Swing question for people who play lots of hands

[sthief09]

this is something that I've suspected and tested


the way PT calculates SD is inaccurate. if you want a SD/100 hands, it should take hands in increments of 100 hands, and find a SD per 100-hand block. it does not do this.

it takes your sessions and cuts them by 100 and treats each "100-hand block" the same. so if you play 10, 10-hand sessions, it will put them together and count them as 1 100-hand block.

so why does it make a difference? well take 2 players. one player plays 4 tables for 24 hours straight without changing tables. one player never plays more than 100 hands per session. they both play the same exact way, and for the sake of the example, against the same players

so the player who plays long sessions probably has a low SD per session. the reason for this can be proven by an extreme case. say you play a series 100,000-hand sessions. clearly your SD between the sessions would be very small. in most of them you'd make +/- .5 bb/100. now, if you put those in PT, it would take each 100k hand session and cut it up 1,000 ways. so you have 1000 different 100-hand samples with very small variance. so a person who plays long sessions will have a smaller SD/100 hands because his 100 hand blocks typically represent a piece of a whole rather than actual 100-hand blocks

I'm sure you can see why it works the other way around.

so someone like you, who I suspect probably doesn't switch tables much (if I remember correctly you 8-table 30/60 so there's not much room for changing tables) but does play long sessions, will have a low SD, like yours.

someone who 1-tables with excellent table selection would have a higher SD because he's changing tables more.

the reason I'm pointing this out is because based on your post, I'm assuming you understand how SD can be used to find out how likely you are to go through these bad runs. the problem with this is your SD is probably closer to 20 than 15 which would suggest that these runs are a lot more likely than you realize, or that PT's SD calculation would indicate