Bank roll

[PBaek]

Hi everyone,

Just want to warn people about believing that a 30 buy in bank roll for SNGs is safe.

I am (usually) a 15% ROI player at the $30 level. In my last 400 "the button" has been turned on insanely. This coincided with my new habit of cashing in $100 each day after I have played. Im thinking this is no coincidence /images/graemlins/tongue.gif Ok, maybe it is.

Anyway, I am down no less than 50 buyins and I feel like [censored]. Having a pretty sytematic approach to the game I have not altered my play, but you know the story: Anything you have they have better or hit miracle outs to catch up...

Its not that it feels like its everytime. It IS every bloody time.

I am going to move down a limit until I feel I have a shot at winning anything again.

Damn that button!!

Peter.

[Big Limpin']

citanul will rip you for this...fair warning

[sofere]

[ QUOTE ]
citanul will rip you for this...fair warning

[/ QUOTE ]

This is a test of the Citanul warning system. If this were really Citanul, your post would be up in flames right now. Repeat this is only a test.

[hummusx]

Hey, what's your avatar from? For some reason I want to bust out laughing when I look at it.

[Sam T.]

Without getting into the conspiracy aspects of your post, let's think about it.

You (effectively) lost 50 tournaments in a row, right? Remember that with a 33% ITM (which, I gather, is pretty good), you were going to lose 33 of these anyway. So there are only 17 losses that "shouldn't" have happened.

Now, if you busted out of every one of these seventeen tournaments on hands when you were ahead when the money went in, it would be remarkable indeed. And very unlikely. It is far more likely that you had some bad luck, pushing your AJo into KK, etc. You were unlucky, but c'mon, you had AJ! Add to this the usual odds-against beats, when his AJ flops an ace to your cowboys, and then consider the truly awful suckouts It doesn't take long to get to 17 losses.

And since we're talking about seventeen games (indeed, seventeen hands) it is impossible for you to come to any useful conclusions from a 50 buy-in drop.

I've never had this happen, so I can't imagine the feeling, but keep your chin up, read TOP a few times, and come back confident.

And if that doesn't work, buy a pattern map, and get a new screen name. That fools the button guys 72% of the time.

Sam

[Sam T.]

It is pretty awesome. Right click on it, and select properties. That'll give you the link.

Sam

[Paul2432]

If you regularly withdrawl, no bankroll is large enough.

Consider flipping a fair coin. If you do this long enough you will eventually have streaks of 10, 50 even 100 consecutive tails. Similarly, you will encounter arbitrarily long losing streaks in poker.

The reason a certain bankroll protects you against going broke is that the bankroll grows. As time passes, you have built up a sufficient bankroll to handle the inevitable losing streaks.

The classic formula for risk of ruin is:

Ror = e ^ (-2 x WR x BR / SD^2)

By withdrawing your winnings, your win rate (WR) is effectively zero. Plugging WR=0 into the above gives a RoR of 100%.

Paul

[Big Limpin']

The avatar is a cut from a music video.
DJ Lethal - We Know Something You Dont Know.
It's a real dope video, everyone in animal get-up spitting verses and breakdancing, if you want to check it, heres a link (http://www.ruben.fm/videos.html)
If you're not a hiphop fan, you'll still enjoy it for the sheer comedic value of seeing Disney-esque characters breakdance.

PS - I just checked the site, and for some rason its loading SUPER slow today. Possibly its just me (?), but if you check it, and have the same problem, the vid will load, just budget 5 minutes or so. worth the wait.

[valenzuela]

I hope u were exagerrating.

[sofere]

Well obviously if you always withdraw all of your winnings you're eventually gonna have a losing streak up to your entire bankroll. Therefore your ROR is 100%. Common sense.

[PBaek]

Erm, thanks for the replies.

I think I either have to get my smileys straight or post the widely used link to sarcasm detector. The conspiracy theories were not meant to be taken literally. Sry, but I thought that was obvious.

The 50 buyin drop was not 50 lost tounaments in a row but a loss of an amount equivalent to 50 times the buyin over a relatively short number of tournaments.

The point of my thread was mostly a reaction to often having read that a bank roll of 30 times the buyin is safe if you are a winning player. I just presented an example (not made up) of a much bigger swing I had being a winning player.

I do have bank roll to handle the swing and chin is up. If I sounded bitter in my original post it was 1) an obviously weak attempt trying to be funny with reference to the button theory Irieguy presented some days ago; and 2) because it does feel good to get some frustration out, even though it is basically illogical thinking which make no sence.

Thanks for the replies and apologies if this is a pointless thread to you.

Best regards, Peter.

[Big Limpin']

[ QUOTE ]
Consider flipping a fair coin. If you do this long enough you will eventually have streaks of 10, 50 even 100 consecutive tails .

[/ QUOTE ]

I hope you are being facetious here. I'm not going to do the math, but im quite sure you could live to be 100 years old, and flip a coin once per second for every waking hour of you life, and not have 100 consecutive tails. I'm willing to be proven wrong though, thats just my gut talking

[Big Limpin']

I'm talking about the fact that you posted a story of how you ran into tough times. Welcome to the club, buddy. I do this for a living, and belive me, i have busted my roll more than once. Several times a year in fact. I will do it again, too.

The thing is, your story is not uncommon, is not big news, and is not a constructive thing to post about. We all know that the "perfect storm" is inevitable.

I "got" the sarcasm. I "realize" that the cashout curse is coincidenal.

