On a 30,000 hand downswing.....

[teamdonkey]

there are statistical ways to answer your question. If you want, i can calculate the % chance you've been playing losing poker over that stretch vs just being unlucky, and also the probable range your actual winrate is in. PM me your BB/100, standard deviation/100, and actual number of hands.

[krazyace5]

PM sent, thanks

Here is my chart, I did drop down in limits during this run also.

[image][/image]

[Kyriefurro]

This is not a 30k hand downswing. This is a 4500 hand downswing, followed by a 4500 hand upturn, followed by.....you get the picture. Yes, you've gone 30k hands without fully recovering from you negative swings, but that's not the same thing as running bad for 30k consecutive hands.

Oh yeah, you're only down about 8 buy-ins. That's bad, but the end of the world. If it makes you feel any better, I dropped 23 buy-ins (at multiple levels cause I kept dropping down) in a 10 day stretch in November. 25k hands...and yes, I played like crap.

The good news is that I've completely recovered and after taking a lot of time to study and learn from my mistakes, I play a much stronger game now.

So hang in there. Study and learn. Things will turn....eventually.

[krazyace5]

Yeah I am gonna take grunchs and your advice.

Just stressin me out more than it usually would since it hit at the worst time with the holidays and all. Also hit right after I took out a nice chunk of my bankroll for holiday shopping.

Thanks for the tips and encouragement.

[Mroberts3]

I would totally agree with Grunch on this one, you can never know for sure about luck, so you might as well look at your game. For what its worth, whenever I play really poorly or on tilt its when I play too agressivly and I suspect you might be doing the same thing. I know the feeling... some guy raises and you reraise PF with KK and the flop comes A high and somehow you find yourself all in on the flop thinking "He can't have A2 again, he just CAN'T" and of course he does.

[teamdonkey]

posted and then totally forgot about this thread. Since I'm a dork, i keep track of this sort of thing in an excel worksheet along with daily play. Calculations are pretty similar to those found in Homer's now famous thread

the upper bound of your confidence interval can be found with the equation:

=J-NORMSINV((100-L)/200)*K*(1/SQRT(I/100))

where J is BB/100, L is your confidence interval (is use 95 for 95%), K is your standard deviation/100, and I is your number of hands.

the lower bound can be found with the same equation, except it starts with J- instead of J+

so if i've seen 5BB/100 over 20,000 hands with a SD of 40BB/100, i can say with 95% confidence my true win rate is between 10.54BB/100 and -0.54BB/100.

What i've learned from doing these calculations is, they don't tell us that much. The OPs case isn't much different. He obviously isn't killing the game, but there's about a 1/3 chance that he isn't playing losing poker over that stretch either.

[ QUOTE ]
there are statistical ways to answer your question. If you want, i can calculate the % chance you've been playing losing poker over that stretch vs just being unlucky, and also the probable range your actual winrate is in. PM me your BB/100, standard deviation/100, and actual number of hands.

[/ QUOTE ]

Please post the proceedure. I've been playing with excel and can't get it.

[Cosimo]

[ QUOTE ]
there are statistical ways to answer your question. If you want, i can calculate the % chance you've been playing losing poker over that stretch vs just being unlucky, and also the probable range your actual winrate is in. PM me your BB/100, standard deviation/100, and actual number of hands.

[/ QUOTE ]

There is a 68% chance that you'll be within 1SD of your expected winrate, 95.5% that you'll be within 2SD, and 99.7% that you'll be within 3SD.

1SD for a given number of hands is (SD/100)*sqrt(#hands/100). That is, if your SD/100 is 30, and you've played 10,000 hands, then (30)*sqrt(10000/100) = 30 * sqrt( 100 ) = 30 * 10 = 300. If you expect to win at 8PTBB/100h, then you expect to be at +2400 BB, and there's a 68% chance that you'll be between +2100 and +2700 BB. The 2400 is your EV, and the 300 is your standard deviation for this many hands.

You have a 16% chance of being 1SD below your expected winrate, 2.3% of being below 2SD, and 0.135% of being below 3SD. Luckily, you have these same chances of being above your expectation by the same amounts.

Sqrt( 30,000 / 100 ) ~= 17.3, so for OP 1SD is about 519 BB. He's down about 800 BB, so that puts him at about 1.5SD below 0. If he's a good player that should be winning at 8PTBB/100h, then he should be at +2400 BB. But he's down 3200 PTBB from that winrate. This is about 6 standard deviations. The chance of a strong winning player being behind by 800 BB after 30,000 hands is about one in never.

The chance of a moderate (4PTBB/100h) winning player being at -800BB after 30k hands is 1:13821 (3.8SD off expectation). Likewise, the chance of someone who is -800BB after 30k hands is actually a moderate winning player is 1:13821. In other words, OP is not a moderate winning player.

The chance of a marginal (2PTBB/100h) winning player being at -800BB after 30k hands is 1:288 (2.7SD off). This is fairly far out on the edge; there's maybe one poster in this forum (assuming 288 regular posters/readers) that is running this badly over the last 30k hands.

The chance of a breakeven player being at -800BB after 30k hands is about 6.2% (1.54SD off). If you play 40k hands per month, you'll have a result like this once a year. In other words, there's a 1:16 chance that anyone (with a SD/100 of 30) will be 800BB below their expectation for 30k hands.

The most likely explanation is that OP has some major leaks. It only takes about one bad call or bad fold every 10 table-hours to drain this much EV, which isn't much at all. When pots get big, you need good reads and smart sense.

Note: I used these public domain normal tables to compute the probabilities here.

[Morrek]

Nice post.
How much would these numbers change as the SD increases? (too lazy/tired to run all the maths right now) Or, what I'm really asking is what would these numbers be for me, at 42 SD and 8ptbb/100?

[Cosimo]

[ QUOTE ]
Nice post.
How much would these numbers change as the SD increases? (too lazy/tired to run all the maths right now) Or, what I'm really asking is what would these numbers be for me, at 42 SD and 8ptbb/100?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'll try to find the point at which you should expect to break even.

SD = EV
42 * sqrt(n) = n * 8
5.25 = sqrt(n)
n = 27.56

So, you have a 16% chance of being negative after 2756 hands.

2SD = EV
84/8 = sqrt(n)
n = 110.25

You have a 2.3% chance of being negative after 11,025 hands.

3SD = EV
126/8 = sqrt(n)
n = 248.06

You are 740:1 against being negative after 24,806 hands.

Let's say you play 2500-3000 hands a week. One out of every six weeks, you'll be behind. In a month, you're about 40:1 against being behind. After you play 25,000 hands, you are very unlikely to be behind.