[SmileyEH]

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someone with that sd who has lost 200 BB over a 10k hand sample has about a 7-8% chance of actually being a winning player. it happens.


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I'm just trying to say, if you're playing 2/4 and you breakeven for 20k hands you have a fair bit you can work on. Sure it's going to happen to good players, I know - I've run bad, and then worse than I ever thought possible. My point is that it's very unlikely to breakeven for such a long time at low limits where winrates are high and standard deviations are low. FWIW an increased winrate goes along with an increased std dev IMO (play more aggressively/more hands increases both) so I think the two factors cancel eachother out (this summer my std dev. is 16.5 FWIW).

But again, assuming a 2BB/100 winner with a 14/100 SD - they only have about a 7% chance of breaking even or worse for 10k hands. When people usually come asking whether they are losing players/just running bad etc. it is usually their first x hands at a limit. If they're breakeven or losing for their first 10k of 2/4 or whatever and we can say that with 93% certainty their winrate is less than 2BB/100, well that is saying something.

Of course there will always be freaks of variance but they are the exception. My biggest peeve is that posters with 10's or 100's of thousands of hands talk about 20k breakeven streaks as if they are nothing - well if you play 300k hands a year they aren't because all those hands make freaks of variance bound to happen - but if you move up a limit and suddenly you find yourself down after 100 hours of 4tabling: you'd better sit up and analyze your game because odds are you've got significant room for improvement.

(notice 4BB/100 didn't appear once in this post [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]).

-SmileyEH