[sweetjazz]

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(2) depending where you play, the opponents can be so bad that your winrate is quite high, which decreases the amount of one's downswings (in terms of BBs lost on an absolute scale) -- much of a downswing against horrible opponents is simply earning less than you normally would.

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This is a somewhat valid point, but still the opponents would have to be really horrible. I mean, you'd have to be rounding at The Normandie. Even a 3 or 4 BB/100 will experience downswings over 10K hands.


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You'd be surprised how long it is realistically possible to go without a downswing when your winrate is that high. Of course, many big winners will experience a downswing over the two years. But that doesn't mean it is impossible or even terribly difficult to run well enough to avoid a downswing for a long period of time, especially if you aren't playing very many hands per hour (see below)...

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(1) you're playing a smaller number of hands, so you can avoid hitting the extreme negative forms of variance for quite a while

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I have no idea what you mean this.

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I didn't word this well, but the basic point is that you only play about 30 hands an hour playing live. So if he played 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for two years, he would have played about 4000 hours, so about 120,000 hands. Is it possible for a player who is crushing a game to go 120K hands without a downswing of more than ~100 BB? I would think it is very possible.

I started playing online at 0.5/1 limits, and I didn't experience my first 100 BB downswing until I had moved up until 3/6, which was after some 40K or so hands of play. If the level of competition he is playing against is roughly of the caliber of 0.5/1 - 3/6 players, then it wouldn't be shocking that he didn't suffer any 100+ BB downswings during his two years of live play, though it would admittedly be a matter of running good.