Max and/or avg swing per hour

[Angel]

Whenever I have seen a swing per hour it is always described as +/- xBB. Is there some reason these numbers should be symetrical? If after 100 sessions, your greatest loss in a $20/$40 game is $1000 but your largest win is $4000 how would one determine max swing? avg swing?

Thank you for any help you can give me on this.

[BruceZ]

Whenever I have seen a swing per hour it is always described as +/- xBB. Is there some reason these numbers should be symetrical?

They should be roughly symmetrical to your hourly rate, but they may not be because your individual hourly results are not well approximated by a normal distribution, and the max swings may not be symmetrical. They will only be normal after you add the results of a number of hours.


If after 100 sessions, your greatest loss in a $20/$40 game is $1000 but your largest win is $4000 how would one determine max swing? avg swing?

Your max swing per session is roughly +4000/sqrt(100) = +400, and -1000/sqrt(100) = -100. Again this is only approximate since your session results may not be normal, and your actual swings may be larger than this.

I did this post some time ago about average swing in terms of SD. Your average swing per hour is roughly 1.25 times your hourly SD. You can't really relate this to max swing since you would need to know how many standard deviations your max swing correponds to. For example, you could equate a max swing to 3 SD, and then evaluate the average swing per session in terms of that.

Sklanksy has an essay called "How Fat is your Wallet?" in Poker Gaming and Life where he talks about max swing. It is simply another way to talk about fluctuations separate from SD, but it's less precise unless you equate max swing to some number of SDs. It's kind of a dumbed down way to talk about fluctuation, and when you're a grown up you should really learn to use SDs instead, but that's not everyone's thing I guess. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]