The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

[not a bad beat whine]

So the other week I'm in a gigantic pot (7 ways capped+1 to the flop due to straddles, etc., blah blah blah) and my best hand on the turn is two-outted on the river (OP actually had odds to stay in hand due to incredible size of pot). No big deal, happens, on to next hand. So last night, similar thing happens. Again, no big deal, I'm not too concerned about it, I'll win my fair share of those big pots IN THE LONG RUN.

But then I began thinking about the first two outter pot. The pot was one of the biggest I've played in, it's not the type of pot the comes around all that often; I'm involved in a pot like that maybe only once or twice a month live, if that, let alone leading big time on the turn. So sure, 22 times my hand will hold up to every 1 time it doesn't so IN THE LONG RUN I kill. But am I ever going to see enough of those kind of hands (i.e. huge pots, leading hand on turn with great odds of holding up) in my live lifetime play to outrun the variance? I mean, I'm guessing I'd have to be involved in at least a few hundred of those particular hands (maybe a few thousand?) in order for the numbers to start converging to 22:1; am I really going to encounter that many situations in my lifetime of play?

I guess that basic question I have is this: Do you really think you'll be able to play enough lifetime live hands in order to make up for short term variance? Sounds stupid, but is one man's lifetime live hands ever going to be a large enough sample size?

GusingvarianceasascapegoatwhenindownswingG

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

How many hands do you play in a month?

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

Without looking at my records, I'd guesstimate around 3.5 times a week * 4 weeks per month * 4 hours per session * 25 hands per hour = 1400 hands/month.

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

The short answer is 'yes', but obviously the more you play and the better you table select, the faster the numbers will converge. Table selection is very key here, as some tables are practically incapable of creating monster pots.

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

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Without looking at my records, I'd guesstimate around 3.5 times a week * 4 weeks per month * 4 hours per session * 25 hands per hour = 1400 hands/month.

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I could do some arithmatic, but I would guess that it probably takes at least 10000 hands, or six months before things are likely to start to converge. Maybe I will do some arithmatic, after my nap [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img].

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

Good question.

25 hands per hr. might be a bit on the conservative side but I hear what you are saying. I play about the same amount of hours per month take or give a few. So to round it off, let's say one is playing only 60 hours a month. In a years time that is 720 hours. 5 years=3,600 hours of play time. Is this enough to tell if we are a winning player? What do some of you consider a decent number of hands or hours played live to tell if one is a winning player? Online obv.one sees way more hands per Hr and the ability to multi table is there as well. We all have heard of well known live pros who have had down years. They are putting in way more hours than the typical player I would assume.

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

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Table selection is very key here, as some tables are practically incapable of creating monster pots.

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Unfortunately, my poker room isn't big enough to table select very well. Usually only 1 or sometimes 2 2/4 tables going, plus 1 or sometimes 2 4/8 tables (yes, I know I should move up, I'll get around to that one day). If I'm there to play (which I am) then I'm basically stuck with what is there.

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

[ QUOTE ]

I could do some arithmatic, but I would guess that it probably takes at least 10000 hands, or six months before things are likely to start to converge. Maybe I will do some arithmatic, after my nap [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img].

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But I guess I'm more talking about some very particular situations (i.e. monster pot, huge lead on turn), situations that don't arise all that often and yet I'm thinking the results of these types of hands have a big affect on overall winrate (although perhaps I am overestimating the importance of these hands).

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

I think about this all the time. I average only 6, 5 hr sessions per month due to 3 & 4 year old kids and a non poker understanding wife. I hope to at least double that when my kids are in school full time, but its crazy when I hear about somebody who's average is based on their last 300,000 hands. I may never get there.
I do think that if you only play live, these situations are so rare that you only have to win 1 or so a year to get slightly ahead, and you wonder if its worth the variance to even get involved.But then again these are the fun pots to play so I say If we have an edge lets go.

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

I think it is very arguable whether a thing such as a "true winrate" exists. Of course you can define it arbitrarily in various less meaningful way. "Outrunning variance" and other uses of this concept seems to not signal a super-solid understanding of statistics.

