Re: Moving Up Is Hard To Do
here's a quote of a post from GuyOnTilt. I can't find the link, so sorry.
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GoT did some calculations and concluded that it's possible for a "true" 1.8/100 winner to win like 3+bb/100 or .5ish bb/100. Combine this with the fact that players are bound to change their play from the beginning of a meaningful stretch of hand to the end, and obsessing over your bb/100 rate is little more than an act in futility.
-James
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Come on. This way oversimplifies things. Just because it's possible for a 1.8 player to run at 3.0 or 0.5 doesn't mean it's likely. As the number of hands increases the level of confidence in the BB/100 number undoubtedly increases, but that does NOT mean that the number is meaningless after 25k or 50k or 100k.
In other words, to paraphrase Peter_Rus' idea, is it possible that someone running at 2BB/100 after 50,000 hands is really a losing player? Yes, possible. Is it likely? No. Stated another way, just because something isn't "statistically significant" doesn't mean it's meaningless.
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Eh, I'm getting questions now about this so I figured I'd specify. I ran 100 samples of 100k hands each for a 1.80 wr, 16.90 sd player (or 100 different players with the exact same true winrate and sd under the circumstances). Note this test would assume winrate is constant per 100 hands, i.e. no changing game conditions, no tilting, etc. Out of the 100, the highest wr was 3.47 and the lowest was 0.42, with the total wr over the 10 million hands being 1.95, meaning the player(s) was/were running hot for these 10M hands, and not just by a little, yet still one of these samples was as low as 0.42 bb/100.
On the subject of sample size, obviously 100 trials is far too few to come to any reliable conclusions. But these results made me think of variance and the long run in LHE quite differently. If two people playing the same game were to present to me their last 100k hands and one was earning 0.5 bb/100 and the other was earning 3.5 bb/100, who would I think was the better player? Obv, the 3.5 guy. But how much doubt would there be in my mind as to whether he was better or not? Apparently there should be room for some. Winrates just do not converge NECESSARILY until millions and millions of hands. For some they will, sure. Some of us will run close to our true earn for our lifetimes and will rarely or never venture to the upper amplitude of our SD. Others will run hotter than our true earn lifetime; some a little and some A LOT. Same goes with running cold. Some of us will find the very outer bounds of what our SD is capable of, and others won't even get close.
So what determines who among us will get rich and who stays stagnant or drops down? Better players will have a better chance at success of course, and success on a greater scale. But even a WCP could very conceivably end up having to drop down to lower limits while a mediocre player may rise to the big games, maybe never even realizing they're as good as they truly are. It might not even be a stretch to say this HAS happened.
So poker skills being equal, what determines who becomes and millionaire and who keeps playing 15/30? I don't know. QM? Sure. Maybe God DOES play dice with poker, I don't know. What I do know is that this (along with continuing to learn and appreciate Zen philosophies) has helped me come to realize that results, even on an extremely broad or lengthy scale, should be meaningless to me. And I don't mean meaningless in the sense of how I view the game now. I mean in the sense of how I feel I should STRIVE to view the game. We as a group have trained ourselves to not care about 200 bet swings, about 20k hand down periods. None of that comes naturally of course, but as we learned more and more about the nature of LHE we came to accept those things as just part of the package and we learned to deal with it. In the same way, I'm attempting to continually make myself immune to results, period. Not just short-term, but long-term as well. I want to approach this game theoretically and conceptually, without the hint of any wins or losses clouding my judgement. Ridding my conscious from any and all results, period; that is the goal. I'm not there yet by a long shot, but given what I think I know about this game and the philosophy and approach I feel is best for me, my goal is to be constantly progressing toward that state.
GoT
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