A visual on the effect of the luck factor on bankroll

[eastbay]

Lots of posts about streakiness, how bad is this run, etc.

I thought I'd put up a visual on how much of this poker business is luck.

Just to work with concrete numbers let's say you're taking $1k into the $55s with expectations of modest success. You're winning 1st, 2nd, 3rd place 13% of the time each, for an ITM of 39% and an ROI of 18%. Not great numbers, but realistic for a lot of players, especially if they are new to a level.

After 50, 100, 200, and 300 games, the probability curves of ending up with a given bankroll look like this:

http://rwa.homelinux.net/bankroll.pdf

To me, this is sobering. After 100 games, you "should" be up to $2k, but it's not all that unlikely that you'll have gone nowhere; it's equally likely that you could shoot up to $3k.

After 300 games, you could reasonably be up to anywhere between $2k and $6k. The flip side to this is that it's a little presumptuous, even after 300 games, to really make any hard and fast statements about your long-term ROI given just the current state of your bankroll.

Hope you find this interesting and useful for gauging your own success.

eastbay