ThorGoT
12-28-2004, 02:11 PM
Hypothesis: It is possible, with reasonable certainty, to identify a losing streak caused by bad play, while it is occurring, solely by analyzing results. I'm curious to hear what other people think.
Like a lot of people on this forum, I play my SNGs four at a time, and that's how I track my results. Although there are a number of possible net results for a four game set, I've assigned a somewhat arbitrary dividing line at a $30 win or below (for $50 games) -- i.e., what you get if you win no more than one 1st, or a 2nd and a 3rd, in a four game set. For a winning player, you get this result around 60% of the time. And it's certainly possible to do get this result twice in a row, or three times . . . but the more times it happens in a row, the less likely it is due to chance (i.e., the less likely it is that you are, during that period, playing a winning game). So if you really are recording good sessions 40% of the time, and you have 6 losing/barely winning sessions in a row, the likelihood it is due to variance is only about 5% -- pretty low. If I could remember the formulas, which I can't, I'm sure there's also a way of determining the odds of having only one winning session in a group of seven or eight games.
Anyway, I thought this was interesting, since it seems -- after the fact -- that it would have helped me to identify my big losing streak over the past month while it was occuring, a losing streak that -- in retrospect -- I think involved bad play.
Like a lot of people on this forum, I play my SNGs four at a time, and that's how I track my results. Although there are a number of possible net results for a four game set, I've assigned a somewhat arbitrary dividing line at a $30 win or below (for $50 games) -- i.e., what you get if you win no more than one 1st, or a 2nd and a 3rd, in a four game set. For a winning player, you get this result around 60% of the time. And it's certainly possible to do get this result twice in a row, or three times . . . but the more times it happens in a row, the less likely it is due to chance (i.e., the less likely it is that you are, during that period, playing a winning game). So if you really are recording good sessions 40% of the time, and you have 6 losing/barely winning sessions in a row, the likelihood it is due to variance is only about 5% -- pretty low. If I could remember the formulas, which I can't, I'm sure there's also a way of determining the odds of having only one winning session in a group of seven or eight games.
Anyway, I thought this was interesting, since it seems -- after the fact -- that it would have helped me to identify my big losing streak over the past month while it was occuring, a losing streak that -- in retrospect -- I think involved bad play.