Homer\'s Excel Streak Sheet
I'm currently enmeshed in the second worst losing streak of my online career and am beginning to threaten a new record. Since Homer provided the Excel formula for simulating streaks, I have resorted to it whenever I hit a downturn. It's somehow soothing to observe how I haven't hit rock bottom, to know that a player with a good win rate and standard deviation could do a lot worse than I am.
So I was pounding the F9 key after yet another loss, taking some comfort in the squiggly downward graph lines, chuckling about how I've NEVER been that low, when the following pops up --
Assume a 2/4 game, win rate of $6 per hour (not mine, just my dream), SD of 44 (about mine) - MarkD's formula says max loss is $1114 or 278 BBs. Now I get a graph that shows a BB drop of 491. This is a monster, and doesn't seem to be within any reasonable margin for error - it seems either the sim is wrong or the formula.
The happy ending to the story is that after 10,000 hours the win rate is $5.78 per hour - a truly bumpy ride to the projected EV.
Of the hundreds if not thousands of times I've run this formula, I've never noticed anything more than a few BBs away from the expected max. Perhaps the formlua has something like a 99.9999 % accuracy, and I just happened across that 1 in a million anomaly?
|