Crying wolf?

[Nate tha' Great]

Just a few things.

Beware of anecdotal evidence that a particular game is getting tougher. It's natural to seek out explanations when you're running poorly, and frankly, it's natural to be a little bit paranoid about a game drying up when you rely on it for a large percentage of your income.

A subset of well-known 2+2ers having a bad month does not mean that the sky is falling. I suspect that you could start a thread in most any month of the year and claim that you've run poorly and you think the games are getting tougher and you'd get quite a number of people to chime in with the same opinion.

I had a better-than-usual win rate in the Party 15/30 in January in spite of playing what I consider to be B-/C+ poker. The games did not seem to be notably stronger or weaker than they were in November before I took some time off.

I don't think the fact that I've run well tells you anything at all about the quality of the games. But I don't think the fact that [xxx] Carpal Tunnel poster has run poorly tells you anything about them either.

The games might well be getting tougher. But I'll be convinced of it by one thing and one thing only, which is large pokertracker databases telling me as much.

[fsuplayer]

good post.

people like to have company in tough times, this is no different.

this is my first month in the game, so I think its as tough as ever. /images/graemlins/tongue.gif

[Joe Tall]

GoT, James282, Schnides, Sublime, Barry, myself and a bunch of other solid players all had a losing month in January. Nate has a winning month.

Nate, care to tell us who you know at Party Poker's management? /images/graemlins/grin.gif

Go Pats!
Joe Tall

[moondogg]

[ QUOTE ]
GoT, James282, Schnides, Sublime, Barry, myself and a bunch of other solid players all had a losing month in January.

...

Go Pats!


[/ QUOTE ]

There's your answer. Q.E.D.

Go Birds! (I even had a winning month, and I suck)

[James282]

[ QUOTE ]
GoT, James282, Schnides, Sublime, Barry, myself and a bunch of other solid players all had a losing month in January. Nate has a winning month.

Nate, care to tell us who you know at Party Poker's management? /images/graemlins/grin.gif

Go Pats!
Joe Tall

[/ QUOTE ]

Hey Joe - didn't mean to mislead, I didn't have a losing month. I just had a 250 bb downswing.
-James

[Ponks]

I agree completely, I've had my best month ever, and I don't think I'd be saying anything if I had my worst month as well.

Ponks

[AceHigh]

[ QUOTE ]
I had a better-than-usual win rate in the Party 15/30 in January

[/ QUOTE ]

Me too. I've only been playing 15/30 for about 6 months, but my January win rate was twice as high as December and around the same as November.

[dana33]

[ QUOTE ]
The games might well be getting tougher. But I'll be convinced of it by one thing and one thing only, which is large pokertracker databases telling me as much.

[/ QUOTE ]
I agree that this is the proper criterion. One's win rate over only a month is just too subject to variance effects to be an accurate measure of game toughness. What I'd like to see is an analysis of, say, average VP$IP of opponents at a given limit as a function of time. I don't have enough PT data to draw a firm conclusion about this, but my sense is that it has dropped a bit compared to late last year. However, even if this is the case, I think it's more likely to be a seasonal effect than a trend.

[GuyOnTilt]

Hey Joe - didn't mean to mislead, I didn't have a losing month. I just had a 250 bb downswing.
-James

Same here. I had a pretty good month for how few hours I logged actually.

GoT

[dana33]

I took a look at my PT database, and here are the numbers I have for all players at the PP .5/1 tables:

1/1/04 to 11/30/04: VP$IP = 39.4% (~11K hands)

12/1/04 to 1/31/05: VP$IP = 35.9% (~11K hands)

So it does appear that there has been some tightening of the tables recently -- though it's not a huge effect.

[Joe Tall]

Hey joe - didn't mean to mislead, I didn't have a losing month. I just had a 250 bb downswing.

Hey James,

I didn't mean so much "losing month" as not running good for January. Plus, I was just fcking around w/the board by my suggestion.

Go Pats!
Joe Tall

[Joe Tall]

Same here. I had a pretty good month for how few hours I logged actually.

Good month? Did you pay Clarkmeister your bet? Your just a punk azz kid, GoT, we all know that. /images/graemlins/grin.gif

Oh, I'm out in Cali from Thus-Wed this week. We'll be playing poker on Mon/Tues, I'll give you a call.

Go Pats!
Joe Tall

[James282]

[ QUOTE ]
Hey joe - didn't mean to mislead, I didn't have a losing month. I just had a 250 bb downswing.

Hey James,

I didn't mean so much "losing month" as not running good for January. Plus, I was just fcking around w/the board by my suggestion.

