Consecutive first places finishes

[Sundevils21]

I just lost a $10SNG at party, ending my streak of 5 in a row first place finishes. It got me wondering whats the most in a row anybody has ever won, I'm sure the number towers over 5. Anybody??

[Desdia72]

mine is 4 in a row.

[blackaces13]

I started off with a streak of 4 wins and a 2nd in my first 5 tournys and that was when I had no idea what I was doing. Since then I posted my general strategy in here, got uniformly ripped, adjusted to a more standard approach and now I can't win sh!t.

I'm not saying that one has anything to do with the other, clearly I just got very lucky when I first started out and I know my strategy is a lot better now than it was then. Its still pretty frustrating though.

[adam61]

I got 6 at the $10+1 level at stars.

[William]

adjusted to a more standard approach and now I can't win sh!t.

LOL, you must know that this is very common. It takes some time before one can really adjust to playing a different way, avoiding the usual traps of the new style.

I started reading books late in my poker "career". I am still hitting the rail as much as before, but now at least I know how badly the others are playing [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

William

[Hirez]

4 firsts at $5.50s
best streak is 9 in the money though. (at 10's and 5's)

[Losing all]

I've had 3 in a row several times, and 5 out of 7 once(with a secons and a third to keep the profit alive)

That's over 7 monthes though, with over 1500 sng's played. 5 in a row seems impossible with my gay play, but I did manage 7 2nd's in a row in Jan. For that I win the dunski award

[AleoMagus]

Ok, Ok... I know psychology will factor into this a bit, but really, consecutive wins is a matter of probability

Assuming a player only won their 'fair share' and took 1st 10% of the time, they could expect to get 2 consecutive in about 100 attempts, 3 consecutive in 1000 attempts, 4 consecutive in 10,000 etc...

this amounts to a streak likelihood equal to the probability of winning to the power of the streak. For example, with a 20% win rate, and a streak of five games, 1/5^5 which is about 0.032%. In other words, if your win rate was 20%, you should expect to win five in a row every 3125 sngs.

Interesting actually, because I've won five in a row twice now and I'm not that far over 1000. My win rate is also under 20%.

My guess would be that most players will in fact find that they have won more than they should expect to have because when we are running well, it probably has a lot to do with how good we are playing and our 'actual' win rate might be even higher (at least for a while when our minds are sharp and our confidence is high). Sadly, when we are playing bad, we might see worse 'bad' streaks than expected for the opposite reasons.

What I find intriguing about this is it suggests to me that 'perfect' or at least optimal play could produce much higher than 20% win rates otherwise there wouldn't be so many big streaks from players with small samples. If only it could be maintained.

One last observation - The likelihood of bigger and bigger win streaks decreases exponentially so even with the best play in the world, I doubt that anyone could accurately boast of a win streak much greater than 8 or 9. At a whopping 30% win rate, the odds of 9 consecutive wins would be 1/3^9 or about 1/50000.

Regards
Brad S

PS - I'm just a math dilettante, so if there are any math experts out there who could correct me if I'm wrong I'd appreciate it.

[Daliman]

3 in a row at the $200 level is my record, done a couple times, although i play 4 at a time, so it gets a bit jumbled at times. i did have one night however where i had 5 firsts, 3 seconds, and 2 thirds in a 12 tourney stretch.

[NotMitch]

6 winds in a row in the middle of a 10 game run of 8 wins, 1 third and one finish outside the money. The one I missed the money on I got all in preflop with AA and lost.