The idea is something like this: With each hand you play you can assign a profit value. This gives us a random distribution, input hands and get profit. Now, this distribution is very irregular obviously, most hands you just throw away and in hands like this one you could have won enormous amounts. Now suppose each hand has a similar distribution and that they are moderately independent (note however that this assumption is pretty laughable. Any statistician would probably laugh at this way of making a time series analysis), when we sum up the distributions and divide by the number of hands (i.e. we calculate our BB / hand) we get something that is very close to a normal distribution. The normal distribution is a very nice random distribution that is symmetric around some value, the mean profit. This mean profit is what the nerds in this forum mean by "true winrate". If we make ridiculous assumptions, this can be interpreted as the expected profit on each hand you play (obviously not true with position being important). This model does not say anything about "huge hands" like in your example. Although you could make the same argument and take your average expected profit over "huge hands" and arrive at a positive value. I do believe however that you are correct in that you will not play enough of these huge hands for the sum / number of hands to approach a normal distribution, given how irregular the distributions are in these situations. However, this does not deter from the quality of the original model I presented. Extreme values occur, just not very often.

I would say you shouldn't really worry about it. You just lost a huge pot and you're feeling bad. You should just get over it.

Another thing - you seem to think that guy was the only one drawing live. Was that really so?

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

Live will you ever get in enough hands to...

1) Have true statistical significance in terms of determining if you are a truly winning player or no? Probably not due to thin margin of "victory" coupled with big standard deviations requiring large numbers of hands to narrow the range of the deviations. And the coup de grace... hopefully, you get BETTER as you play those hands and your target moves!

2) win "more than your share" of these mega-pots? Very hard to answer that one. And while that one pot can determine whether you win or lose for an individual session, the better players appear to adopt the attitude that it is all one session.

3) have a good guessestimate of whether you are a winner or not at a certain level? Yes, IMO, you can. Just keep score all the time and have a running spreadsheet of your results. After about 50 sessions of accurate scorekeeping you should have a baseline that is more likely to be right than wrong. But streaks, hot and cold do happen and I feel that you can allow yourself some "anecdotal" observations about where you stand. For me, I have been unconscious playing 2/4 and my winrate is over 3BB/hr. Over course, I moved up to 4/8 just as a cold streak blew in so my winrate there is breakeven. And I've got 800+ hrs. of play spread across 7 different kinds and levels of poker play this year.

The 1BB/hr. rate IMO still remains evidence of a good solid winner with enough hours. My goal is to get all my games to that rate or better.

So keep accurate score. IMO, winners keep score, whiners complain about bad beats. I also believe that by having focus on your total poker picture, you can balance out the days you are killing it with TPTK value bets that hold up for smaller pots against the monsters that get away.

Make sense?

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

I have given this some though as well and have asked the same question. You only get so many shots at huge pots. And when you lose a big one you might not get another shot at a huge pot in quite awhile. For instance if you get say 1,000 shots at a huge pot (like I had KK and lost on the river to QQ and the pot was about $450 at 6/12) and you do not win your fair share then that might affect your win rate. If you won more than you fair share that could have a positive affect on you win rate.

Whether you are a winning player or not. Variance.

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

Nope, give up now as you're always going to lose in the short run.

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

I agree with the long term thinking of your sessions as just one continuous session. It helps when you are running bad in the short term of things.

I have a pal who asks me how I did after every session I play mostly because he is just interested. I am honest and tell him when I win or if I lose and how much. When I tell him that I had a loser he always says " Oh man sorry about your loss" like it's the end of the world. To me it is now no biggie. Many Months ago it would have been. I just take it in stride.

Wouild be good to hear from a "long time winning player"(???) here on this thread.

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

i don't ever expect to have played enough hands live to see my true winrate / get through variance

i say that, though, because i'm over 550k hands played online [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

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Nope, give up now as you're always going to lose in the short run.

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yads, i know you're like a med stakes hotshot, but please refrain from talking down to those us of still moving up the ladder, kthx

[img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

Maybe I'm overestimating the importance of these big pot / big lead pots that make up such a small portion of the hands I play? Perhaps the nickel and dime stuff play far outweighs these hands due to the amount of times they occur?