Go Pats!
Joe Tall

[/ QUOTE ]

Haha, true. And yeah, it was a pretty frustrating month in spite of still winning.
-James

[stoxtrader]

I'm pretty sure avg VPIP has gone from around 31 to 28 in the 15 game.

[1800GAMBLER]

I only played 3 sessions in Jan and i'm up 250bbs.

[Zetack]

[ QUOTE ]
GoT, James282, Schnides, Sublime, Barry, myself and a bunch of other solid players all had a losing month in January.

Go Pats!
Joe Tall

[/ QUOTE ]

Hmm, I was up 79 BB's in January. Course I'm not nearly as solid a player as these guys. Undoubtely if I were more solid I would've gotten killed too. If I were less solid I probably would've made a ton.

So much for the solids. Any liquid or gaseous players want to chime in and tell us how much they killed the game for in January?

--Zetack

[theBruiser500]

lol, from the whining thread to the bragging thread

[Rockatansky]

Shouldn't the result of the poker boom be that, eventually, the quality of poker will rise? I don't know whether it's happened yet at higher stakes, but I don't see how that the smaller stakes couldn't be tougher than they were two or three years ago.

I only started playing online a few months ago, so I don't know what it was like prior to the recent growth in popularity. Surely someone out there must have PT stats over the past year or two.

[memphis57]

[ QUOTE ]
So much for the solids. Any liquid or gaseous players want to chime in and tell us how much they killed the game for in January?

--Zetack

[/ QUOTE ]

I guess I'm a liquid player, or maybe even gaseous, since I started in early Nov and my playing style has moved around quit a bit in that time. I've played 25K hands total since I started. I lost in Nov, won slightly in Dec, and have gotten killed (i.e., lost heavily) in Jan.

I agree win rates aren't stable enough to measure game toughness though. I'd like to see more VPIP stats, and can we post them on a standardized format so we can add them up? Just 15 or 20 guys numbers for a given limit would give a decent sample size.

So, suggestion - for Party only, post limit and monthly # hands and VPIP for each month you have data up to a year back. Here's my numbers:

$0.50/1.00
nov04 dec04 jan04
#hands 1,929 13,047 10,647
vpip 35.39 35.00 33.30
asf 42.41 42.14 40.18


Also, some clarification on exactly how to get the numbers might help keep things consistent. I'm showing the "ASF" number from the top line of the sessions tab (after setting the date range int he preferences tab), and I think ASF ("Average saw flop percentage for entire table") counts big blinds who don't raise or call, and so will run 8-10% higher than real VPIP. Are you other people using actually the ASF number and calling it VPIP, or can you tell me where to find VPIP for the table on PT?

<EDIT: Per post below, VPIP comes from the bottom of the bottom grid on the summary tab. I've changed my table above to show both VPIP and ASF.>


On the overall question, I think many posters confuse "tightening up" with "oh-my-god-I-can't-make-money-like-this-any-more." The ones that deny the tightening tend to point to stuff like slot players still playing (anybody know what % of slot player volume is contributed by people who have been playing slots regularly for less than 1 year? I've heard numbers like 80%+) and Bobby Joe still coming to the home game even though he hasn't won in 5 years. That's all true, and the games are still beatable, but it seems pretty natural that at some point there has to come a tightening. Poker got real popular real fast, lots of people got in expecting to be good one day but also willing to lose money while learning, after 4-5 months (? how long?) many of those people are either going to get better or stop playing. So, it seems natural that 4-5 months (or some period) after the peak entry month for new players you will see a tightening month. Whether that month is Jan 05 I don't know, but it's something this board ought to care about and try to gather data about.

Personally, I think it's just the bonus whoring at Party, and that we'll see it loosen if the bonuses get cut back, but I got no data to support that.

[dana33]

[ QUOTE ]
Also, some clarification on exactly how to get the numbers might help keep things consistent. I'm showing the "ASF" number from the top line of the sessions tab (after setting the date range int he preferences tab), and I think ASF ("Average saw flop percentage for entire table") counts big blinds who don't raise or call, and so will run 8-10% higher than real VPIP. Are you other people using actually the ASF number and calling it VPIP, or can you tell me where to find VPIP for the table on PT?


[/ QUOTE ]
In my post, I reported true VP$IP. Go to the "Summary" tab as shown here. (http://www.pokertracker.com/ringsum.jpg) Look at the bottom of the second grid. The last row of the grid for the VP$IP column gives that number averaged over all players. (I'm assuming that this average is correctly weighted by the number of hands, but have not confirmed this.)

A request to anyone else who reports PT data here: PLEASE do not report ASF as VP$IP or vice versa. These are two completely different numbers, as pointed out above.

[memphis57]

Thanks, just added VPIP numbers to my post.