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- Beginners Questions (http://archives2.twoplustwo.com/forumdisplay.php?f=30)

- - Assessment (http://archives2.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=375481)

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The OP is currently rolled for at least he $22s, even the $33s if he feels frisky. I'm pretty sure earning potential at the $33s is higher than 2/4, with lower variance.

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Having done both, i can tell you that this is incorrect. ($$$ wise)

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your sample size is too small.

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Why are people so negative to Kurosh? I don't get it. The guy has 100/200 experience. I've never seen him be rude or a jerk (maybe I missed the posts) so that separates him from roughly 98% of these forums.

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He just posts too many sob stories and bad beat posts. His 100-200 experiance comes from running good while way over playing his bankroll. Its not a big supprise that he is nearly broke considering the way he went up.

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I think he is fairly honest about his shortcomings. He has also shown himself willing to be able to take his lumps. HE was at one time kind of arrogant sounding... but oh well..If we are going to dislike people for sounding arrogant... might as well start hating 90% of the regular posters at one time or another.

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Why are people so negative to Kurosh? I don't get it. The guy has 100/200 experience. I've never seen him be rude or a jerk (maybe I missed the posts) so that separates him from roughly 98% of these forums.

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He just posts too many sob stories and bad beat posts. His 100-200 experiance comes from running good while way over playing his bankroll. Its not a big supprise that he is nearly broke considering the way he went up.

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I think he is fairly honest about his shortcomings. He has also shown himself willing to be able to take his lumps. HE was at one time kind of arrogant sounding... but oh well..If we are going to dislike people for sounding arrogant... might as well start hating 90% of the regular posters at one time or another.

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I like kurosh from IRC, and honestly would like to see him turn this around. But to be fair, 90% of the regular posters haven't said they are +EV heads up against anyone.

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400 hands -12.40BB/100. At least now I'm more confident I'm running bad and not a losing player.

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It would appear that in your last 400 hands you are BOTH running bad AND a losing player.

Some of those beats are pretty sucky.
Others are kinda so-so. I mean, we all know that it can be legit to stick around in a heads-up hand with bottom-pair. If you get lucky and catch a runner-runner straight then sobeit.

I had a string like that at the beginning of this month. Down 230BB's in no time.
I am up 370BB's in my 7k hands since then.
It happens.

this poem rocks.

well done.

Re: SnG = Variance

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and we shouldn't be assuming a normal distribution to analyze the math in poker.

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why not?

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Why are people so negative to Kurosh? I don't get it. The guy has 100/200 experience. I've never seen him be rude or a jerk (maybe I missed the posts) so that separates him from roughly 98% of these forums.

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He just posts too many sob stories and bad beat posts. His 100-200 experiance comes from running good while way over playing his bankroll. Its not a big supprise that he is nearly broke considering the way he went up.

[/ QUOTE ]You mean the 2 bad beat posts I've posted out of my 2500 posts? One after losing 30k+ in a day and this? Yeah, I post sob stories a lot.

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I'm not an expert, but as I understand it, variance in hold em goes something like this:

Multi table tournies >>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>>>>>>> Limit HE >>> NLHE > SnGs

If this is any way inaccurate someone will (and should) come behind and correct me.

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Of course, variance changes depending on your skill, and which games you're better at.

I'm still trying to figure out how I dropped 30 buy-ins at the $11 SNGs but I'm beating 25NL like a drum.

Re: SnG = Variance

It is very easy to calculate the SD of SNGs. It is tough to do it for LHE because you need a large sample size, and even then you can have a fairly large sampling error. Obviously LHE hands don't run according to a normal distribution. It is impossible to lose more then 12 BB in a hand while it is quite possible that you can win 20 or more BB in a hand. But when you take hands in blocks of 100, it is possible to get a normal distribution provided that your sample is large enough. You would need hundereds or even more of these blocks to get a reading that is close to corret. I hope you see why you would get such a big error in the SD.

If you take the blocks as hands 1-100, 101-200, 201-300, etc. you will get a much different figure then if you take blocks as hands 51-150, 151-250, 251-350, etc.

So for this reason, I have little to no faith in the PT figure until a ton of hands are logged, and even then there will be some error involved. So when they say that your SD is 16.4546 bb/100, you know that they are FOS. There is no way that you could get a figure that accurate using the method that I provide (and what I hope they use).

Brad

Edit - While SNGs are not low varience (unless you are a bad player), they are certainly less swingy then LHE. I'm currently in about a 50 buy-in downswing right now, and that is over roughly 220 SNGs. I'd be happy to run some numbers on how bad this current downswing is, but I would venture to guess that it is less then a 2 SD swing.

I'm with you. I don't know why but kurosh is one of the guys I respect most on this forum. I always read a thread that he has made.

