variance

[Hoopster81]

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thing is, i'm not sure. in limit, i know when i'm getting fagged over and over, and that 300bb drops are not uncommon at all. in nl, i have no frame of reference, especially since i am new to it.

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your frame of reference will come with time

I'm getting into PLO and feel the exact same way

[Vinetou]

I LOVE variance. That is why I play exclusively NL. I earned 15 buyins a day and lost 10 buy ins in 5 hours. I lost 4 buyins in 15 minutes and in the next 15 minutes I won 6 buyins. That's no limit and I love it. You should embrace variance and start to love it.

[Jantjebeton]

How about the 'length' of the downswings? Limit players talk about 10k or more hands losing/breakeven stretches. How is this in NL?

[Surf]

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How about the 'length' of the downswings? Limit players talk about 10k or more hands losing/breakeven stretches. How is this in NL?

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Just as a sample:

Last month my winrate was about 7ptbb / 100, which is consider excellent and a likely indicator of running hot. I also had a 12k breakeven stretch and a 8BI downswing in the middle of it.

Surf

[Vinetou]

I ran 78PTbb/100 on 1/2 HUNL and earned like 2000 in maybe 4 hours.

[pzhon]

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How about the 'length' of the downswings? Limit players talk about 10k or more hands losing/breakeven stretches. How is this in NL?

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Limit players should talk about longer downswings than that, as they happen frequently except in soft games.

A good unit for measuring downswings is what I call the long run. The long run is how long you need to play for breaking even to be 2 standard deviations below the mean. If your win rate per 100 hands is w, and your standard deviation per 100 hands is s, then the long run is 4 (s/w)^2 sets of 100 hands.

For a limit player who wins 2 BB/100 with a standard deviation of 15 BB/100, the long run is 4 * (15/2)^2 * 100 = 22,500 hands.

For a NL player who wins 16 big blinds/100 with a standard deviation of 80 big blinds/100, the long run is 4 * (80/16)^2 * 100 = 10,000 hands.

For typical statistics of solid winning players, the long run seems to be shorter for NL than for limit. The long run is longer for a marginal winner than it is for a solid winner. Cutting your win rate in half multiplies the long run by a factor of 4.