Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

I am trying to figure out if my experience multi-tabling is normal. Since mid-July, I have played 200,000 hands. In that time, I had a 215, 250, and 315 bb downswings, while maintaining a solid WR and standard deviation of 15.1 bb/100. This is the first time I have logged this many hands in such a short period. Should swings like this be expected on a consistent basis? I'm thinking that they are unlikely, and I must be playing bad when I am losing without realizing it, but I am curious to see what other people think.

Thanks- alex

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

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I am trying to figure out if my experience multi-tabling is normal. Since mid-July, I have played 200,000 hands. In that time, I had a 215, 250, and 315 bb downswings, while maintaining a solid WR and standard deviation of 15.1 bb/100. This is the first time I have logged this many hands in such a short period. Should swings like this be expected on a consistent basis? I'm thinking that they are unlikely, and I must be playing bad when I am losing without realizing it, but I am curious to see what other people think.

Thanks- alex

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I'm not very good, but I also play a lot of hands, and the graph below is an anomaly, at least for me.

Keep on truckin' dude.

http://img50.imageshack.us/img50/2473/two300s1yv.jpg

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

"Normal" swing sizes have a lot to do with winrate, as well as SD.

Without doing any calculations, I'm guessing that these swings are nothing unusual for a true winrate in the 1-2BB/100 range, but out of the ordinary for a true winrate in the 3+BB/100 range.

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

ive logged around 200k hands online and have 2 250BB downswings with a couple 200BB downswings. i would imagine that its pretty common to have such swings over this hand range. so many posters have 300BB downswings under their belts, and many havent even logged 200k hand. i think these swings should be common.

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

That's pretty normal man. In my 300ish k hands this year I've had like 3 250bb drops or so, as well as a 28k breakeven streak and a 32k breakeven streak. Totally normally.

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

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That's pretty normal man. In my 300ish k hands this year I've had like 3 250bb drops or so, as well as a 28k breakeven streak and a 32k breakeven streak. Totally normally.

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dont you play very high limits? your variance at 30/60 or higher, whatever it is doesnt really apply to 2/4.

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

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That's pretty normal man. In my 300ish k hands this year I've had like 3 250bb drops or so, as well as a 28k breakeven streak and a 32k breakeven streak. Totally normally.

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dont you play very high limits? your variance at 30/60 or higher, whatever it is doesnt really apply to 2/4.

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I guess you're right there is probably more variance at the higher limits cause they're more aggressive...but still it's the same game with the same suckouts and bad luck.

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

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I guess you're right there is probably more variance at the higher limits cause they're more aggressive...but still it's the same game with the same suckouts and bad luck.

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Is there a difference in your SD/100 for 30/60 compared to 100/200+?

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

x2... was this graph all at one limit? You broke even for your first 63k hands. That must be brutal.

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

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x2... was this graph all at one limit? You broke even for your first 63k hands. That must be brutal.

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The first 30,000 hands or so were at $5/$10 full. I dropped down to $3/$6 full after the first 250BBs of the downswing, and incurred another 100BB dowsnswing at $3/$6 the day of dropping down.

Based on the number of hands I have played in the past 1 1/2 years (500,000+), I figured a downswing like this was inevitable (although it did in fact suck my balzac).

The sharp upswing following was quite nice, although I was justly disappointed that it had to happen at $3/$6 instead of $5/$10 lol.

The additional 300BB downswing hurt a lot more than the original one which was worse (both BB-wise and dollar-wise), since they both happened in such a short time-frame.

