[ggbman]

Dean,

I am literally chuckling as i read this post. Don't take offense to this, but it's incredibly obvious that you are VEEERRRRYY biased in your assessments. I have so much that i would like to cover here. First of all, mathamatically, these downswings are nowhere NEAR as unlikely as you make them sound. If you have an earn of 1 BB/100 and a standard deviation of 20 BB/100, you have a 1% ROR with a 920 BB bankroll. If you play HU and 3 handed a lot as I do , having a standard deviation of 30 BB/100 is not at all uncommon. If you change the SD to 30 BB/100 with a 1 BB/100 expection, you would have a 1% ROR with with a 2000 BIG BET BANKROLL! So 1 out of every 100 people who is playing 100/200 will have a 400k downer BY PURE CHANCE ASSUMING THAT THEY DO NOT TILT AT ALL! Within those same data parameters, you would have a 5% ROR with a 1300+ BB bankroll. Even if you up your WR to 1.5 BB/100 you would have a 5% ROR with 900 BB and 1% with 1300 BB. So in all honesty, i have no idea how you think mathamatics supports you here, on the contrary math asserts that a few select people will be cursed and be able to do nothing about losing more bets than you can wrap your mind around because you are more lucky then they are.

Also, for someone who is intelligent obviously, some of your logic is so painful. What would having Josh W. post his SN accomplish. The dude had a 2000 BB downer or whatever it was. No matter how well he was playing, people would say he sucked because they trounced him. I mean surely you don't think most poker players would objectivley admit that their winnings against a player were because of rivering 5 outers in 6 straight pots? [censored] happens to some people, and having people critique the play what they recall of someone who dropped that many bets is worthless. Selection bias alone of hands where he might have made a marginal play would render the results of that analysis close to useless unless he was going on monkey tilt.

Another thing which you have neglected to consider is that the math i provided assumed NO TILTING and even more importantly lack of adjustment in overall play. What i mean by this is that as poker players, much of our sucess is contigent upon contiously making adjustments. We should be able to do it after a few dozen hands based on out compeition. Try to imagine how for some people who have run worse than you could fathom for 50,000 hands, the results of individual situations would [censored] their minds. We teach ourselfs to adjust, and not making adjustments based on 50,000 hands would be impossible. But what if you were one of the people running several standard deviations worse than normal. Your perspective on these situations would be sooo skewed that it would be impossible to play optimally, it would even even be recognizable as tilit, but rather proper adjustments based on the last 50,000 hands. Now imagine how much 100,000 hands would [censored] with yout head. 150k? A quarted million? You should see what i am saying by now.

FWIW, i could provide you with all sorts of examples of variance muuuuch sicker than having a 450 BB downer in consecutive months. That is nothing. NOTHING. Where would you like me to start? I had something like a 150,000 hand breakeven strethch in the party 10-20 NL games. For 100k hands i was a top 10 player in terms of WR, prolly more like top 6 or 7. I had a 50k stretch at like 10 PT BB/100 which was probably the highest earn in the game. In limit this year, i had a 35 day stretch where i didn't lose for a single day and won something like 250k. I then had a 2 day stretch where i lost 120,000 playing 150-300, 100-200, and 10-25 NL. How much of that do you think could have possibly been tilt given that i had probably been playing the best poker of my life and never losing prior?

Look dude, here's the thing. Most people doubt people when they say they are playing well and losing. It's natrual. And most people think players who are running well are better than they ar. Also, most players who are very good but have been FORTUNATE enough not to encounter that kind of variance take offense to others pointing out that they are lucky. Me telling you that every post you have made in this thread is laughable to anyone who understands variance to any degree isn't meant to take away from your accomplishments as a poker player or be mean. Not having had that kind of stretch doesn't make you "guilty" of anything, and it shouldn't make anyone put an asterisk by your results. But you saying that you don't know if BK is a big winner at 10-[censored]-20 right now illustrates why people who haven't had these stretches need to do some more research before chmining in in these threads. I'll make you a deal. At the end of the year, i'll post my results from this year. We can compare them to every aspect of my results from last year. You will very likely see a difference you will not be able to believe. Variance is much much sicker than you think.

[/rant]