Luck or skill?

[smartalecc5]

How do you know if your good or your lucky over the course of a session? You surely can't monitor each individual hand and see who was favored after each street.

Pokergrader is supposed to help give you an idea.

Intuitively, I can tell when I'm calling down too often or pushing bad spots. Reviewing my session can help. I sort by the biggest losses and start looking at each and seeing if I made a bad play.

[spamuell]

You can't know without looking at hands (not necessarily every hand but, for example, every 25th hand or the biggest pots you won/lost or whatever) and seeing what ranges you put your opponents on and whether that range a) justified your actions and b) was accurate. And even then you just have a general idea.

In my view, poker is far too complicated for tools like pokergrader to be useful.

[smartalecc5]

Over the past 666 hands (maybe its a sign!?!?!) I have lost $450 at an astonishing -11.28 BB/100. I wasn't playing out of line by any means. Sure I may have missed a few value bets but I don't think I messed up grotesquely on any hand. Still that would put me at -$400. Is this a really bad streak or indicative of things to come?

[paco]

It could mean absolutely nothing. Of course we can always get better and should put in the time to do so.
Short term downswings will happen to even very good players. 5000 hands even is also a very very small sample.

[wackjob]

My last 2 10/20 sessions over 1000 hands in total were both 50BB+ losses. I don't seem to make a lot of good grind sessions.. playing 3-4 hours to win 20BB, I seem to get bad beat after bad beat one session and do well the next. Its not uncommon to be 10K hands and losing to a downswing either.

[StellarWind]

[ QUOTE ]
How do you know if your good or your lucky over the course of a session? You surely can't monitor each individual hand and see who was favored after each street.

[/ QUOTE ]
If you win you were lucky and if you lose you were unlucky. Luck is the primary determining factor in one session.

Consider that after a 1000 hands your EV might be 20 BB while your standard deviation is around 50 BB. Yes there will be a bias toward winning, but luck dominates the result.

To determine whether you played well you need to analyze the hands. Results don't come into it at all.

[Womble]

I think the luck factor is the actual hands dealt so if your getting KQ vs KJ then thats particuarly lucky, same as getting premium hands alot.

The skill factor comes in extracting the most when you are ahead and losing the least when you are behind so unless you 'know' you made a good fold/call etc its pretty hard to know if it was skill.

Skill only comes apparent over alot of sessions.

[wackjob]

What Stellar said is right on & kind of what I was trying to point to with my other stats. I'm a solid winning player over more than 150K hands so I know the majority of the time I play "well" I still lose a LOT, just happen to win more.