I just thought I would chime in on this thread even though I probably have nothing of true substance to add.

I really like your posts, you give a lot of good information and seems like to play a good game. I hope you can get some control and play within your bankroll. Good luck.

Re: SnG = Variance

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and we shouldn't be assuming a normal distribution to analyze the math in poker.

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why not?

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Shill for some reason decided to be really smart and pretty much say what I was going to say, but I'll add some things I have absolutely no mathematical evidence for.

For starters, the standard deviation needs a LOT of hands to actually be accurate. I don't mean like 50k, 100k, I mean like A LOT. mike l. has talked about how he believes winrate doesn't converge until about 700k hands. I don't know if I believe that, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see the SD number at or above that.

A few reasons. First, the extremes of 100 hand samples are so much to make the SD value very inconsistent. Sometimes, you're playing 35 hands out of 100, and winning 50BBs with them. Sometimes, you play 9 hands out of 100, and lose the blinds each orbit, so you end up down 10BB or so. Sometimes you play more hands, and run like [censored] and drop more BBs.

Secondly, you aren't playing against the same people every time. Each time you sit down you aren't playing with the same lineup, in the same seats, with the same strategy as last time. All of these variables put together make all calculations much more imprecise than a lot of people give them credit for.

Thirdly, players almost always start off in a very tight, A-B-C poker style that limits the variance. As they move up, they begin to add more complex plays, in depth reads, adaptions to other people's constantly changing play, etc. At this point, they already think that they have a certain standard deviation, as they've put in quite a few hands, and PT is giving them a nice number they can look at and feel good about at night. However, as they're adding these other, more variance prone, plays they are actually playing at a much higher variance than they expect. Obviously, they don't see a change in their SD number either, since this sample is so miniscule compared to the rest of their database.

Anyway, as for the normal distribution, I still haven't seen any data that shows winrates are distributed in such a way. And honestly, it's probably impossible to get that data considering we aren't going to see the 5bb/100 losers with 70k hands logged in PT. I mean, if you really want to approximate something, go ahead, use it. But, I hope these people can understand that it's not that good of a guess.

Re: SnG = Variance

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and we shouldn't be assuming a normal distribution to analyze the math in poker.

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why not?

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Shill for some reason decided to be really smart and pretty much say what I was going to say, but I'll add some things I have absolutely no mathematical evidence for.

For starters, the standard deviation needs a LOT of hands to actually be accurate. I don't mean like 50k, 100k, I mean like A LOT. mike l. has talked about how he believes winrate doesn't converge until about 700k hands. I don't know if I believe that, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see the SD number at or above that.

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whether or not you can determine your standard deviation accurately doesn't change the fact that results approach exactly a normal distribution as hands approach infinity, assuming that you don't change the way you play (and when you're talking about winrate in the first place, you're making that assumption). even if your winrate and sd change, it'll still look a whole lot like a normal distribution.

i think you'd be surprised at how close you get to a normal distribution even if you're considering 100 hand blocks. if someone has a database with 200k+ hands it would be pretty easy to graph it and demonstrate it. (it won't be solid proof of course, but it'll illustrate the point)

if you're going to be analyzing the math in the first place, the normal distribution is the model to use if you're going to analyze this, and i assume you do want to analyze it since you didn't flat out say "and we shouldn't be analyzing the math in poker"

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A few reasons. First, the extremes of 100 hand samples are so much to make the SD value very inconsistent. Sometimes, you're playing 35 hands out of 100, and winning 50BBs with them. Sometimes, you play 9 hands out of 100, and lose the blinds each orbit, so you end up down 10BB or so. Sometimes you play more hands, and run like [censored] and drop more BBs.

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i don't see how any of this suggests anything but that variance is high. it certainly doesn't do anything to suggest that a normal distribution is a poor model.

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Secondly, you aren't playing against the same people every time. Each time you sit down you aren't playing with the same lineup, in the same seats, with the same strategy as last time. All of these variables put together make all calculations much more imprecise than a lot of people give them credit for.

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there's no reason why these things can't be considered a natural part of the variance.

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Thirdly, players almost always start off in a very tight, A-B-C poker style that limits the variance. As they move up, they begin to add more complex plays, in depth reads, adaptions to other people's constantly changing play, etc. At this point, they already think that they have a certain standard deviation, as they've put in quite a few hands, and PT is giving them a nice number they can look at and feel good about at night. However, as they're adding these other, more variance prone, plays they are actually playing at a much higher variance than they expect. Obviously, they don't see a change in their SD number either, since this sample is so miniscule compared to the rest of their database.

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you're right. when you change your game, your results will no longer follow the same normal distribution. they will still follow some normal distribution. the normal distribution that you can use to model your play will change as you improve. this is obvious. but again - there's no better model. are you just saying that we shouldn't try to analyze these things at all?

