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Old 12-12-2006, 12:39 AM
Silent A Silent A is offline
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Default Re: Quantifying the profitability of the short-stack strategy

[ QUOTE ]
i dont understand the math behind this at all

but with that said ive always heard that if you are a lets say 1bb/100 winner you will have bigger swings than if you are a 3bb/100 winner.

maybe ive heard wrong or there is something im not understanding. i think ive been playing poker long and seriously enough where i should learn about all this properly. any suggestions on a good book?

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It's not that a 1bb/100 winner has bigger swings, it's that his win rate is lower so he has less of a cushion to absorb the inevitable downswing, so he is far more likely to go broke.

For example, take two players that play 100K hands a year. One has a win rate of 1BB/100, while the other has a win rate of 3bb/100 (let's just assume for a minute that these are their real long term win rates - keeping in mind that an argument can be made that there's no such thing as a real long term win rate). Each player starts with a 40 buy-in bankroll (i.e. 4000BB) and has a style of play that gives them a 75BB/100 standard deviation. The odds that the first player will go bankrupt before the end of the year are roughly 1 in 10, while for the second player it's closer to 1 in 100.

If you want to know how to do these calculations all you need is a basic statistics textbook. It's all based on a normal probability distribution theory. It would also be a good idea to get a solid understanding about what a z-score is.
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