Re: Variance
There aer some very good posts in this thread. I guess you could say I belong to the 'aba' school of thinking. Imo people underestimate the impact of skill on swings.
Consider a marginal winner goes on a terrible run over 15k hands. He loses 500bb. He makes a couple of posts in BBV and they do indeed consider a number of sick, sick beats, hands where any good player would have lost the same amount. In fact, every single on of the bad beat hands was played perfectly by him. A number of experts chime in to say this. I think it might be easy for him to consider it proof that 500bb hands happen. Lets say he is .5bb long term winner. Someone else is 2bb/100. If the latter had gone on the same run of sick sick beats over 15k hands, he would 'only' be down 275bb.
Thinking about the 4 high profile limit posters that immediately spring to mind that went on long (>100k) breakeven or worse stretches, with the exception of JoshW they all play a ludicrous number of tables (6 to 8). I can't help but thinking that they were table selecting bad + playing too sessions in order to get unstuck. They also going to have a smaller edge playing that many tables. Someone 8 tabling at 1bb/100 is gonna make twice the hourly of someone 2 tabling at 2bb/100, but is gonna have way bigger downswings. Which isnt to criticise people who do this - I'm in awe of anyone able to play 6+ tables of sh limit successfully, but they will have longer (in terms of hands) breakeven stretches.
It's extremely difficult to play well when you are running really bad. Every single person Ive played lots with plays better when running well. Almost everyone I know plays more when stuck than after a nice score. I am more guilty than most of these sins. Because of this, I remain incredibly skeptical of claims such as 'I lost 450BB and played me A++ game throughout'. If the player in question wants to send me his hand histories for the stretch in question I would be happy to look through them btw. Also, I dont want people to think Im preaching/claiming to be superior. It's possible I've never been on a prolonged run of lack as bad as some of these guys, and if I did, my game may well go to bits without me knowing it.
I'm more risk averse than the clear majority of 2p2ers, and one really useful thing from this thread is that Im gonna keep focusing hard on game selection. For me, it's not worth playing in a game where my edge is only 1bb/100, even if I am super duper comfortably rolled for the level. Just too much variance, I hate losing for a long time, and the best way to avoid long breakeven stretches is to play in games where your edge is big. Maybe I'll just be content grinding it out at 30/60 and playing higher when the games are really juicy?
fsuplayer mentioned something about me running well in NL. I made a stat post in MSNL a month or so ago where I openly admitted this. I do stand by the statement that most people at 3/6 NL blow though. I also still believe that 2bb/100 is doable in the 100/200 stars limit game with minimal table selection, but Im definitely not good enough to achieve that rate.
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