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Old 03-21-2004, 07:21 PM
scrub scrub is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: Princeton, NJ
Posts: 573
Default Re: No way. I think I might quit poker

[ QUOTE ]
My standard deviation, most I can win or lose in an hour, is about $500.

[/ QUOTE ]

You can easily lose or win more than your standard deviation in an hour.

Your win rate is the average amount that you have won or lost for each hour that you have played (WR). The standard deviation (S) in your win rate is a statistic that provides some information about the volatility of your win rate.

If your results are normally distributed, you can expect about 15% of your hours played to have a net profit or loss of (WR-S) or more. About 2% of your hours played will have a profit of loss of (WR-2S) or more. Unless your win rate is gigantic in relation to your standard deviation (which would be extremely unusual), you should expect to lose your standard deviation or more at least once every 100 hours or so.

Not to be a complete nit (ok, to be a complete nit... [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]), but this is gambling. The real lower bound on your losses for an hour is (# of hands that Party can deal you in an hour) * $100 + any additional money over the buyin you had on the table in the first hand. Is it astronomically unlikely? Yes. Is it impossible? No.

scrub
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