lucky. I've gotten away with a couple that I was the dog to. Last I flat called a goofy raiser pre-flop with 99. He had aces and I checkraised him on the ragged 7 high flop. I caught a 9 on the turn tho. All my aces for 2 weeks have held up!


Is this running good or a result of better play? or a combination of both? There's probably no correct answer on=hter then yes, yes & yes. But I'd like your thoughts.


Thanks,

Larry

It took me 15 four-hour sessions of winning 2 BB/hr to be 95% sure that my EV was really positive. (i.e. to reject the hypothesis that my EV was zero, where the alternate hypothesis was that it is greater than zero.)


Comparing one random variable to a constant is a lot easier than comparing the means of two random variables. I forget exactly how much harder. But I think, if you improved by one big bet per hour, you'd probably have to have several dozen session observations before, and several dozen session observations after, such improvement to be able to say with 95% confidence that you had improved, rather than the results being luck.


--JMike

Did I read this correctly? You skip 4 out of 9 hands to smoke cigarettes?


Lets do some counting. The blinds are 1.5sb and I figure they lose about half of that in EV, thus the other 7 positions get about .75sb/7=.11sb per position (i.e. your random middle position hand is worth .11sb). You skip 4 of these per round so it costs you about .44sb to smoke. There are 3 rounds or so/hour so it costs you about 1.3sb/hour to smoke. Does Nicorette gum cost that much?


No, you are not going to win big 6 sessions in a row without getting lucky. But that doesn't mean you were not also playing well.


- Louie

ooks to me that the key may be your working at finding good game.


I have to drive about 3-4 hours to get to where there are two small cardrooms---and they are about 40 min apart. that's where you are really lucky!!

no louie, i think he's saying he misses no more than 5 mid-position hands about every 2-3 rounds to smoke a cigarette. if a MP hand is worth about .11BB then he is giving up theoretically a SB per-hour to smoke a cigarette. but, it is not quite correct to compare not playing to losing. if it were, than +EV players would be making -EV moves by taking a bathroom break or waiting for the button to pass, or taking a nap. its a cigarette break, and its during the hands where he is out of position.

Bilbo:


"Not Playing" is different than "Losing" when you are sitting at home or when you miss an entire round. But you ARE losing when you skip a couple hands in the sense that [1] failing to make a good +1bb play has the same affect on your bankroll as making a 1bb mistake and [2] you play a dis-proportionate number of clearly losing hands, those in the blinds. Great players would lose in a full game if they only played the blinds and the button. .11sb/hand in MP may be a little high but the principle is sound: if you don't play those hands you "lose" that money. You have paid for the right to take those hands when you take the blind, but you fail to recoup when you skip them.


- Louie

Larry can attest that I'm the fastest smoker in poker. While he skips four or five hands, I skip one or two, very oftentimes just one. Same as him, about once every three rounds.


When we happen to walk out together, he knows that whatever poker story he has to tell had better be a quick one!


The one or two hands I skip are directly under the gun, and while I agree that a very real value is lost by missing an occasional group one hand, I think the bigger value I lose is by missing whatever hands went down while I was outside. Sometimes one pot can be the difference between a formerly lose player tightening up, and/or a tight player teatering on tilt zone. And when that happens, they often only potentially tilt for a few hands, which will be during my blinds and button and cutoff.


But then, I do a good job of resetting and relaxing during my brief visit to the door for an addicition satification. So maybe that offsets the other things. But I don't think it does. Smoking is a curse.


Tommy