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Anyway, as for the normal distribution, I still haven't seen any data that shows winrates are distributed in such a way. And honestly, it's probably impossible to get that data considering we aren't going to see the 5bb/100 losers with 70k hands logged in PT. I mean, if you really want to approximate something, go ahead, use it. But, I hope these people can understand that it's not that good of a guess.

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no, it won't be that good of a guess. for all the same reasons that saying your expectation in a game is 2.5BB/100 because you've beat it for 2.5BB/100 over 100k hands isn't that good of a guess. but people do want to model their winrates. why not model the variance along with it?

Re: SnG = Variance

I always kind of assumed the kurtosis of this distribution was higher than in a normal distribution.

seriously.

Re: SnG = Variance

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I always kind of assumed the kurtosis of this distribution was higher than in a normal distribution.

seriously.

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and that's a correct assumption. just look at the distribution of a single hand and it's obvious.

despite that though, as the number of hands increases, the kurtosis approaches that of the normal distribution.

Re: SnG = Variance

You CAN use the normal to approximate.

By the CLT, anything that is sampled repeatedly many times converges to normal. Even if what is being sampled isnt normal (this is why the 'you can only lose 12BB but make much more in any hand' argument isnt valid)

I played some 2/4 and 3/6, ran bad to $800. I decided to play $22 SNGs. I ran bad some more, lost 7 or 8 in a row and at one point, my balance was around $600. Then I won and won and won and won. I won 3 in a row, got 2nd and 3rd in the next two. I played the rest of the day and finished at around $1400. I went back to where I feel my game is strongest, SH limit and set a loss limit of $400 for myself at 3/6 6max. I ran good. A few days and a couple thousand hands later, I had 3k.

I felt like I was playing very well. I was betting and folding at all the right times. I took the 3k and decided to take a 50BB shot at 5/10. I came up a few hundred at first, but then got crushed badly and quit at around 2500. I've been grinding at 3/6 for a bit and, counting rakeback, I will have 4250. I think I will take another shot at 5/10 soon.

Thanks for all the support.

Re: SnG = Variance

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I've played SNGs and they have the highest variance except for MTTs. You can read threads about it in the SnG forum.

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Most of those threads are filled with ignorance. People whine about variance in SNGs even when it is significantly lower than the variance they would experience in limit ring games.

Of course, if your ROI/win rate is low, then you will experience larger swings. This is true if you are a marginal winner in any form of poker. It is behind the constant assertions that the variance is huge in 6-max games despite contradictory evidence from PokerTracker.

Many 1TT forum regulars play on Party, where the rapid blind increases decrease the advantage of winning players but shorten the tournaments, and they have adopted marginally winning styles they can execute while playing 8+ tables. These choices increase the sizes of swings, but they are not universal. For me, SNGs have about the same variance as NLHE, and significantly less than LHE.

I started playing some shorthanded and HU 5/10. I run good and play a lot. I've been playing, at a minimum, 1k hands a day. My roll is now a healthy 7k online so that's plenty for 5/10 and hopefully will be enough for 10/20 again soon.

Yay!

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I started playing some shorthanded and HU 5/10. I run good and play a lot. I've been playing, at a minimum, 1k hands a day. My roll is now a healthy 7k online so that's plenty for 5/10 and hopefully will be enough for 10/20 again soon.

Yay!

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this is awesome to hear, keep it up

Since someone bumped, might as well update. Up to 15k now and happily playing 10/20 + 15/30.

way to come back...I can't seem to make any progress online. Best of luck to you!

at first i wasn't jelous, Now i am a bit [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

Good job, You need to seriously analyse your whole poker "experience" as a whole to avoid serious TILT(again).

To experience this again may bankcrupt your roll next time mate, Good luck at the tables.

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Poker... I tilt badly and I run bad or maybe I just suck. I had 4.5k yesterday haha, then this and more losing.

I also manage to always lose whenever I'm upset even though I think I'm playing fine.

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You tilt bad, but you manage to play ok when upset :P :P :P

POKhER.

Well, I made a few major changes.

The second I notice myself tilting, I stop.
As soon as I badly misplay a hand, I take a break and reevaluate if I'm fit to play.
If I do not think I am playing well, I stop. I don't play anymore when I'm tired.
I do not play under the influence of anything anymore.
I do not talk to my [censored] ex within an hour of playing.
I judge my opponents more objectively now. If I think they are better, or not much worse, then I don't play.
When I take shots, they are much more controlled now.

And I really think the results have shown those changes. 4BB/100 over my past 15k hands [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

These are some very good discipline guidelines that I think many players would be wise to incorporate into their play

(myself included...especially the bit about misplaying a hand and then stepping back and re-evaluating...and playing less or never when tired)

Also - "at first i wasn't jelous, Now i am a bit"