02-07-2002, 11:09 PM
So many posts on this topic I had to get involved. I did a minor amount of thinking after reading more than one simply boastful post and came to a conclusion I'd care to share.
In a normal, live ring game a good player plays with an hourly standard deviation (SD) of 10 big bets. A poor but winning player might be a lot higher, say 30 BB. Switch gears to head's up and I'd estimate that a good HU player might have an hourly SD in the range of 25 - 40 BBs. It's higher because you're putting in money on every hand. You gotta get in there and play. Now switch gears once again to online play where you might get in 3 times the number of hands per hour. I'm open to debate here but I'd guess that a three fold increase in hands/hour ups the SD by the square root of three, 1.7 or so. So now we're talking about a SD for a good online head's up player that runs 40 to 65 big bets per clock hour.
So who's the biggest swinging dick at $50-100 HU hold'em? With a SD that might be 50 big bets per hour it would be almost impossible to know. As an example if A plays B for 10 hours the session SD would run in the range of 160 BBs, $16K. That means that if these two were equally skilled they would have roughly 1/3 of there sessions where either A beats B for $16K+ or the reverse. One session in 20 that swings better than $32K. How do you find any signal in all that noise? You don't. Not very likely anyone has the bankroll and the time needed to develop enough data to really know if they're a solid winner or loser. Most all the data will be pure dumb luck.
In a normal, live ring game a good player plays with an hourly standard deviation (SD) of 10 big bets. A poor but winning player might be a lot higher, say 30 BB. Switch gears to head's up and I'd estimate that a good HU player might have an hourly SD in the range of 25 - 40 BBs. It's higher because you're putting in money on every hand. You gotta get in there and play. Now switch gears once again to online play where you might get in 3 times the number of hands per hour. I'm open to debate here but I'd guess that a three fold increase in hands/hour ups the SD by the square root of three, 1.7 or so. So now we're talking about a SD for a good online head's up player that runs 40 to 65 big bets per clock hour.
So who's the biggest swinging dick at $50-100 HU hold'em? With a SD that might be 50 big bets per hour it would be almost impossible to know. As an example if A plays B for 10 hours the session SD would run in the range of 160 BBs, $16K. That means that if these two were equally skilled they would have roughly 1/3 of there sessions where either A beats B for $16K+ or the reverse. One session in 20 that swings better than $32K. How do you find any signal in all that noise? You don't. Not very likely anyone has the bankroll and the time needed to develop enough data to really know if they're a solid winner or loser. Most all the data will be pure dumb luck.