Nevertheless, even including this ~63,000 hand breakeven streak over the past few months of play, I have still ended each and every month with the profit expected given the amount of hands that I played that month (~1BB/100 [I am aware that I suck]). It just goes to show that these things happen, but as long as you keep playing your best, you'll get what is coming to you [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

this is something that I've suspected and tested


the way PT calculates SD is inaccurate. if you want a SD/100 hands, it should take hands in increments of 100 hands, and find a SD per 100-hand block. it does not do this.

it takes your sessions and cuts them by 100 and treats each "100-hand block" the same. so if you play 10, 10-hand sessions, it will put them together and count them as 1 100-hand block.

so why does it make a difference? well take 2 players. one player plays 4 tables for 24 hours straight without changing tables. one player never plays more than 100 hands per session. they both play the same exact way, and for the sake of the example, against the same players

so the player who plays long sessions probably has a low SD per session. the reason for this can be proven by an extreme case. say you play a series 100,000-hand sessions. clearly your SD between the sessions would be very small. in most of them you'd make +/- .5 bb/100. now, if you put those in PT, it would take each 100k hand session and cut it up 1,000 ways. so you have 1000 different 100-hand samples with very small variance. so a person who plays long sessions will have a smaller SD/100 hands because his 100 hand blocks typically represent a piece of a whole rather than actual 100-hand blocks

I'm sure you can see why it works the other way around.

so someone like you, who I suspect probably doesn't switch tables much (if I remember correctly you 8-table 30/60 so there's not much room for changing tables) but does play long sessions, will have a low SD, like yours.

someone who 1-tables with excellent table selection would have a higher SD because he's changing tables more.

the reason I'm pointing this out is because based on your post, I'm assuming you understand how SD can be used to find out how likely you are to go through these bad runs. the problem with this is your SD is probably closer to 20 than 15 which would suggest that these runs are a lot more likely than you realize, or that PT's SD calculation would indicate

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

The tigher the game with less dead money in it. The worse the swings. I went 100BB on 2/4 party for the first time ever. I aknow its because that limit has become the Sahara desert compared to what it was 2 years ago..... [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

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The tigher the game with less dead money in it. The worse the swings. I went 100BB on 2/4 party for the first time ever. I aknow its because that limit has become the Sahara desert compared to what it was 2 years ago..... [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

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no, the opposite is true. this is what people mix up. a tight game will affect your winrate. a lower winrate will yield greater downswings. this is why the mediocre 0-.5 bb/100 winners have enormous downswings. a tight game corresponds with a lower SD, since there will be less big pots and you will be putting in a lot less bets postflop.

also, 100 BB in limit is nothing and it says nothing about the quality of the games.

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

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if you want a SD/100 hands, it should take hands in increments of 100 hands, and find a SD per 100-hand block. it does not do this.

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I think the easiest way would be to calculate SD per hand, and then multiply by 10 to get SD/100.

( Because SD/(Y hands) = SQRT(Y/X) * SD/(X hands) )

I tried this in Excel, by going to game notes, clicking get all, then click the "p", then export to excel, etc.

Just take the whole BB_won column and do an =STDEV(firstcell:lastcell)

I got a SD/hand of 1.47, for an SD/100 of 14.7. PT gives my SD/100 as 15.6.

That was for a 4400 hand sample.

For a 31000 hand sample I get: Excel: 13.9, PT: 14.4

For a 55000 hand sample I get: Excel: 13.8, PT: 14.1

That was about the most it would let me export. Looks like the two methods converge as the sample gets larger and larger.

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

the problem is it's using PT table sessions. if you play a 300-hand session, it should not be treated as 3 equal 100-hand blocks. you could've swung up and down 250 BB in those 300 hands.

Re: Swing question for people who play lots of hands
 

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the problem is it's using PT table sessions. if you play a 300-hand session, it should not be treated as 3 equal 100-hand blocks. you could've swung up and down 250 BB in those 300 hands.

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I see what you mean now. But over a large enough sample this will average out too. After enough sessions, your overall session results will reflect your variance just as well as if you broke them into 100 hand blocks, and the two calculation methods will converge.

I wrote an Excel file to show this. Say your results of a 100 hand block were like coin flips. Heads +100BB, tails -100BB.

Now if you play many 400 hand sessions, one sixteenth of your sessions will be +400, one sixteenth will be -400, one quarter will be +200, one quarter will be -200, etc.

As long as you play enough sessions so that this distribution is reflected well in your session results, it doesn't matter which method you use to calculate your SD/100.