Length of break-even or losing streak?

Hi,

I'm asking for feedback from professional players who have proven to themselves that they are able to win one BB/hour or more at 15-30 or higher limit poker. Can you tell me how many hours you have played in a row without showing a profit? I guess I am asking about a period where you felt you were playing your normal winning game, but having a sustained run of bad luck.

Thanks

typical (theroretical) results have shown 400 hrs is possible.

Well Jeff,

your winnings should go up linearly with the number of hours you play (n) and your standard deviation goes up as the root of that number of hours. We also know that all events basically live within 3 SD's. So all we have to calculate is how long it takes for your win rate to overcome a 3 sd move against you and you basically have the longest you could go without showing a profit (this is assuming a constant win rate and SD).


so if you have an hourly rate of 1BB and a SD of 10BB. after n hours you could be down n - (3*10*root(n)) (the 3 represents 3 SDs, the 10 is your SDs/hr and the root n represents your SD not going up linearly). set this = 0 and you get n = 900. you could go 900 hours without making a new high water mark. keep in mind that 1 BB/hr and a SD of 10BB is very good. If you have a SD of 15BB and a win rate of .5 BBs then you could go as long as 8000 hours without making new money.


In practice, I've played poker for about 1000-2000 hours and I'm lucky enough to have not gone more than 40-50 hours of not making new highs.


rob

if you want to figure out this time for a win rate of W BB's/hr and a SD of S BB's/hr just plug into the following formula.


Longest Break Even time = (3*S/W)*(3*S/W)


notice this time gets shorter as you reduce your SD or improve your win rate. I would imagine the best anyone anywhere could hope for in limit holdem is 2 BB/hr with a SD of 7 BB/hr for a logest losing streak of 110 hours you pretty much can't have a shorter longest losing streak (if that makes sense).


rob