(This is my best impression of a citanul beat-down...judges please submit your scorecards. I think it deserves an 8.5)

[sofere]

Actually I think you would be flippin a coin once per second until the sun exploded and then maybe a couple trillion years after that (4.02 * 10^22 years)

[Sam T.]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Consider flipping a fair coin. If you do this long enough you will eventually have streaks of 10, 50 even 100 consecutive tails .

[/ QUOTE ]

I hope you are being facetious here. I'm not going to do the math, but im quite sure you could live to be 100 years old, and flip a coin once per second for every waking hour of you life, and not have 100 consecutive tails. I'm willing to be proven wrong though, thats just my gut talking

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, but how'd you like to get to 99 tails in a row, and have the last flip come up heads. Then you gotta start all over.

I'm not a math guy, but high school algebra tells me the odds of hitting 100 tails in a row are 1/(2^100), which if you sleep four hours perday, will take you 48,236,324,209,597,770,224,379.87 years.


For fifty consecutive tails, it will only take 42,842,462.2 years, so I'd go that route.

(Note, my numbers will be thrown off by leap year, and any vacations. But I figure that by 48236324209597770226384 A.D., that won't be an issue.)

Sam

[Big Limpin']

word'em

[Paul2432]

OK, maybe I was a little over the top (nonetheless, my statement is true). However, instead of 50 or 100 consecutive tails, consider that you will eventually have runs with 50 or even 100 more tails than heads, and that will often occur within just a few thousand flips.

That is probably a little more analagous to the OPs predicament.

Paul

[Nick M]

I have flipped a coin until the sun exploded...it's hella boring. And if you want to flip after the sun explodes, you need to invest serious cash into de-icer spray cans. The ones you use for car windows in the winter. That coin is going to be frozen to your fingers.

[valenzuela]

well i usually have a 60% ROI on the 215s, however on my last 5000 Ive lost 700 buy-ins. Oh Im so unlucky.

[Happycamper374]

I in turn will probably get flamed for this, but all the poster did was relate a personal story and try to warn others and now you guys are lighting him up. Yes, high volume players may know 30 buy ins is low, and maybe you guys that live on the forum have seen posts like this before. But this is a public poker forum, and if somebody wants to post something that they feel contributes to the forum then they have a right to be able to and not be attacked. Some people will be enlightened by this post and some people may not care. But if you don't care, just ignore the post. Dont lash out at the poster.

Sorry about the a semi-rant, but I really feel that a lot of people are a little testy and start flaming at the drop off a hat. Not necissarily this post, but others as well. Cant we all just get along? /images/graemlins/laugh.gif

[valenzuela]

well ill say it in a nicer way: U cant say u have a 15% ROI if u exclude some sngs because u had bad beats.( if the poster included his streak in his ROI then my apologies)

[valenzuela]

that 30 buy-in bankroll is a myth, u can do just fine with 10 buy-ins.(4 tabling the 11s) U just need higher bankroll requirements in higher levels because( lower roi= more variance AND because theyre pros and they need to eat and if they lose their BR they cant eat). Dont wait until you have $3000 to play the 55s, u can play them perfectly with a BR of $1000.( im not saying u wont go broke with $1000 if ure a winning player, im just pointing out dont worry so much about ROI and BR if ure a winning player and u have something else)THIS IS MY PERSONAL OPINION AND MANY POSTERS MAY DISAGREE SO DONT TAKE THIS AS A RULE OR SOMETHING.

[raptor517]

this is fine for a casual player, and i wont flame that. i take shots all the time with an inadequate bankroll. then i lose, so i go back to my bread and butter. the 109s. for that, i say you still need 7k to feel comfortable. u can swing down 5k all too easily playing 10 tables. it rarely happens, but it does happen. holla

[tech]

[ QUOTE ]
Cant we all just get along?

[/ QUOTE ]

You must be new to 2+2. /images/graemlins/smirk.gif

[hbaromega]

This isn't likely. For example to get 50 in excess (2525 heads vs 2475 tails) out of 5000 flips:

There are C(5000,2525) = 5000!/(2525! * 2475!) ways to get 2525 heads out of 5000
Using the stirling approximation gives
sqrt(2/pi*5000) * 2^5000 * exp(-2*25^2/5000)
divide by 2^5000 to get the probability =
.001128665 * 1 * .7788 = 0.0008667 = 0.08667%

Ok, so it is more likely than I thought.

[dfan]

I think you calculated the probability of exactly 50 excess heads. The probabilty of 50 excess heads or more on the other hand is moderately high:
normal approximation to the binomial says distribution for 5000 tosses is normal with a mean of 250 and a sd of sqrt(5000*.5*.5) or 35. So 275 heads is 25/35 = .71 sd's above the mean which should occur 24% of the time.

[PBaek]

Thanks Happycamper, youre right that was all I was trying to do.

I´m joining the silent observer group again and will leave it up to the regulars to carry on intelligent discussions and flaming anything that isn´t.

But hey, this thread has 25 replies already so at least we can all agree on taking turns flaming boneheads like myself.

Best regards, Peter /images/graemlins/confused.gif

p.s. It´s kinda funny to have several people telling me who is comming to flame me and what they will probably say. None of them has replied yet.

[Happycamper374]

Haha yes I am new. I guess as long as everyone is having some fun, flaming isn't the end of the world. Peter, I've noticed not everyone takes it as well as you.