Losing 138 big bets within 13 hours....

[ungar]

Hi All.

The last two days I have been playing 3-6 online hold'em for a total of 13 hours. Within those 13 hours, I am down with 831 $.
What are the chances of that?? Is that suppose to be normal??
I concider myself a good hold'em player. No expert, but certainly a winner at 3-6 to 10-20.
Has anyone else experienced such a bad run??

Best,
John

[John Ho]

It can happen. But if you consider it is a 3-6 table with lousy players you have to wonder if maybe your game needs work.

But then again really lousy streaks can happen. If it happens again in the near future you're probably playing badly.

[ResidentParanoid]

If this is the first time you are playing in this online game, then you have pretty strong evidence (not conclusive) that the other players are better than you are.

If you play in this game all of the time and this is unusual, and you have had long runs of success, then it could easily be a bad run of luck.

[crazy canuck]

The following calculations involve very approximate values but here it goes. If the standard deviation is 10BB/hr and assuming that you are a break even player, means that for 13 hrs the standard deviation is 130BB/hr. So you dropped a little bit more than 1 standard deviation. This happens approximately 16.6% of the time. Certainly not that unusual. The value is just an estimate, since I don't know your true earn rate and SD.

[Nottom]

Actually, 1 SD over that time would be Sqrt(13)*10 or about 36BB which puts him down a bit over 4SDs if those numbers are decent estimates. 4SDs is certainly enough of a drop to make me look a little closer at my game and wonder if I'm as good as I though I was.

[Glenn]

First of all I think 10BB/hr is an unreasonably small SD in an online game. Secondly, short term poker results aren't necessarily normally distributed (long term they are--central limit theorem). In fact, due to the discreet bet sizes, etc..., it is certainly not normally distributed in the short term.

[crazy canuck]

Good points...but i still think the loss in that small amount of time is not that unusual.

[MCS]

Central limit theorem 0wns j00.