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  #11  
Old 12-30-2005, 12:22 PM
Songwind Songwind is offline
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Default Re: Moving Up Is Hard To Do

I loved Jax's post, but there's something that is working for me (and a couple of my friends) that he didn't mention.

It's the "cold swimming pool" method of moving up in limits.

You know you can play and beat $1/$2. You make money and continue to grow your bankroll. Super. Keep doing that. Now, dip a toe in the $2/$4 pool. Play one table for an evening, see how it goes. Pay close attention to how the game is different. Between sessions, study those skills you weren't using in $1/$2 as much that are going to be more important. Play a few sessions at 1/2, recoup your losses (if any), continue to make progress. Rinse and repeat until $2/$4 is where you feel ready to play.
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  #12  
Old 12-30-2005, 12:25 PM
car ramrod car ramrod is offline
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Default Re: Moving Up Is Hard To Do

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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.
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  #13  
Old 12-30-2005, 12:33 PM
WalkAmongUs WalkAmongUs is offline
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Default Re: Moving Up Is Hard To Do

nice post, i agree with you completely.

as far as multitabling goes, in my personal experience, i'm not overwhelmed with 4 tables. I can comfortably play 5. i think it depends on your goals and even then these goals are liquid and move about/combine freely.

edited to say: goals can be some sort of ratio combination of making as much money as possible and excelling in skill as fast as possible.

assuming you are a winning player at your chosen level, if your goal is to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible, you should add as many tables as you can while maintaining a semi-decent winrate.

my personal goal is to increase my skill as quickly as possible moreso than increasing my income. Playing less tables allows more focus on playing individual players and applying concepts to specific situations.

when multitabling, you can witness situations where you think a concept applies and apply it. what may be happening is that there is information there that you missed that makes that concept incorrect in that situation. This leads to mistakes and is the reason why you won't beat 4 tables for 4BB/100 just because you beat 2 for 2BB/100.

These errors however are usually small errors and account for only a slight decrease in winrate in most, but not all, cases.

my personal goal is to increase skill and move up to higher levels. i want to get rid of these slight errors in my game because as i move up they cost more and more and may become exacerbated by the better players i will encounter.

multitabling doesn't allow my the focus required to refine my game to the extent I want to.

getting reads by opening one table at a time is a good idea, however, by the time you get reads on all the players and get to that 4th or 5th table, odds are at least half the 1st table is going to be new players. having 4 tables open with constantly revolving players makes it impossible to keep up with high quality reads.

I personally get more satisfaction knowing i'm really outplaying my opponents than cramming in 8 tables and autopiloting ABC poker. i have a feeling autopiloting ABC isn't going to work very well at 30/60.

in essence, i feel if your goal is making the most money possible at your level, multitabling is the way to go. ESPECIALLY if you have rakeback and bonuses.

if you're goal is to move up as fast as possible AND be able to get right in there and already be playing better than your opponents, you do yourself a favor by playing 1 or 2 tables and working on refining your game. you'll always be playing better than most, if not all, of your opponents and the sailing will be much much smoother.

these are all just my personal thoughts and opinions from my own experiences. each player is different and i don't doubt there are players out there that can 20 table and have perfect reads on every opponent. There will always be someone smarter, faster, stronger, better playing than you.

figure out where you stand as a player, both in knowledge and innate skill, and capitalize on your excess and/ or lack of either.
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  #14  
Old 12-30-2005, 12:33 PM
jaxUp jaxUp is offline
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Default Re: Moving Up Is Hard To Do

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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  #15  
Old 12-30-2005, 12:34 PM
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Default Re: Moving Up Is Hard To Do

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'.
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  #16  
Old 12-30-2005, 12:37 PM
Thebram Thebram is offline
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Default Re: Moving Up Is Hard To Do

There are a lot of helpful tips in jax's post.
These arent necessarily more important than any of the others, I just wanted to single them out because I for one didnt put as much stock in them as I should have when I started moving up.


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7. Don't identify yourself as an "x-limit" player. If the games are good, try playing a level higher, and if they're especially bad, you may even want to move down. I sometimes play 3 different levels at a time.


8. Practice good table selection when you move up. I think this one is self explanatory.

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Those two are very important to my current rate. To me, winning 2BB/100 at X limit is much more beneficial(psychologically) that winning 1BB/100 at 2X limit.

There's no shame in moving down if the game is that much better. You have hundreds of tables to choose from online, quit being lazy and actually "choose" one!

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If you read this far, thank you.

[/ QUOTE ]

Anyone that read that far should be thanking you.
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  #17  
Old 12-30-2005, 12:38 PM
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Default Re: Moving Up Is Hard To Do

Great post Jax. And also along the lines of Pedigree's post, if playing 20k hands doesn't give you an idea of your winrate how many hands will?
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  #18  
Old 12-30-2005, 12:39 PM
bottomset bottomset is offline
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Default Re: Moving Up Is Hard To Do

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

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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  #19  
Old 12-30-2005, 12:41 PM
jaxUp jaxUp is offline
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Default Re: Moving Up Is Hard To Do

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
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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.


[/ QUOTE ]

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.

[/ QUOTE ]

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

[/ QUOTE ]

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
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  #20  
Old 12-30-2005, 01:02 PM
Aaron W. Aaron W. is offline
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Default Re: Moving Up Is Hard To Do

The key is identifying what is different. The "average" player at the new level is usually just a tad bit better at something (or somethings) than the "average" player at the old table. Figure out what they are, make an adjustment to your general strategy, and get reads on individuals (as always).
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