I want to believe I'm a winning player, i REALLY do

[Senor Choppy]

Post a screenshot of the general tab in Poker Tracker and I bet the consensus here as to whether or not you're a winning player would be pretty accurate.

[MaxPower]

There are some formulas you can use, but I'm too lazy to help you with that. Maybe this will help.

I fed all of my 15/30 sessions for the year into StatKing. I have a very nice win rate since January. StatKing says that I can break even for 682 hours. It also says that there is a 99.87% chance that I am a winning player.

So, yes a winning player can run bad for 25K hands. I can break even for 682 hours which will be about 48K hands.

Your results may vary.

[dogmeat]

Natethegreat was interested in the exact thing you mention - a long mediocre streak (or a long losing streak). If you have a total of 70,000 hands at $15/$30, and now find yourself at 1.53BB/100 (or $46 per 100), this may very well be a strong indication that you are evening out towards what you can honestly expect to win in the game.

A standard deviation of 16bb/100 is often mentioned here, mine happens to be 21 (but I play a large dollar range of games from limit and NL), and at 21bb/100 you can easily see yourself either + or - $630 every 100 hands. If you are playing a single table, that is about $400 per hour, either way.

If you are going to plot your bell curve with your current stats, then your mean is 1.53bb, your value x is -.02, and your sigma is (?whatever you have, but lets use 16).

z=x-mu/sigma or z value is equal to -.2 - 1.53/16 which equals: z=.11 or from the area under a normal curve, you should experience this only 6.2% of the time.

Since the chance of this happening is only 6.2%, and it represents 36% of your total hands, I make the assumption that you should not expect to make even 1.5bb/100 - If it happens for 1000K it is an abberation, but for 25K, it is very significant (unless you already had at least 250,000 hands in your database).

Keep playing, and see where you end up in another 30K hands..........The long run is very long. Sorry.

However, winning 2.5BB/100 for 45,000 has an even smaller chance of happening, so all told, you are probably a decent player with what will average out to somewhere around 1-1.2BB/100 as you approach 100K hands.

If you want to be more precise and do a frequency distribution from your grouped data, take your stats on poker tracker from every 5K hands and you can look at your range and mean deviation. You can get your own standard deviation this way, get a new mean, and recalculate to see how "rare" your current numbers are.

Dogmeat [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]

[magithighs]

I'm with Bernie on this one.

I had a 10k breakeven roller coaster -- running at 4BB/100, then -2BB/100 and then 0BB/100. It was ugly on the downswing. So many premium hands going down in flames.

I did what bernie suggested. Actually used pokertracker to review my hands from each position. What I found was extremely interesting. My loses were not from my premium hands getting busted. They were from grinding hands where I made some basic mistakes. Pushing too hard, when I knew I was beat, and giving up when I could have won the pot with some more aggression. Optimistically, I figured I should have been a 2BB/100 winner over the 10k hands, had I played every hand correctly. Well, that just isn't right. But, had I played halfway better, I would have been a 1BB/100 winner -- that's something I could have done.

Went back at it, making the minor tweaks and I was back in the saddle at my normal win rate.

Look at your hands and figure out how you should have played. It's amazing what you'll find.

Cheers
Magi

[DcifrThs]

streaks like that happen...look at your game to find some leaks, but i wouldn't worry. it still helps to go over a few sessions hand by hand to make sure you're not tilting. also, if you have a friend to look over a session or 2 that wonthurt, nor will posting questionable hands

-Barron

[Mempho]

Freddy,

If I remember our NL$50 days together on Party (before the TV made it huge), I will recall that you were a strong player. I'm sure from what you state here that the same holds true for limit. Just make sure that you haven't developed any leaks. You won't recognize me from my ID on here, but we've played many thousands of hands together.

[phish]

[ QUOTE ]
Too much relying on stats and results.

Don't you know how to tell if you're playing well by the hands you play and your reasoning behind the plays? Don't you review after each session? How about after you just played a hand, you don't instantly replay it in your mind if it's an iffy situation?

I think many people should throw out their PTs for awhile and concentrate more on how to analyze their own game without relying on stats. Someone could have the exact same stats as you and they could mean completely different things.

You should ignore your mediocre results and study your game regardless. Even if you were killing the game.

There's a thread somewhere about longest breakeven streaks. Mine was 21k hands.

b

[/ QUOTE ]

Best advice i've heard yet. Seems there's way too much focus here on PT stats, almost to the exclusion of playing strategy. I use PT too, but I hardly pay attention to the stats. I use it to keep track of how i'm doing overall and to replay key hands (rather than have to read thru them).