Moving Up Is Hard To Do

[Pedigree]

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ok, some of these posts are kind of bothering me, so I'm going to throw in my 2 cents. I am going to be kind of a nit to all of the people talking about winrates, because in all honesty they don't mean much. Even after 100k hands at a given limit you still may be quite far from your true winrate. That being said, since not many of us have the time to play a million hands at each level, we must infer some things from short term results.


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I find it hard to believe that after 100,000 hands you can be quite far from your true winrate. And, yes, I've taken statistics courses.

[car ramrod]

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I find it hard to believe that after 100,000 hands you can be quite far from your true winrate. And, yes, I've taken statistics courses.


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you'd be surprised.

Online you can play 100K hands in a couple months. I've heard people say that ran good for 100K hands, and then there win rate came back to earth.

Teh long term for a true winrate is a lot longer than most people think.

[jaxUp]

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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Which reminds me of a book:

"Zen in the Art of Archery" by Eugen Herrigel

Well worth the time spent reading.

--klez

The whole concept of playing x thousand hands to find out your winrate is flawed. Most people do not play the same poker for x thousand hands, they learn and improve, or tilt or get lazy / play badly.

I don't think you can pin down your winrate any more firmly than 'This is what i have won' and 'This is what I expect to win'.

[DavidC]

Firstly, thanks for the GOT quote Jax.

Secondly:
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Most people do not play the same poker for x thousand hands, they learn and improve, or tilt or get lazy / play badly.


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Sure, or game conditions change or whatever, but you can view these things as an agregate, and the alternative to this is just to say that you'll never know if you're a winner, which is probably not true.

[bottomset]

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ok, some of these posts are kind of bothering me, so I'm going to throw in my 2 cents. I am going to be kind of a nit to all of the people talking about winrates, because in all honesty they don't mean much. Even after 100k hands at a given limit you still may be quite far from your true winrate. That being said, since not many of us have the time to play a million hands at each level, we must infer some things from short term results.


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I find it hard to believe that after 100,000 hands you can be quite far from your true winrate. And, yes, I've taken statistics courses.

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GoT did a simulation, 100 1.8BB/100 16.9SD/100 winners at a certain level

after 100k hands for each the winrates varied from 0.5(roughly) to 3.5(roughly I don't have the exact numbers offhand) and the overall winrate for them all over 10million hands was 1.95

if your winrate can be off by .15BB/100 after 10million hands, it can be off a ton as shown after much smaller ranges

[jaxUp]

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ok, some of these posts are kind of bothering me, so I'm going to throw in my 2 cents. I am going to be kind of a nit to all of the people talking about winrates, because in all honesty they don't mean much. Even after 100k hands at a given limit you still may be quite far from your true winrate. That being said, since not many of us have the time to play a million hands at each level, we must infer some things from short term results.


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I find it hard to believe that after 100,000 hands you can be quite far from your true winrate. And, yes, I've taken statistics courses.

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GoT did a simulation, 100 1.8BB/100 16.9SD/100 winners at a certain level

after 100k hands for each the winrates varied from 0.5(roughly) to 3.5(roughly I don't have the exact numbers offhand) and the overall winrate for them all over 10million hands was 1.95

if your winrate can be off by .15BB/100 after 10million hands, it can be off a ton as shown after much smaller ranges

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you're late...see my post above. Also, you need a new avatar. Whenever I see obsidian's posts it makes me think he's you. Also, Christmas is now over and you need to give me my new avatar by New Year's

[DavidC]

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ok, some of these posts are kind of bothering me, so I'm going to throw in my 2 cents. I am going to be kind of a nit to all of the people talking about winrates, because in all honesty they don't mean much. Even after 100k hands at a given limit you still may be quite far from your true winrate. That being said, since not many of us have the time to play a million hands at each level, we must infer some things from short term results.


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I find it hard to believe that after 100,000 hands you can be quite far from your true winrate. And, yes, I've taken statistics courses.

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How close would we be, with a standard dev of 15/100 and a 95% confidence level?

I'm asking because I don't know, not just to be a smartass, but I'm curious, because I'm hopefully going to be moving up limits soon. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Edit: 99% confidence level too, if you don't mind.

[shadow29]

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How close would we be, with a standard dev of 15/100 and a 95% confidence level?

I'm asking because I don't know, not just to be a smartass, but I'm curious, because I'm hopefully going to be moving up limits soon. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Edit: 99% confidence level too, if you don't mind.

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Even I know the answer!!! [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Assuming that after 100,000 hands you have a winrate of 3 bb/100, and a SD of 15 bb/100, the .95 confidence level is:

[2.070307452, 3.929692548]

so, we can be almost an entire bb/100 off from our "true" winrate. (I think).

The .99 CI is: [1.778176881, 4.221823119]

And that's even bigger.

So basically, you can never really know your "true" winrate.