Maybe I think about this stuff more than I should in downswings (currently in midst of fun 175BB downswing; it's the fourth major downswing I've had so I'm really not sweating it too much). But I've also thought about it in upswings. My last upswing I looked at my results and, man, it seemed that a lot of my winnings boiled down to a few hands here and there.

GrationalizingbadplayasdownswingG

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

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(Your are) overestimating the importance of these big pots. The nickel and dime stuff play far outweighs these hands due to the amount of times they occur.

it seemed that a lot of my winnings boiled down to a few hands here and there.



[/ QUOTE ] edited by fishyak

Does 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1=10? Yes. But if you had a large list of numbers between -10 and 10, with 10 being the highest, would the 10 stand out as most important? Particularly so if the total of those 100's of numbers was just 10? But truly the 10 1's are of equal mathmatical importance, correct? We tend to focus on the extreme outcomes, even though the average outcomes are of equal importance to the final total. The search for drama.

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
(Your are) overestimating the importance of these big pots. The nickel and dime stuff play far outweighs these hands due to the amount of times they occur.

it seemed that a lot of my winnings boiled down to a few hands here and there.



[/ QUOTE ] edited by fishyak

Does 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1=10? Yes. But if you had a large list of numbers between -10 and 10, with 10 being the highest, would the 10 stand out as most important? Particularly so if the total of those 100's of numbers was just 10? But truly the 10 1's are of equal mathmatical importance, correct? We tend to focus on the extreme outcomes, even though the average outcomes are of equal importance to the final total. The search for drama.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ow my brain, stop it!

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

site Variance:
If we flip such a coin once a second for a year, most people believe over that many trials that heads and tails are in the lead roughly equally often. Nothing could be further from the truth! The probability that the less fortunate outcome is in the lead less than 54 days is slightly more than .5. The probability that the less fortunate outcome is in the lead less than nine days is .2.

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

I played in a wild game yesterday at my local casino. In a span of an hour, there were 5 or 6 hands (some straddled) capped at least 6 handed pre-flop. YES, it gets frustrating when your hand does not hit or hold up, particularly when you are going in pre-flop (or on the turn, whatever) with the best of it.

I think that those of you who seem to constantly get rivered in these types of games are missing one thing: these pots are HUGE and perhaps YOU are not sticking around long enough with what seem to be hopeless (or non-existent) draws. If you see a game like this, see the crap that people end up showing down, you need to realize that PRE-FLOP you are essentially tying yourself to the pot, unless it becomes completely hopeless.

Often times (especially if, as seems to often be the case) players will lag it up pre-flop, then not protect their hands enough after the flop, allowing you to stay in getting tremendous odds. When I first started playing limit, I folded way too often on the turn in pots like this, only to realize that my one overcard was actually affording me sufficient odds to call. The game I played in yesterday, the pot was often re-popped by the third or fourth limper (after I raised a big suited ace from the blinds). These people are capping with junk, I won a huge pot by spiking a queen on the river after the flop came king high. I called on the turn getting over 20:1.

My point is: play the player in a game like that. If a rock takes the lead post flop, that's one thing. But if the straggling LAGtard represents a big hand, go ahead and make some crazy flop and turn calls. You can't play your standard game in gigantic pots against crazies. Maybe you are folding too quickly in the pots where you are behind. Because of this, you remember the times they caught up with you, not vice versa...

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

In my experience playing live has actually done better for me than I've been doing online. Online I 4-table 3/6 and live I've been playing 8/16. The players are SIGNIFICANTLY worse at live play as compared to the competition of 3/6 players online, even at live 8/16 and 20/40.

That being said, I don't think that playing live for 2/4 and 3/6 is profitable at all. The rake is too large to be making any decent money. At my B&M, the rake is 3$ for 2/4 and 3/6, and 4$ for 6/12 and 8/16. Thats 1 SB per pot that you lose as compared to 1/2 a SB in 8/16. That will cut into your 1-2/BB per HR greatly.

Re: The Long Term - will you ever get in enough live hands?
 

I think long term comes down to simply playing every hand right. When we talk about one bet per hour as being a good player then missing a vaule bet on the river is an hour lost. As is playing two weak hands preflop.

Huge pots are great when you hit them but everybody has the same chances of hitting them. Now stealing a pot from a better hand is much better for your overall win rate.

Just my thoughts.