[ QUOTE ]
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showfl...rue#Post8465243
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showfl...e=0#Post8449205
[/ QUOTE ]
What points do you think these threads make? They don't speak for themselves, and it's easy to jump to an incorrect conclusion from a quick reading.
For one thing, while most people will look at the graphs ZBTHorton gave and assume that he has established that he is a solid winning player before hitting that 40+ buy-in downswing, that's not true. Just as I mentioned happens in stories of downswings, he changed from the relatively soft Party games to the shark-infested games on PokerStars.
ZBTHorton ran at 5 PTBB/100 for 40,000 hands at NL $200, after which a rough 95% confidence interval for his win rate ranged from about 0.5 PTBB/100 to 10 PTBB/100. I'm sure he'd like to believe that he was neither lucky nor unlucky in that period, so the 5 PTBB/100 would represent his true win rate, but it's likely that he was lucky in the first 40,000 hands, and unlucky in the next 40,000 hands to lose it back. It's much more common to see a result that is +2 standard deviations followed by -2 standard deviations (or +1.5 followed by -2.5) than to see par followed by -4 standard deviations. If his true win rate is 2 PTBB/100 in those game conditions, then in some sense, a 40 buy-in downswing is about as surprising as it is for a player who wins 8 PTBB/100 with the same standard deviation to have a 10 buy-in downswing.
As for the other thread, there is a lot of unsubstantiated speculation, but don't miss this comment by Pokey: "As a result, the simulated paths should trend upward more sharply and have far
less volatility than the Poker Tracker numbers would have us believe." I'm not sure I agree overall, but that particular factor Pokey identified means that the mathematical models may still be overly cautious, despite recommending 10 buy-ins or less in some cases.