Winners, losers and variance

[Shandrax]

We all know that people who constantly lose to bad beats are victims of variance. Now if there are people who lose for months or even years because of variance, there should also be people who win for months or even years because of variance, right?

Could it be that winning is just the upside of variance and that many of those "skilled" guys are nothing but riding an above average streak of luck?

Maybe being a winner or a loser is for the most part just a matter of samplesize after all.

[_D&L_]

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We all know that people who constantly lose to bad beats are victims of variance.

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I thought you were being sarcastic. But then I read on, and you seemed serious. Variance in poker, especially limit poker (though i'll discuss no limit), is not high.

What effects variance is how much the average value of a pot varies from its mean. In limit poker, you should expect to see convergence after a few hundred hands. If after a few hundred hands or maybe 1000 hands, your losing at a limit table, its because your behind in skill not luck.

No-limit is slightly different because a strategy of sacrificing many small pots to get one large pot can pay off. What you want to look at is how many small pots does your big pot make up for. If your are going to need 3 or 4 big pots to make up for all your losses, again its probably because your behind in skill, not luck.

Posters who claim u need 10k plus hands to have a good sample I believe are perpetuating a myth. I can dust off my statistics books; someone prove it to me mathmatically why we need a sample that large, and why a sample of 1-2k isn't sufficient?

[Shandrax]

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I thought you were being sarcastic.

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I deleted the part with people hate to blame it on their lack of skill, so let's say semi-sarcastic. Still the whole idea isn't that far off. If you look a huge sample, you will probably find some extreme cases. It should be possible to be a winning player for 40 years by sheer luck. If we look at the millions of poker players, we might even be able to spot that guy.

[SGspecial]

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[ QUOTE ]
I thought you were being sarcastic.

[/ QUOTE ]

I deleted the part with people hate to blame it on their lack of skill, so let's say semi-sarcastic. Still the whole idea isn't that far off. If you look a huge sample, you will probably find some extreme cases. It should be possible to be a winning player for 40 years by sheer luck. If we look at the millions of poker players, we might even be able to spot that guy.

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I saw him last year at the WSOP. His name is Jamie Gold.

[_D&L_]

tournament variance is something distinct. Of course lotto type games, where one winner takes all (or most) and the other 10,000 entrants get negative entry fee are going to have high variance. But the original poster didn't reference tournaments.

[bbartlog]

1000 hands is not enough, even for limit. For no-limit and pot-limit games the variance will be higher, since much of it comes from rare occurences like set-over-set or losing strings of 60/40 matchups for your entire stack.

By way of evidence, look at the results graph for davebreal in this thread: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showfl...e=4#Post9001914

He's a winning player, having won $14K or so over 80,000 hands in one month. But of more interest to the current argument, notice that over the last 40,000 hands in the month he *lost* money (down $2K). Of course you could bring forth other explanations (maybe another pro got his number and decided to try to win money off of him starting in mid-January) but to me it looks like simple variance.

[Shandrax]

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[ QUOTE ]
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I thought you were being sarcastic.

[/ QUOTE ]

I deleted the part with people hate to blame it on their lack of skill, so let's say semi-sarcastic. Still the whole idea isn't that far off. If you look a huge sample, you will probably find some extreme cases. It should be possible to be a winning player for 40 years by sheer luck. If we look at the millions of poker players, we might even be able to spot that guy.

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I saw him last year at the WSOP. His name is Jamie Gold.

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Not exactly the guy I had in mind, but Jamie Gold is a perfect example. Out of 6k players the luckiest player won and he did it by an endless streak of getting dealt the nuts or making them along the way. Now this was just one tourney, but it is theoretically possible for this to happen on an entire career. It's of course extremely unlikely, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. All you need is a gigantic sample and the freak events will start coming.

[Kerth]

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In limit poker, you should expect to see convergence after a few hundred hands. If after a few hundred hands or maybe 1000 hands, your losing at a limit table, its because your behind in skill not luck.


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AAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!! Man, for a second there I thought you were serious.

[_D&L_]

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Quote:
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In limit poker, you should expect to see convergence after a few hundred hands. If after a few hundred hands or maybe 1000 hands, your losing at a limit table, its because your behind in skill not luck.



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AAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!! Man, for a second there I thought you were serious.



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The mean value of a random poker hand, excluding skill factor, is zero (or slightly negative if you include rake). Poker is a zero sum game, thus excluding skill, the EV over a series of hands will also be zero.

Thus, we know the expected mean of any series of poker hands. Variance is measured by distance from the mean. Say you play $1/2 limit poker, the average win or loss is about $13. Its rare to have outliers beyond $20 or so.

Given that distance from the mean is bounded, variance is bounded, and should converge fairly rapidly. If necessary I can calculate it more precisely than my original guesstimate, but unless your going to spend some time crunching numbers to prove that my guesstimate is far too low or provide a more accurate assessment (thereby enlightening all of us), i'm not going to waste the time.

[CopTHIS]

This cannot be a serious post.